Ti
Jean wondered sitting on Pawtucketville silts listening to the rushing rock-strewn
Merrimack coming by, wondered like maybe those old-time Dutch sailors sighting
that green fresh breast of land that would become Long Island as they entered the sound, another
waterway a metaphor for Jack life, and found a new world unspoiled for that
fifteen minutes before they laid anchor and claim on the cheap. That wonder
drove Jack boy, all fourteen- year old Jack boy so not worried by red dress
Paula Cole coming hither Friday night dates or that damn Maggie down by the almost
Chelmsford dream side of the river, damn already the river is in play with her
Irish braids and that god damn Bible between her knees to wonder if James was
it MacNeil Abbott or Abbott MacNeil Whistler sat beside this same river
thinking about his own Mere, his mother and how he could do justice to that
forlorn Puritan face which razzled him with blacks, browns and greys, as if to
mock the very idea of mother. Hell, James, he would never be called Jimmy like
the other boys once he “did” his mother in those woe begotten colors decided he
would use the old dame, and she was an old dame to star in his various studies
of colors and only philistines would dare to call the work some mother lode
draught.
This
is where the story gets interesting, although we know that Jack was not
bothered just then by come hither girls in red dresses or Bible-kneed Irish
girls since he had, playing hooky, crept into his holy of holy spots in the
cubicle at the school library gone beyond the wonder of those muddy splat
riverbanks where he first wondered the wonder akin to those Dutch sailors
seeking his own fresh green breast of land, the land of the mind. Wondering how
to stop wondering Jack picked up a biography of James Whistler complete with
mother on the front except she was painting title called some study in black
and white, something like that by one Lancelot Grey who Jack would later find
out was the central figure in what he would wind up calling the pre-war art
cabal that was attempting to “dress up,” read, protect American art and artists
from the onslaught of European critics who basically call that art “folk art”
meaning show the bastards the door and maybe get them shown in Peoria or better
Grand Island but stay away from European shores.
Grey’s
take on Whistler, taking the American born but life-long ex-patriate in was
that he never left the American shores and stuff like that. What interested
Jack though was not that art cabal stuff (art cabal a term he would not know
until later when landing in New York he came face to face with the denizens of
that cabal through various Student Art League girlfriends and others met in
Village garrets when garrets were there and not in Soho). But that was after
the war (World War II in case a younger reader has happened on this piece) when
New York told cheapjack art Europe to fuck off, to step back and various
abstraction movements were all the rage. Just then Grey delved into Whistler’s
various non-mother pieces (than mother painting an iconic come on since back
then only the art cabal knew other paintings and the publisher insisted that
that painting be on the front).
The
most interesting one, and one that seemed to contradict what the art cabal was
doing to protect American artists, was a painting called The White Girl (now in the National Gallery but then in private
hands). Jack was fascinated by the young woman portrayed who he learned from
Grey had been one of Whistler’s mistresses. The title intrigued and confused
him since somebody else called it that study in white gag that had handcuffed poor
Mrs. Whistler when it suited her James. Jack would wonder, would have deep
chaste Roman Catholic dreams (some say that would by his writings really always
be his dreams, his Jesus-sweated dreams) and wonder what it was like to have
been James’ girlfriend, and wondered too whether James wondered that he would
paint his mistresses to help pay the rent. Jack would later laugh about how
many girls he would con into paying the rent, walking the streets if necessary
or going in some café back room to play the flute for the night’s booze and
dope money and so he had kindred feelings for Brother James somewhat akin to the
bandit prince Gregory Corso. But at fourteen in some library cubicle in Lowell
mill-town hard by the Merrimack all he could think of was how long he would
have to wonder about lots of things, too many things when the world was moving
way to quickly but he would always say with pride that James was from Lowell
and leave it at that. Even when he found out that James’ white girl was like
his Mexican junkie- whore Tristessa. By then though that fresh green breast
wonder had hardened into funk, dunk and drunk.
************
Jack
popcorn for eyeballs sitting in the last row of the orchestra section of the
old Majestic Theater off of Bridge Street across from the offices of the Lowell Sun waiting as the screen heated
up after some very ordinary news of the week reels and an off-color cartoon
which he never did get even after watching several times over the next few Saturday
matinee double-feature week. The films changed every Friday but Mr. Le Blanc
cheapened up his operation by re-running those silly cartons built for
ten-years olds with no brains but silly to a strapping boy of sixteen who
actually took girls to the shows. (Le Blanc also sold stale popcorn with so
much salt laid in it would make your eyelids curl and watered down the tonic,
old-fashioned New England word for soda, so much it might as well have been
water and even made boys like Jack with strong kidneys ran to restrooms
frequently.) Of course, that was a totally different proposition, that messing
with girls stuff that he had pretty much figured out by sixteen with plenty of street advise some of it recklessly
dangerous and no, zero, parent advise but that was when you asked a girl if she
wanted to sit in the orchestra section or go up to the heavy-breathing pitch
dark moaning balcony. If the former that would be a last date (one time he left
the girl in the front lobby to fend her herself on the way home while he went
off to Renoir’s Ice Cream Shop with Even Stephen and Dizzy Izzy). This day,
this Thursday afternoon first show skipping afternoon classes was different when
Jack was all business trying to figure some stuff out that was going to appear
on the satin silk screen.
