A Preface, of Sorts
Possessing little money and no job but a few credit cards, I was ready to track Jack Kerouac down the big sexy American highway. I also wanted to fuck his ghost but I’ll get to that later. I’d just finished graduate school, all but my thesis, and had managed to convince my professors that – aside from giving me a great chance to see the country – retracing Kerouac’s steps across America would yield this last bit of required scholarship. My thesis committee consisted of two men and one woman and I was casually sleeping with all three, so my “convincing” obligated me to do a lot of sucking dick and eating pussy. I didn’t mind, of course, which will later become quite obvious; from the beginning, after all, my journey with Jack Kerouac would entail a lot of sex . . .
O! Jack Kerouac! my heart sang to hidden desire and fancy: my lover!
Route 66 exists only as a fragment of its former self, so I headed east on Interstate 10. Leaving Los Angeles in a rented Buick, I drove through the backside of the sunset into the empty deserts of Arizona, the endless stretches of land called Texas, the bogs and bayous of the South. The only thing we had less of than money was time: we were re-enacting Jack’s cross-country scrambles far more closely than I had ever intended, or wanted. Like Jack (my secret lover) when he complained in On The Road, we too were “rushing through the world without a chance to see it.”
Moving at this pace, my experience of place transmuted into a kaleidoscopic slide show flashing by at warp speed. I had less than six weeks to hit as many cities, straddling both coasts – legs spread, of course, and pussy wet and willing. The effort left me dazed and uninformed about the deeper histories of my ever-changing surroundings, mottling me in an intense mosaic of sensory impressions.
And, as I said, my pussy was always wet.
New York City in Two Days
Day 1
1 A.M.
Let’s say I’m on my way to New York. Let’s say I’m on the train. Its rhythm keeps rocking me to sleep, and then I wake up, worried about missing my stop – the route is, after all, unfamiliar. Let’s say the movement of the train makes me horny and I’m thinking about shoving my hand down my pants and fingering my little cunt. Let’s say I’m thinking about Kerouac’s declaration that the East is “brown and holy and California is white like washlines.” Let’s say I’m thinking brown is like a puckering arse and white is like thick gooey semen – I can taste both in my mouth as the train lurches forward. Ah yes: the difference between old and new. Old being decrepit and historic. New meaning clean and vacuous. Brings to mind the TV ads I saw when I was a kid, ads for cleansers. The whole homogenizing kind of television commercials that were so popular back then. I think about fresh-smelling bed sheets (the kind you sniff in a hotel room just before you’re about to get fucked by a stranger you met in the bar) and the scroungy apartment that’s got old dirty laundry on the floor (underwear stained with come, piss and shit) . . . yet has all kinds of stuff there. Like a vibrator in the drawer; a two-headed dildo under the bed; secret butt-plugs under the pillow.
Warm, very warm, air whisks by me. It smells unclean, like it is coming from the bathroom – and that makes my pussy contract as I think about giving Jack Kerouac a blowjob while he sits on the toilet, one hand on my head and the other holding a beer can. Faces reflect in the train’s window like pictures in a frame. After Jack comes in my mouth, he urinates.
I go into the bathroom. I pee and then I stick my hand between my legs and think of Jack’s deep green eyes.
Well, I’m in New York; I’m in Greenwich Village and I’m hitting that moment that I knew I would . . . when I’m beginning to wonder about the sanity of this whole idea of mine. Does it really make any difference to be where Kerouac was? Perhaps my conclusion will simply be that the thing about literature is: it takes you to worlds you might not otherwise get to see and explore, and the thing about On The Road is that it compelled more people to go to those places and see the world for themselves. Or so I’ve been led to believe. And that’s exactly what I’m doing. One of the things I think I’m finding is an understanding of Kerouac’s fascination with the open road because he lived in a place where he didn’t drive, where he didn’t need to drive. Being the one behind the wheel, and with the endless stretches of highway – it’s a new kind of freedom for him. It’s more of an extreme kind of freedom to him, whereas on the west coast we’re always behind the wheel and the open road is crowded with traffic –
I want to die in a car crash while being fucked in the backseat –
Yeah, I know that’s too much like Ballard’s Crash –
As for Jack – and Dean Moriarty/Neal Cassady, his pal, his Huckleberry friend . . . just a diversion, an entertaining diversion for my Jack K. Because he ultimately had his suburban home to return to, his mama, and his middle class respectability. Places where Dean could never go. Dean was just a lark for JK.