Then
it, no, she started. All fresh as a new born daisy fending off some sidewalk
Lothario, if only in Jack’s imagination, really only some lug like a million
lugs he knew in Lowell High School and who if he hadn’t been on a mission this
afternoon could have stood in front of the high school at close of day and
counted the number of lugs from the class of 1939 carousing out the door some
he could name by name. So, no this lug was going nowhere, was getting nothing
except the desert breezes from this girl. Jack swore the girl with the Bette
Davis eyes after beating the clown off with a car jack sat in her dust-filled
private reading spot reading some French poet from the fourteenth century. Jack
pressed his popcorn eyeballs to see book jacket cover and his heart beat a mile
a minute once he saw that she, Gabby let’s give her a name, was reading his
hero prince bandit poet Francois Villon, like him a Breton when that meant
something before the wave of diasporas which led angelized angel-headed
Kerouacs to the shores of the Saint Lawrence River and downwardly mobile fates
stripped the clan of their respective dignities.
Yes,
Villon the prince of thieves who Jack had discovered in that broken- down
school library where he hid out when he could not deal with bullshit chemistry
classes or some such subject around the time that he read that book by Lancelot
Grey about that pimp daddy, holy goof (first use of the term “holy goof” came
from reading Grey) James Whistler the artist who kept himself from the Thames
and watery graves by selling his paintings or more usually “selling” his
mistresses to make the rent money when times were tough. He still loved
Whistler (although he could only mock a guy who had to practically handcuff his
mother to the chair to get her to stand still for what he called a study in
black and white, something like that) if only because he was Lowell, was a
native son and that counted a lot for Jack then even if James was not a Breton.
(Funny later he would go through seven kinds of hell with his own mother before
telling her to kiss off.) But Villon was a legitimate bandit-prince who hung
with the lumpen outside the guarded moats ready to pounce one minute on the
next jackroll victim (some historians have speculated that Villon and his
scumbags invented the jackroll, taking a bag of nails or coins if they had any
wrapping them in a small cloth and under cover of darkness bopping some old
lady or drunken sot for their dough). A lost art that Jack would use more than
once in Times Square when some pansy hipster tried to do tricks on him and he
bopped him for hot dog money at Howard Johnson’s stuff like that, yes, a lost
but helpful art for those who lived outside the law, for those whose only road
was the road.
And
there she was the girl with the Bette Davis eyes all dewy even as a desert dust
storm was brewing just outside the Gates of Eden reading Villon in French (her
mother was French a catch for her woe begotten father during World War I
service in France with the American Expeditionary Force who came back to Eden
saw the dust and stone wood and left on the next train with some Singer sewing
machine salesman with four quarters and a quart of wine). That Garden of Eden
business a gag, a gag of sorts since the diner that he father owned, no, really
her grandfather who was getting too old to run the place but too ornery to let
his deadbeat son who couldn’t keep a French whore, Gramp’s words, in the middle
of the desert from running away with the next time that came by with long pants
on was just outside the main entrance to the Petrified Forest (couldn’t later a
guy like Allan Ginsberg or even novice poet Dean Moriarty have a field day with
that idea as the 1930s was tearing America, tearing the world apart, making the
world turn in on itself). The gag was that Gramps an old Kentucky coalminer
until he was thirteen and figured out that he would rather not die in
Appalachia with the muskrats had headed out of the hills and hollows as fast as
he could. Head out to California where he had heard had streets paved of gold
and young girls ready to give whatever they had to give. But see Gramps and his
forbears were sitting folk, were tied to the tired land so long that they would
sit down anywhere where that didn’t have to pretend to seek prosperity. So
Gramps stopped at the Petrified Forest once he ran into some Nevada Jane
heading east after busting out heading west who worked at the diner and who
played the flute for him until she too ran off with some calico salesman. Gramps
just stayed put and married the first woman who smiled at him (Gabby’s grandma)
and that ended the road west in that generation.
So
poor rattled and pestered Gabby was torn between sweet perfume dreams of Left
Bank Paris cafes and that endless rock-hard dust. Then out of the blue some
pretty hobo came walking up the road to the diner all dusty and road worn, a
hobo whose name turned out to be Leslie Howard (that would be important later
to Gabby if meaningless to Jack when she inherited his life insurance policy
but that was later long after Jack had gathered in the wanderlust that set that
first Breton to Canadian shores and that fucking raging Saint Lawrence River of
no returns) Listen up, Jack did, this Leslie Howard was no stumble bum like
half the hoboes, tramps, bums, and there are social distinctions among the
brethren who were running around the country stopping at railroad jungle camps
or sleeping under unkempt bridges and arroyos but a real live itinerant
intellectual who had when he had seen the first turnings of the world inward in
those times got the hell out of Europe
as fast as he could (he would be found later when Gabby looked for next of kin
to see if anybody would contest the life insurance policy to have been Jewish
not a good thing to be in Europe in those times to be a “rootless
cosmopolitan”) This Howard, let’s call him that since it is as good as any
other and who knows what he real name was if he was on the run bedazzled Gabby
from minute one leaving that lug gas jockey out to dry with the trees. Knew his
Villon cold, knew that he too was a bandit prince who hung outside the moats
with the lumpen.
Right
then Jack’s already strong flight of fantasy knew that he was kindred, here was
guy who loved to read but could not settle down with at crazy-mixed up world
pounding tattoos in his fevered brain. If anybody had been near Jack in that
darkened orchestra section fit only for one-date girls and sullen adults they
would have heard him gasp every time this Howard said anything of import to
Gabby. Jack’s fevered mind started sketching things out, read like crazy, write
like crazy and keep on the move, always on the move. What Jack would call later
in one of his lesser but more philosophical books the quest, the grail hunt,
the breaking from the holy goofs that keep you penned in and unfree, that holy
goof a well-worn word in Jack talk. For now though just the germ of a plan.
They
say that Bretons are not only are hearty but also headstrong and Jack sensed in
Gabby just such characteristics even though she was nothing but some dirt
farmer Okie, Arkie descendent. He would forever search for his Gabby but never
find her, and frankly that search was just one among a number of searches
later. This guy Leslie, what made him tick, why Jack was drawn to him like
lemmings from the sea was more problematic. The Villon, hobo road warrior
philosopher king part was straight up. He would have a million sleepless night
visions of being out on some tramp road in say Winnemucca or Yuma facing no
dough and no food or water and glad-tiding himself into soft spot, some soft
bed if that was the way the thing played out. Pearl-diving, you know washing
dishes for his meal in some such Garden of Eden diner somewhere if necessary
just to stay on the road one more day. That part held romance, held him in
thrall.
What
Jack couldn’t figure out especially since the girl with the Bette Davis eyes
was totally smitten by him and his wayward ways against the lugs, demented
grandpas, jelly-fish fathers and abandoned down some Seine River mother not
unlike the Merrimack always close to his dreams especially that rocky crest
around the old Lowell Textile Institute why this modern day troubadour had so
little regard for himself that he would let a bum like the notorious Duke
Mantee, yes, that Duke who was the scourge of the West just then put two random
slugs into his body. He tries, and would continue to try later to understand
the idea of the retreat of the intellectuals, that the time of the caveman was
making a reappearance after so much spent trying to come up from the mud and
slime. Backwards. Damn, that bothered Jack, would bother him until his own
dying breath when he turned on the intellectuals with a vengeance. The now dank
dark movie hall left him utterly perplexed about what would happen to him when
he had to face his own road west.
Outside
the movie theater, actually he had been in the lobby when he spied her and then
hailed her, Jack stopped that come hither Paula Cole and asked her if she would
like to go to the movies that next Friday night when the films changed. When
she answered yes Jack now a veteran of the ploy asked Paula -orchestra or
balcony? Answer: “don’t be silly I would not have accepted if we weren’t going
to the balcony.” With that he would put the fate of Howard in the back of his
mind. First things first.
********************
Jack
brought the Tokay, the cheap wine of the day that got him through the day and
the only other wine beside kosher Mogen David mad monk (although just then
demurely so) Allan Ginsberg, hereafter Monk, would drink to set himself up to
read some sliver of a poem. This night expecting a bunch of people to of all
things a North Beach (San Fran) converted garage gallery something the Monk
would put an end to guys like T.S. Eliot, bum of the month Nazi-symp Ezra Pound
and about fifty other guys and twenty other gals including his high school
prose father. Would burn their old-fashioned words now of no account on a pile
of burnt offerings, a pile of faggots (he would not learn until later that
word’s common origins use to destroy brethren fellow homosexuals). Would get
the world well, for a minute, in search of some fatherless compadre, in search
of the father Jack claimed he had never known, and not he alone in the welter
of great depressions and slogging through war. Maybe in the end they were
searching for Father Death who knows. Jack passed the wine, passed all
understanding before that search was consummated.