Cassady had two wives. I bet he was a great fuck.
He looks like a hunk in his pictures.
I would have fucked Neal Cassady – then again, I’m pretty open to fucking any man or woman who is attracted to me and wants to make that quick, lovely physical connection.
Test question: Is the quest an excuse for living however you want to, without regard for anybody else or their feelings?
Times Square, one of the many places that is mentioned again and again throughout the time spent in New York within the pages of On The Road, and really it’s a terminus. It’s a terminus, and so I guess it becomes the landmark of arriving home for Kerouac.
I’m on Bowery Street, venturing into the part of town someone warned me against. “You’ll get raped if you’re alone.” Paranoia seeps in. This state of mind of mine – I came in open, trusting, willing. Now I find I’m closing myself off because I’ve been told that’s the “smart” thing to do. “Trust your sixth sense,” my waiter at the first cafe told me, but all I could do was look at his crotch and think about sucking his dick. My sixth sense is going all out of control and I feel as if I’ve dropped acid and walked into some strange parallel universe. Everyone’s noticing me, how out of place I appear. Everyone’s plotting scams. They all want to gang rape me. I’m testing my limits and finding out what they are. I want them to fuck me, I want to know what that’s like, because the whole point of this journey is to experience the extremes –
I will not be smart –
But I will follow my true heart.
I had initially harboured hopes of tapping into some wild, crazy mode, a network of irregular characters as adventurous as Moriarty, or as hip to the literary scene as Kerouac – the looseness with which they invaded the homes and lives of the people by whom they passed.
“Of course, all of this is much different from how it was in Kerouac’s time,” says Todd (he’s one of the hallowed two percent of the acting community able to actually earn a living in the theatre scene). “None of the places he hung out at are even around any more,” says Todd. He takes me through Times Square late at night and points out how the drug dealing that used to go on there back in the ‘50s has radiated much further out.
“What about prostitution?” I ask.
“There are always whores,” he says.
“Peep show booths?”
“Gone.”
“Live sex shows?”
“I doubt they existed.”
“Kiddie porn?”
“That’s a myth.”
“Donkey shows?”
“Only in Mexico.”
Todd takes me back to his tiny apartment in the Lower East Side and I let him fuck me on his musty futon. First, I take off my jeans and panties and he eats me out. He comments on how wet and sticky my cunt is. My cunt smells strong, maybe bad. Todd likes the stink, he keeps rubbing his nose into it. “What a nice little pussy,” he says. I say it’s always dripping and always wants to be fucked. “Are you always this quick and easy?” he says. “I’ve barely known you for two hours,” he says.
I shrug.
He says, “Do you want me to wear a condom?”
“It’s up to you.”
“I’m clean and safe. Are you?”
“Yes,” I say.
His dick is curved like a banana. I ask if he wants me to suck it. “I have to fuck you right this minute,” he says. He lifts my legs onto his shoulders and he fucks me.
I scream when I come; that curved cock does the trick.
Later, I suck his dick and he shoots off in my mouth.
Phoned one of my professors earlier, complained how the wild literary crowd Kerouac ran with is unavailable to me. That even if it exists today, I’m not tapped into it. He said that the network of Kerouac’s time is no longer around. That the literary community of the 21st century is disjointed. He’d given me a long list of writer friends of his before I left. He gave them all advance notice that I was an eager girl and willing to spread my legs and explore the literary possibilities of being a total slut. “Fuck them all,” my professor said. “They are lonely men of American letters.” Looking at it now, I see what he means: they’re scattered all over the country. Many of them don’t even know one another.