Some
guy, some guy who claims that his mother had worked at City Lights Bookstore in
those days and had had an affair with the poet Phillip Larkin and had brought
the dago red and him to the reading. Claimed to know Jack, or maybe it was the
Monk in the old days, in the days when they raged with so many words they
couldn’t keep enough Woolworth 5 &10 notebooks in flannel shirts or golf
scorecard pencils ready wrote this, second hand about being present at the creation,
second hand. At this far remove it is hard to tell fact from fiction, tell who
is bullshitting and who has the goods especially since virtually all the
background characters are gone, some long gone. Make of that what you
will.
********
I have seen the best
poet of the generation before mine, no, let me start over, I have seen a
universal max daddy poet speaking some truths to put old Homer and freaking
staid T.S. Eliot in the shade. Starting off by
declaring that he had seen that the
best minds of his generation, guys like brother in soul Kerouac, be-bop Charlie
Parker, Phil Larkin when he was sober, Johnny Spain when off the needle and
doing cold turkey and of course the daddy them all one Carl Solomon turn to
mush. Turned out in the barren wilderness, not the friendly desert-scrapes
heading west on lonely Greyhound buses or Tourist Bureau hang-ups wilderness
out pass Butte or Boise but what a novelist named Nelson Algren who called the
shots and gave many a troubled youth the keys to the fixer man and
wellness called the neon wilderness,
called that place where the bright lights of the city blinded a proper man (or
woman) some junkie Frankie Machine haven with a wife he hated and a girlfriend
who couldn’t stick with him when he was on the junk. That neon beast from which
no one returned except for quick stays in safe haven mental asylums (called
ironically funny farms but even the Monk, whose own mother had her share of
sorrows in such places could find no humor in such designations).
Get this, no, let me
start again against the cold nose of my sister filled heart. Saw, he the Monk
okay in case I lose my train of thought passing through Salt Lake City and
thoughts of Joseph Smith’s grand hustle taking a bunch of farmers from burned
over lands to the searing sun of the western depot. Saw the same Negro streets Jack,
and one time Jack and he when he, Jack was looking for some rough trade sailors
just off the China Seas pierce earring trail saw around Blue Hill Avenue and
Dudley Street blank, 125th Street blank, Dearborn Street blank,
MacArthur Boulevard blank, Central Avenue blank, Cielo Street in Tijuana blank,
Plaza del Mayo, Montezuma revenge Mexico blank, and wasted in the sweated fetid
humid Thunderbird-lushed night dreaming of pink Cadillacs and stony-faced fixer
men getting wise by the hour on Carl’s ancient fears. (And, this is funny or so
the winos and every hobo, vagrant, escapee, drifter and grafter yelling out in
unison thought so “what is the word-Thunderbird-what is the price forty twice.”
Ready to jackroll some senior citizen lady for the price, for fucking eighty
cents which any self-respecting junkie could cadge in two minutes even in Cielo
Street, Tijuana and that is a hard peso to drill,-ready to commit mayhem at
Park Street subway stations for their “boy,” to be tamped by girl but I will be
discrete since the Feds might raid the place sometime looking for the ghost of
Trigger Burke who eluded them for a very long time. (Trigger who captured
Jack’s imagination and the Monk’s but here is the weird part Carl’s too who
started strutting like him too after the prince of bandit-poets Corso showed
him how to do that slinky swagger on the last visit before the blade at
Sandhill).
Thought that those
angel-headed hipsters hearing choruses of angels strumming their noiseless
wings, those cold as ice in a man’s veins hep cats hanging around Times,
Lafayette, Dupont, Harvard squares (you can fill in your own squares, square
the Monk laughed and Jack hee-hawed) crying in pools of blood coming out of the
wolves-stained sewers around the black corner would never stop bleating for
their liquor. Would not stop until they got popular and headed for the sallow
lights of Harvard Square where they, those angel-headed hipsters in case you (and Carl) forgot hustled young college students, young
impressionable college students green as grass whose parents had had their best
minds, those hallowed students’ mines, okay, wasted in the turbid streets of
south Long Island (not the West Egg of Gatsby’s dream out of Fitzgerald’s fresh
green breast of land to stir even sullen rough trade Dutch sailors looking for
whips and cuts, conquering everything in sight like any other poor-boy
arriviste with too much money and not enough imagination and not East Egg of
the fervid elites but any-town, Levitt-town of those who would escape to Boston
or Wisconsin to face the angel of death, that angel frightening even Monk when
Carl was not around to anchor his brain. Up front and say no go, pass, under
luminous moons which light up sparks and say to that candid world which could
have given a fuck hard times please come again no more.
Here is the beauty of
the green as grass hustle working fast to get enough to fix that jones. Dangle
some college guy, maybe with a girl, shy, with dreams of hard-core liquor or a
well-twisted joints to loosen her up and her fragile come hither virginity (reminding
Jack of that Paula Coe who played the flute for him more than one time in that
Majestic Theater balcony some hardcore Friday night and the Monk, searching for
some blue-eyed Adonis, settling for some
pimpled has been teenager seeking his own father dreams). Lay out the story-kid
your booze and something for me. Done. Later, a big bottle wrapped tight in a
paper bag. Trick, a very thin brew of whiskey split and cash for him to get
himself well. Oh the hipster cons which would have made even the Monk laugh.
The Monk saw hipsters
cadging wine drinks from sullen co-eds staying out too late in the Harvard
Square night who turned out to be slumming from some plebian colleges across
the river maybe good Irish girls from frail Catholic parishes with rosaries in
their fair-skinned hands and a novena book between their knees who nevertheless
has Protestant lusts, strong Protestant lusts busting down the shrines to
Immaculate Conception Virgin Marys pretty painted by guys like Tintoretto and
marching to the church door just behind Martin Luther and his bag of lusts and
Salvation Army clothing in their pallid hearts but unrequited. Here’s how-they those
sullen salty Irish girls, not all redheads but close would arrive at the Café Lana with ten bucks
and their virginity and leave with both leaving some guy with dreams of salty
sucking blowjobs walking out the backdoor and doing the whack job behind the
dumpster –a waste of precious fluids and according to Norman Mailer who would
have known from his perch down in Provincetown when the mix of homosexuals and
straight, except those lusty lonely Portuguese fisherman Marsden Hartley loved
to paint (and to love) the waste of world-historic
fucks which would product the best minds of the next generation all dribbled
away.
You already know about
what you need to know about Protestant girls with their upfront Protestant
lusts although they would not be caught dead, or alive, in Sally splendor
although they certainly could play the penny whistle and damn those world
historic fucks. Maybe tasty Jewish girls from the shtetl not in East or West
Egg who flocked to the other side of the river and gave Irish guys who
previously had dribbled their spunk behind dumpsters after losing out to ten
bucks and virginity in tack tickey-tack Catholic girls who refused to give that
head that would have brought some of the best minds some freaking relief
(better not say fucking relief because that would be oxymoronic). Maybe some off-center
sullen fair-skinned and blonded Quaker, Mennonite, Primitive Baptist or
Brethren of the Common Life kind of Protestant girls, like I said off-center,
who spouted something about one god and no trinities, no god and no trinities
and just feel good stuff.
All three varieties and
yes there were more off-centers but who even knew of Quakers, Mennonites, lusty
Amish girls run away from home, Tantric card-wheelers, and fresh- faced red
light district sluts who at least played the game straight-played the cash
nexus for pure pleasure and maybe to even up some scores. All-Catholic, Jewish,
Protestant, yeah, Quakers (fakirs, fakers and Shakers included), the sluts,
Mennonites and yes those lusty red-faced Amish runaways all coming together
after midnight far from the negro streets, the Monk’s beat and no anachronism
like saying black or Afro-American back to those Mister James Crow days, but
not far from the all night hustlers and dime store hipsters with their ten-cent
cigar store rings and cheap Irish whiskeys bought on the installment plan who
converged around the Hayes-Bickford just a seven league jump from the old end
of the line dead of night Redline subway stop in order to keep the angel of
death at arms’ length. The angel of death a tough bitch to break, and tougher
to cross when they deal went down. There to listen until dawn to homosexuality-
affixed hungry for the keyhole blast or the running sperm fakir poets, the Monk
number one of all the number ones and
slamming singsters (to keep up with the gangster, mobster, hipster theme, okay)
fresh out of cheapjack coffeehouses where three chords and two-line rhymes repeated
in call and response got you all the action you wanted although maybe a little
light on the breadbasket sent around to show that you were appreciated. Yeah,
now that I think about the matter more closely hard times please come again no
more.
Saw the angel of death
make her appearance one night at the Café Lana and then backstopped the Club
Nana to fetch one young thing who warbled like heaven’s own angel. Some Norman
Mailer white hipster (read the Partisan
Review essay if you don’t get this about all kinds of cultural mishmash and
sexual too just ask the Monk when he was in his hungers and not worried about
singing some Walt Whitman song about the rotgut of his generation) turned her
on to a little sister and then some boy and she no longer warbled. No longer
warbled like that angel angle heaven- shamed chorus but did sweet candy cane
tricks for high-end businessmen with homely wives or fruitless ones who had
given up that sort of “thing” after the third junior had been born and who were
ready to make her their mistress if she would just stop singing kumbaya after
every fuck like she was still a freaking warbler. A freaking virgin or
something instead of “used” goods or maybe good for schoolboys whose older
brothers took them to her for their first fling at going around the world,
welcome to the brotherhood or maybe some old fart who just wanted to relive his
dreams before the booze, the three wives and parcel of kids did him in and then
the hustler sent her back to the Club Nana to “score” from the club owner who
was connected with Nick the dream doper man, what did Nelson Algren and Frankie
Machine call him in dead of night, yes, the fixer man, Christ who would get
him- and her well –on those mean angel-abandoned death watch streets. Who knew
that one night at the Hayes (everybody called it just that after they had been
there one night), one after midnight night where they had that first cup of
weak-kneed coffee replenished to keep a place in the scoreboarded night where
hari-kara poets dreamed toke dreams, and brought paper-bag wrapped Tokay wines
just like Monk’s Jack and some Mister dreamed of fresh-faced singer girls
looking for kicks. So please, please, hard times come again no
more.