For instance, last night in Philadelphia, I sat on a living room couch with a writer named Ed, going through the collection of photographs he’d taken over the years. He’s got so much passion for photography – a skill and talent. He didn’t pursue it as a career because he thought it would prevent him from being the kind of husband and father he wanted to be. He traded away that passion in favour of stability. I asked where his family was now. He said his wife had divorced him and his son and daughter were grown up and had their own families. Ed’s fifty-two. He gently placed his hand on the back of my neck and told me to blow him. He didn’t ask, he ordered me to. I said: “Okay, take it out.” He did and I buried my face into his crotch and satisfied his need.
“How old are you, my dear?” he asked after we had some wine.
“Twenty-seven,” I said.
“You’re younger than . . .”
“What? Who?”
“Never mind.”
“Do you want to screw me?” I asked.
“Very much so,” he said.
In bed, I allowed him to do me anally because he said his wife would never let him do that and he was curious what it was like. “I’ve never done it with anyone,” he said. “I feel I’ve missed out on a lot of things in life.”
Kerouac wrote feverishly of something he called IT: “the point of ecstasy” he’d always wanted to reach, a “complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows” where he finds himself “hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncertain emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiance shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotuslands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven.”
Ed said into my ear: “Being up your arse is like Heaven.”
Capturing life’s brightest flame within your hands, yes? George Eliot wrote that:
The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. (Middlemarch)
Maybe Ed found IT, after all.
4 A.M.
Saw a western tonight in New York City. Between fucks: the TV on. The myth that propelled Kerouac down the road. “It’s ironic . . . to be in New York, watching a western,” I say to Todd – I being a westerner, having driven through those spaces only a week ago.
“Do you want to stay and fuck more?” Todd asks.
I tell him sure, sounds fun.
“If you’re really into sex, I know some guys who’d love to do you.”
“Pimp me out on Times Square,” I say, and laugh.
He laughs.
He kisses me.
I turn away.
“You don’t like kisses?” he asks.
“Too intimate,” I say.
“So what’s this?” he says, touching my wet pussy.
“Fucking,” I say, “nothing more, nothing less.”
Day 2
11 A.M.
St Mark’s Bookstore. It overwhelms me. The shelves go up twenty feet into the air, and they’re all filled. I see a photograph of Drew Barrymore on the cover of a magazine. She looks like a little girl. It makes me think – that’s exactly what women are in our society. What they’re supposed to look like, anyway. They’re supposed to be little girls. Men like little girls – or women who look like little girls. The fantasy thing.
I wonder what Jack fantasized about.
I can see now why New Yorkers are so hooked on their city.
People, before I got here, talked about how Soho and Greenwich Village have grown trendy, gentrified, tourist sights. Yet if I’m seeking the literary community, I am told the Village (the East Village to be precise) is still the place to go.
I gravitate toward a restaurant called Dojo, and wind up sitting between a Czechoslovakian student and Peter – he’s a fund-raiser for PBS who recently returned here after a nine-year stint in L.A. (When he was in L.A., we went to bed a couple of times.)
“Allen Ginsberg1 used to live in this neighbourhood,” the Czech student says to me. “Sometimes you can see his ghost passing by.”
Peter says he prefers New Yorkers because they have substance. “L.A. is so pretentious,” he says. “People there have to find out what hill you live on, what kind of car you drive, before they decide if they want to know you.”
“The people in New York are real,” says Peter.
I write a small poem on a napkin:
I am in “brown & holy” East
I watch
westerns
starring Clint Eastwood, leather
shops of cowboy fringe
I am silent inside
& my cunt always
wants to be filled
I go with Peter and the Czech student back to Peter’s place in the Village. There, the three of us get nasty. They take turns “mouth-fucking” me with their cocks – that’s what they call it, that’s what Peter says: “Can your mouth take a fucking like you were getting it in your twat?” I said I suppose so. First I’m on my knees and they take turns, holding my head, moving their cocks in and out of my mouth like pistons. Then I lie on Peter’s bed and each guy hovers over me and pounds his cock down my throat. It chokes me, there’s saliva and pre-come flying everywhere, my mascara is smudged and runny – I find this all very sexy and as they mouth-fuck I play with my clit and I reach orgasm over and over again. I could be satisfied just with this but then Peter and the Czech student fuck my pussy, then I find myself on top the student and Peter is sliding into my arsehole. I close my eyes and imagine that I am being fucked by Jack and Neal, Sal and Dean: we’re in a motel someplace, somewhere on the road, and I let them do anything they want to me, like I allow Peter and the Czech do what they desire to my body.