I have seen frosted
lemon trees jammed against the ferrous night, the night of silly foolish
childhood dreams and misunderstanding about the world, the world that that poet
spoke of in a teenage dream of indefinite duration about who was to have and who
was to have not once those minds were de-melted and made hip to the
tragedies of life, the close call with the mental house that awaits us all.
Yeah Monk was right even about Carl Solomon and all his sorrows before the
knife.
***********
What
the hell did sullen Carl Solomon start before he went under the knife with his
pleading for his father, a father that he had never known since he had been
left back in Poland to peddle his fruits and vegetables to his brethren and his
mother and the four kids headed to the Americas on some tub of a boat and never
looked back. Rumors abounded that he survived because he had a gentile mistress
grabbed after his wife and kids left. That at least is the story Carl told,
told endlessly which would not be so bad but the Monk picked it up in his own
moment of despair.
Monk
searched his valium brain for his own prose-filled father but that was not
nearly good enough, kept him awake at night because he had strange dreams that
his father was not some fake high school teacher writing awful poems in broken
down post-war America. Was afraid that his real father was William Appleton
Williams who denied him three times, didn’t want to believe that his broken
words would mesh so well. Had better dreams that his real father was sexy Walt
Whitman (this remember in dialogue with Carl Solomon before the knife so it is
not clear whether Carl remembered) whose vagabond dreams matched his and his homosexual
desire beating out some Johnny Reb who could give Walt the ride he desired.
Here is the trick though the Monk had sweet dreams whenever he read Leaves of Grass (usually on grass) and
he passed that on to Jack in some secret moment in Denver when some screwball
Adonis was looking for his father.
Now
Jack, funny before Carl grabbed Monk with the father who we never knew
religion, always thought he knew his father, knew the con artist, poker
cheater, movie theater ticket taker great bear of a French-Canadian who came
down the Jackson, Maine road with five cents Canadian in his pocket and dreams
of printing up ads. But that was not the father that he knew but some skinny
stiff wino pissant who he sought out in greater Denver cattle yards. Always
deferred to everlasting Mere, Mere out of some fresh Breton conceit never
getting some whiplash from old father time who died before his time of
heartache and heartbeats. So Jack conned himself into some holy goof, his words
exactly, metaphysical search going up the Bear Mountain, Jackson, Wyoming
Jackson not that trail of tears from down in Maine Jackson where the red brick
and mortar spinning wheels beckoned and he spent and spilled his young manhood
trying to get the fuck out from under even if he couldn’t drive, made him
nervous, to save his life. Funny again that fame never stopped the bleeding
inside looking behind some bushes for some father death, some father time
pissing against that Tokay dream he figured out back in about 1946 but could
never get past. The Monk did him no service on that long trail drive from
Monument Creek to Sunnyvale and then drop off and outs at Big Sur where he got
sober for a week.
Damn
that stuff is contagious, will drive you crazy, when twice removed Lance, me,
went looking for the father he never knew too. Looked for him behind closed
doors to his heart. That distant slightly dim figure who brought home not
enough pay checks. Who never talked about but never got over the Pacific war
like a lot of guys who found themselves on tubs picking up stray comrades from
washed-up beaches, picking up too guys who got too close to chore, got wasted
in some windless fire and fell down into the green-gray-blue surf that gets us
all in the end. The old man, father, never talked much, much about anything
that Lance, me would understand and so Jack-like Ma, Mere, Mom, Mere whatever
you want to call her ran rough-shot over childish dreams and insecurities.
Here’s the worst of it though, Jack-like, he never got to say good-bye to that
father he never knew and crushed his days with regret, total regret that he
didn’t have the sense of a holy goof, Jack talk, to have called a truce, even
an armed truce to the madness that wracked his silly excuse for a family, and
now all his has is slate grey stone to place the remnants down in some unknown
holy place where he can never dwell, yes, Lawrence, me, got caught in the
Monk’s version of Carl’s plainsong, no, got stuck in the damn mire.
Silly
to think that the father time search would only apply to men, young men, holy
goofs like Lawrence, me, when the max daddy sin of all was the way Jack, in
Jack speak, abandoned his Jan, his spitting image Jan, denied like Christ was
denied three times by the count. Jan who would search like some strange Kenneth
Rexroth figure for the father we all knew, or thought we knew once he pointed
us toward the light, once we got the beat, the second-hand beat that washed us
clean in places like Big Sur and Todo el Mundo where Jan still searches in some
desperate wild water surf for some broken down guy who wasted away with drink,
and she with drink too. Jesus, funny he was searching for his father too out in
Middle Eastern wildernesses, will it never end.
Contagious
that is what Sam Lowell said about the freaking search for that lost father
world made up of pure sand and not much else. Some goof, the holy part excluded
was looking for his father, his famous private detective father, a guy named
Lew Archer, who back around Jack time in California ran the rack on few good
cases and then rested for forty years something like that. Tried to claim that
his father’s life death was due to his father’s overused whip, his sorrows that
he could not go the distance with his wife, this goof’s grandmother, his code
of honor that once he took a job he was in, totally in, for good or evil,
and
maybe
that he drank too much Tokay, Jack-like when he wound up behind some freaking
wino pissant dumpster saved but some sister of mercy who could not save him in
the end. Get this though that junkie weirdo so-called grandson, some modern-day
Carl Solomon without the sorrows before he went under the knife could not be
searching for Lew, Lew Archer since Lew never had a son, had no children. Sorry
goof,
Out
on the Jersey looking east first to see the great ocean that drove his forbears
to search for fresh green breasts of land then west to seek dungeon filled
fathers never known in Denver, Santa Fe, Salt Lake City Salvation Army hotels
or whatever they call those blessed places of rest the whole deal was to figure
out a way to look for some American cowboy past, looking for the Monk’s Adonis
if he couldn’t make it with sexy Walt Whitman with the furl of whiskers. There
sat Dean Moriarty, no, fuck that, one Neal Cassidy who would ride the freight
trains west looking for that father the others really did think they had found.
Neal’s old man was in some wino jailcell speaking in tongues to a candid world.
Maybe Carl was right, Monk too we should all cry to the high heavens looking
for the fathers we never knew.
For Ti Jean Kerouac On The 50th Anniversary Of His Death And The “Assistant King Of The Beats” Allan Ginsberg-Hard Rain’s A Going To Fall With Kudos To Bob Dylan “King Of The Folkies"
By
Lance Lawrence
[In
the interest of today’s endless pursue of transparency which in many cases
covers up the real deal with a few fake pieces of fluff I admit that I knew
Jack Kerouac’s daughter, Janet always called me and those I knew Jan now late
daughter (she died in 1996) whom he
never really recognized as his despite the absolute likeness and later testing for
whatever cramped reason and which took its toll on her with like her father an early
death, met out in Todo el Mundo south of Big Sur off the famous Pacific Coast
Highway. We, a group of us from the Boston area who had been told by some guys
from North Adamsville, about forty miles south of Boston who we met through
Pete Markin* who I went to Boston University with before he dropped out in the
Summer of Love, 1967 about Todo and how it was a cooler place down the road
from Big Sur which had become inundated with holy goofs and tourists and a rip
off. That s is still true today although the rip-off part is submerged since it
in no longer a hippie Garden of Eden except among those who were so stoned that
couldn’t find their ways out of the hills above the ocean and have wound up
staying there as models for what the 1960s were all about (and what I remember
hearing a few parents tell their children to avoid at all costs-oh, to be very
young-then)
We
had been staying at a cabin owned by the writer Steven Levin (mostly novels and
essays for publications like City Lights and Blue Dial Press and regional
literary journals) when one Saturday night we held a party and in walked Jan
then maybe seventeen or eighteen, nice and who wanted to be a writer like her
dad. The hook for me to meet her was the Boston-Lowell connection (one of the
few times being from Boston did me any good). We became friendly the few days
she stayed at the cabin (at my request) and I saw her a few times later. I was
having my own troubles just then and as the world knows now she had a basketful
from that crass rejection by her father and frustrations at not being taken
seriously as a writer always following in her father’s two-million-word shadows.
Funny it did not take any DNA testing for me to see that she was pure Kerouac
in features and frankly from what I read of his style that too.
I
also knew Allan Ginsburg in his om-ish days when we fired up more than one
blunt (marijuana cigarette for those who are clueless or use another term for
the stick) to see what we could see out in the National Mall where he would do
his sleek Buddha Zen mad monk thing and later Greenwich Village night where he
did serious readings to the Village literary set. I was just a little too young
to have appreciated his Howl which
along with the elegant Kaddish (for
his troubled late mother) fully since the former in particular was something
like the Beat anthem to Kerouac’s On The
Road bible. He had kind of moved on from beat and was moving on from hippie
a bit as well and it would not be until later when the dust settled that he
would go back to the later 1940s and early 1950s to explain to a candid
audience including me over grass and some wine what it was all about, what
drove the startlingly images and weird noises of that former poem. (Which I
have read and re-read several times as well as through the beauty of YouTube
has him reading forming background while I am working on the computer.