Kerouac “yearned to see the country,” a feverish desire spawned by westerns, the mythic cowboy heading into the sunset. In On The Road, he departs from New York numerous times. But he always returns.
I never want to work again
but sit @ cafe tables watching
catching conversations, smiles,
glances, voices, radios, silent
billboards & rolling-by garbage
trucks
have sex with strangers
fuck & fuck & suck & fuck
How far we can go and still be inside our own borders – to the end of the road, the end of the rainbow? A pot of gold, of sorts, waiting in sunny California – a fool’s gold, you know –
My lover, Jack Kerouac, gave me an excuse to run away from home at a time I was long past the age for getting away with it. I longed to travel across the country, to hunt and gather the sights and sounds and places and faces of America, to somehow piece everything into some all-encompassing piebald quilt. Let’s say I also wanted to fuck my way across America because it sounded so juicy and fun.
Not Only a Trip Through Space
“To see how Kerouac actually lived in the places they lived is not a bad idea,” says a sixty-five-year-old writer that I visit. Another one on the list. He kinda looks like Burroughs, or I pretend he does. He’s a self-proclaimed expert on JK’s life and words. “You should read every one of these books on Kerouac,” he tells me. “It wouldn’t take you long and it’ll save you a lot of trouble. And you should go in his footsteps. You might even have a publishable book out of it. Did you see the places in Denver? I think you probably could search out most of the places he lived, although in Denver there’s been a lot of urban renewal, so-called. They’ve destroyed lots of that.”
“I did talk to the owner of one of the old jazz bars in Denver,” I reply. “He said he served Jack Kerouac when he used to come in. He just thought JK was a drunk, and . . . it’s kind of interesting to see his perspective of ‘why do these people keep coming in here year after year and asking me these questions?’ How does it feel to have all these people coming to you, year after year?”
“They’re sincerely interested in Jack and that he was a pretty good writer, and there’s a whole cult of Kerouac. Because of differences in generations and culture, the social gradations in society as it existed then, when young men were upper-middle-class boys and Kerouac was strictly a working-class kid, and Ginsberg was different because he was . . . well, the child of intellectuals, and his mother was a beautiful mad communist poet in her own right. You can’t really understand it without seeing all the social gradations. A guy like Burroughs came from a family that ran the country. A different kind of family. So that’s what’s very interesting. And Kerouac, his range of going from the dregs of American society to pretty high up in that society.”
“That’s something I noticed in his biography, that he seems to have had no trouble traversing different –”
“No. And he was always himself. He never tried to change his personality for that. He certainly changed his behaviour to people who sometimes could do him some good. And he had this problem with bisexuality, that complicated his life. And that’s in Jack’s Book. Did you read Jack’s Book?”
“I did read Jack’s Book and –”
“There’s the episode with Gore Vidal . . .”
“Yeah.”
“About Jack sucking Vidal’s cock.”
“Yeah. ‘I blew Gore Vidal!’ “
“What did you think of it?”
I shrug, say, “Is it true?”
“I mean, what do you think about sucking cock?”
“I think about it all the time,” I say with a smile.
“Are you a cocksucker?” he asks.
“Oh yeah,” I reply, “you can call me that.”
He takes out his dick and says, “So suck on this one here if you’re such a cocksucker. Show me how you do it. Show me how good you are.”
I lean down and blow him. His penis tastes like loneliness and cigarettes.
I eat his runny come.
“They had a strange attitude toward women, those guys,” he says, zipping his pants up. “Of course, Ginsberg made a stab at going straight for a while. But he was primarily homosexual.”
“That was pretty radical then,” I say, swallowing.
“He was a cocksucker, and it goes without saying he liked fucking other men up the ass.”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“What about you?”
“Do I like fucking men in the ass?” I say. “Give me a strap-on and I’ll do it.” I grin.
He laughs. “Yeah, baby, that might be fun. But you – do you take it in the ass like a gay man?”
“I’ve been known to.”
“Maybe later you’ll let me do that to you.”
“Maybe,” I say, smiling.
“It was radical to be as open about it as Ginsberg was. Kerouac was never really open about it. To that extent. Kerouac was Catholic. He had all kinds of hang-ups. But what can I do for you?”
“What?”
“Sexually.”
“You can eat my pussy.”
“Love to,” he says.
I take my jeans and panties off. I lay back on the couch and he eats my cunt. He’s good at it. He slides his thumb into my arsehole. He makes me come twice.
“Thank you,” I say, catching my breath, “that was nice.”
“Back to Jack,” he says.
“Well, I think this has become a cult thing,” I say. “I mean, you’re seeing people who are coming from a completely different generation, they read On The Road –”
“You can’t possibly understand Columbia at that time, or San Francisco at that time. They’re different places today.”
“I realize that. I’m going to these places and, like in Denver, Larimer Street’s been completely redeveloped. The people that I talk to are talking about the difference between what Skid Row was like forty years ago and what it’s like today.”
“There’s different people. There were Indians then. The place was filled with Indians.”
“Do you feel baffled why a book like On The Road still continues to draw people?”
“No, because dissatisfaction with . . . Look, in the forties and fifties and even sixties there was a certain . . . there were certainties about American life. You took it for granted that certain things had absolute value. And you believed in them. I did. I thought I was put on this earth to make the world a better place. That was the attitude of most educated young people of that time. That continued right up to Kennedy. ‘To those much is given, much is expected.’ That was gone forever with the Vietnam War, the corruption in Washington. But these people, the Beats – which is a misleading name – had come to that conclusion a whole generation before. Unless you . . . I don’t know how well educated you are,” he says, “I don’t think very well educated, you’re just a little slut really. I mean, have you read Dostoyevsky?”
I feel insulted. I feel embarrassed. I say: “No.”
“Yes. See, so you are . . . well, sorry . . . these books had a tremendous influence on Jack. Books like The Possessed by Mr Fyodor. These books really affected the way he thought. So on this journey – he was propelled into this journey by a mixture of personal experience and literary experience. He was a writer. Have you read his earliest book, you know, The Town and The City? You know, you really can’t do serious work unless you do the reading. You can’t understand On The Road unless you read this earlier book.”
“I’m afraid I have not.”
“You should read it because it’s fun, you buy it in paperback from City Lights. I’d like to help you, but I don’t know exactly how I can because you – these other people have all come doing full books on Kerouac and this is just a term paper.”
“Yeah. And I’ve had to really work at trying to keep my focus narrow and not let it get too broad –”
“Broad,” he says. “That’s the word I was looking for. I wanted to say ‘girl’. Look, my cock is hard again. Eating your pussy got my blood going. Seeing you sitting there with no pants – your nice brown skin – so smooth and perfect – well, I want to fuck you now. Will you let me fuck you now?”
“In the arse?”
“No, we don’t have to do that. I want to fuck you like you are a woman I’m in love with.”
I lie back on the couch and spread my legs, open my pussy for him. “Dive in,” I say.
He licks his lips. “Now there’s a sight for an old fart . . .”
He mounts me. He fucks me slowly, kissing my face: my nose, my lips.
I turn away. I won’t let him stick his tongue in my mouth.
“What’s wrong?” he says. “What is it, little girl?”
“Don’t make love to me like I was your wife or girlfriend, which I’m not,” I tell him, “just fuck me like the slut you know I am. Okay? Fuck me like a filthy whore,” I hiss.
He flips me over on my stomach, roughly, and crams his cock straight up me.
“Ouch,” I say.
“Hurt?”
“A little.”
“Good.”
“Fuck me harder.”
“All the way up there,” he groans.
“Ouch,” I say.
“Hurt.”
“A little.”
“Good.” After, we take turns cleaning up in the bathroom. I put my pants back on. He opens two beers and we sit on the couch and continue to talk.
“The trip is not only a trip in space,” he says, “but it’s also a drop through American society till you hit bottom and you find Neal Cassady and people like that. And people who are in many ways quite destructive, even criminal. This infatuation with the criminal class . . . it’s different than just a dropout class of people. I mean, people who did real harm, like Burroughs shot his wife and I consider that not a nice thing, to kill your wife. And these guys were thieves. See, so I don’t share the general admiration that Kerouac had for someone like Cassady. There was a guy when they were young – Thomas Wolfe – and Kerouac loved him. I thought Thomas Wolfe was a jerk. A good writer, but he had no self-criticism, like Kerouac. The stuff came pouring out like piss. Thomas Wolfe also had journeys. There’s a train ride from North Carolina. His sister married a sort of white trash guy, or a kind of redneck guy. I shouldn’t say white trash, I didn’t know him. But no one reads Thomas Wolfe today except a certain kind of English major.”
“And yet people read Jack Kerouac.”
“Yes, but when we were young, Thomas Wolfe was almost as far in the pack as Kerouac is now.”
“So the real test will be in the next 40, 50 years?”
“It’s not going to be a classic forever. It’s not like Huck Finn. Huckleberry Finn is the greatest American book. The most important analogy to On The Road is Huckleberry Finn. Have you read that? Good. All right. So the trip on the raft with Tom and Huck – Kerouac thought of Cassady as the kind of Huck Finn character in the 20th century, and he thought of people like Bob Burford, upper-middle-class Denver boys, as a smart aleck Tom Sawyer. And the difference between their attitude on the raft going down the Mississippi. But that’s a false analogy. Because Huck is always good. Huck is always noble and Neal was a rat. And betrayed people. Huck never betrays anyone. Kerouac saw this the way he wanted to, and you dropped through the bottom of respectable society and found yourself in the basement full of fascinating characters. Kerouac made a great contribution with that. You know, it’s a good book. It’s going to last for a long time. It’ll always be read, probably by young people who want to get out of the trap.”
“So you basically look at it as a window into a different reality,” I say.
“He himself was a disenfranchised French Canadian. Canook. He came from what was the equivalent of a French hillbilly. They were a fossilized group of French in New England and Canada. They didn’t even speak correct French. It was a kind of patois. His pronunciation of French was not as good as mine. It was the way he –”
“It was a dialect, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, it was a dialect. In On The Road he doesn’t treat people very kindly. Not even Neal Cassady.”
“You don’t like Neal Cassady because you think he was immoral?”
“Yes, and a rat. And a pain in the arse. He was a bad type. Bad news. You didn’t want him anywhere around.”
“That seems to be the general –”
“Well, no! Young people still think he’s a saint of sorts.”
“They respect, they enjoy the fact that he was a con man . . .”
“Well, you look at the movies today, these anti-heroes. James Dean was sort of the first non-hero hero of movies. It’s people who don’t share the values of mainstream America at all. And there’s a lot of nice young people who are horrified by certain aspects of American society, or established society any place, so they like this. But that book is incorrect in certain ways. Although Kerouac had the social range, he wasn’t particularly sensitive to gradations in it. But if you could read the, uh – what was it?”
“The Town and The City?”
“Yes. I’m distracted. God, you’re pretty.” He touches my hair. “Beautiful.”
“Thank you.”
“I can’t believe my luck, getting to have sex with you, and I’m acting like a big jerk . . .”
“It’s okay.”
“You’re nice.”
“If you want more sex, you can have it.”
“I’m keeping that in mind. Where were we? Oh yes. The Town and The City, you’d get some idea of the background for this, and then some of the biographies of Jack. You don’t have to read them all. It gets very sad after . . .”
“I was very depressed after I read Jack’s Book,” I say.
“You know, Scott Fitzgerald said a famous thing: ‘There are no second acts in American lives.’ Well, there was no second act in Jack’s life. He became a parody of himself. The drugs and the drink really destroyed him. And he had physical problems. He had nephritus, this vascular disease, from football injuries. He was a superb football player, at a time when football players were smaller than they are now, and he could have gone to Notre Dame. He had a scholarship, an athletic scholarship.”
“Did you ever have any understanding about why he had that trouble with alcohol? Was it just that it runs in the family and you get it with each generation?”
“Well, there’s a classic Freudian psychoanalytical theory, maybe it’s discredited now, that alcoholism is a suppression device for homosexuals. And, whether it’s true or not, I thought it might be true in his case. That he had . . . he was very shaky sexually. That’s a big key to him, that he got quite girlish, quite coquettish. And, you know, the sense of restless flight with men, sort of a parable of homosexuality. There’s a correspondence with Moby Dick, sailing over the whole world. This way, you’re driving in cars over a continent.”
“There’s something you’re running away from?” I ask, sitting up.
“Yeah. And always coming back to his mother, who was a powerful character. Very stubborn. She once told me that the nuns – she was raised in a strict Catholic school – she did something that displeased the nuns, they would make her kneel on rice as the punishment. Uncooked rice, so the rice kernels would dig into her bare knees. She said, ‘It hurt me a lot, but I never apologized to them.’ So, I think . . . when do you have to turn in your paper?”
“My goal is to have my first draft completed by mid-May. I’m just going to see how it works out. I want to approach this in a very open-ended way, without preconceived ideas or expectations.”
“Ah yes. That’s very Kerouackian. Wanting the constantly fresh experience this experience of the frontier or the new places. There’s something, the frontier, you come to a place and take what you can from it. You even soil it. And then you move on to a new place. And that’s what the pioneers did.”
“It seems like an eternal cry, sort of this eternal call of the wild, that final –”
“Jack London is a writer, you know. Kerouac even looked like him. Those young handsome photographs of Jack Kerouac in a sea captain’s hat or petty officer’s hat. Jack London posed that way too, handsome. That was before Jack London got fat, bloated, drunk. And Jack London, in a very innocent way, was a thief. He used to rob oyster beds in an earlier time. So if you go on with your studies of Kerouac, there’s some analogy. So I think if you can capture that . . .”
“My younger sister, who is into a completely different thing, is into this capital I, capital T thing, you know, the IT Jack talks about in the book . . .”
He touches my hair some more and says, “Another influence is Rimbaud and, have you ever heard of the French poet Rimbaud? There’s a famous poem called ‘The Drunken Boat’ in which the poet himself is like a drunken vessel going down this powerful river without a destination, saying good-bye to the ancient parapets of Europe, parapets meaning the old castles and palaces of Europe. And he went to Abyssinia, and he had certain similarities to Kerouac. Bisexuality.”
“I thought he was pretty definitely homosexual.”
“Yeah, but then he went straight in Abyssinia and had been homosexual with Verlaine, and violent. He stabbed him. So, yes, you get that wildness which verged on criminality. Kerouac himself was not vicious. Kerouac was basically kind and he always thought people would get along together if he liked them, that all of his friends liked one another. But they couldn’t. That’s just not the way the world works. Everyone doesn’t love everyone else.”
“Didn’t he get pretty alienated from his friends?” I say, thinking of Christine.
“Yes. In the end, Ginsberg . . . you know, he always had this anti-Semitic side to him and his mother hated Jews so . . . they had this narrow, bigoted French Canadian Catholic outlook. It’s hard to imagine the primitiveness of that life.”
He reaches over and kisses me.
Fuck it, I let him – a sixty-five-year-old man making out with a twenty-seven-year-old woman –
We kiss for a while but my head is somewhere else.
“Will you, uh,” he says, “will you suck my cock again?”
But what I discover, when I open my eyes, is that I’m sucking on a Hebrew Nation all beef hot dog, not on this man’s cock. The man doesn’t even exist, although I have to admit it would be nice if he did.
Oh well.
I can’t masturbate all night with these images in my head, alone in my apartment. I have to get back to writing my thesis concerning image and metaphor in On the Road.
If I could just keep to the scholarly writing rather than lapsing into pornographic fancies, I may just graduate this year.
I erase everything I have just written, except for one line:
Route 66 exists only as a fragment of its former self.