This
piece first appeared in Poetry Today shortly after Allan
Ginsburg’s Father Death death without accordion and caused a
great deal of confusion among the readers, a younger group according to the
demographics provided to me by the advertising department when I was trying to
figure out where the thing got lost in the fog, why these younger folk missed
some terms I took for granted with which every reader was at least vaguely
familiar. Some readers thought because I mentioned the word “cat” I was paying
homage to T.S. Eliot generally recognized in pre-Beat times as the ultimate
modernist poet. Meaning for Eliot aficionados the stuff that Broadway used to
make a hit musical out of although it would have been better if they, either
the confused young or the Broadway producers had counted their lives in coffee
spoons. That cat reference of mine actually referred to “hep cats” as in a
slang expression from the 1940s and 1950s before Beat went into high gear not a
cat, the family pet.
Some
readers, and I really was scratching my head over this one since this was
published in a poetry magazine for aficionados and not for some dinky survey
freshman college English class, that because I mentioned the word “homosexual”
and some jargon associated with that sexual orientation when everybody was “in
the closet” except maybe Allan Ginsburg and his Peter although they were in
friendlier Frisco mainly thought I was referring W.H. Auden. There had been
some coded words for the sexual acts associated with homosexually then, and
maybe in some older sets still in use Jesus,
Auden, a great poet no question if not a brave one slinking off to America when
things got too hot in his beloved England in September 1939 and a
self-confessed homosexual in the days when that was dangerous to declare in
late Victorian public morality England especially after what happened to Oscar
Wilde when they pulled down the hammer was hardly the only homosexual
possibility. That despite his game of claiming every good-looking guy for what
he called the “Homintern.” Frankly I didn’t personally think anybody even read Auden
anymore once the Beats be-bopped.
There
were a few others who were presented as candidates as the person I was
championing. James Lawson because some of his exploits were similar to the ones
I described but those events were hardly rare in the burned over 1950s down in
the mud of society. Jack Weir because of some West Coast references. Jeffery
Stein, the poet of the new age shtetl because of the dope. All wrong. That poet
had a name an honored name Allan Ginsburg who howled in the night at the
oddness and injustice of the world after saying Kaddish to his mother’s memory
and not be confused with this bag of bones rough crowd who refused to learn
from the silly bastard. This piece was, is for ALLAN GINSBURG who wrote for
Carl Solomon in his hours of sorrow just before he went under the knife in some
stone- cold crazy asylum and I now for him when he went under the ground. Lance
Lawrence]
*(We
have, those of us who knew Markin back in the 1960s when he hung around the
Cambridge coffeehouses with his cheap date girlfriends (he was a scholarship
boy who had no money, came from some slack family house so coffeehouses, the
ones with no admission charges and cheap coffee to maintain a seat), have often
wondered whether Markin and Kerouac would have gotten along if they had been of
the same generation. That generation born in the 1920s, his parents’ generation
if not lifestyle. From Markin’s end would Jack have been the searched for
father he had never known. From Jack’s end whether the two-million question
Markin would have clashed or meshed with the two-million- word Kerouac. I know
as early as in the 1980s when I was dating an English Literature graduate
student from Cornell that Jack was in bad odor as a literary figure to emulate
and subsequently anybody who wanted to be “school of Kerouac found hard sledding
getting published. This is probably worthy of a separate monogram in this 50th
anniversary year of the passing of Kerouac )
***********
I
have seen the best poet of the generation before mine declare that he had seen
that the best minds of his generation had turned to mush, turned out in the
barren wilderness from which no one returned except for quick stays in safe
haven mental asylums. Saw the same Negro streets he saw around Blue Hill Avenue
and Dudley Street blank and wasted in the sweated fetid humid
Thunderbird-lushed night (and every hobo, vagrant, escapee, drifter and grafter
yelling out in unison “what is the word-Thunderbird-what is the price forty
twice” and ready to jackroll some senior citizen lady for the price-ready to
commit mayhem at Park Street subway stations for their “boy,” to be tamped by
girl but I will be discrete since the Feds might raid the place sometime
looking for the ghost of Trigger Burke who eluded them for a very long time.
Thought that those angel-headed hipsters, those hep cats hanging around Times,
Lafayette, Dupont, Harvard squares crying in pools of blood coming out of the
wolves-stained sewers around the black corner would never stop bleating for
their liquor, stop until they got popular and headed for the sallow lights of
Harvard Square where they hustled young college students, young impressionable
college students whose parents had had their best minds, those hallowed
students, wasted in the turbid streets of south Long Island (not the West Egg
of Gatsby’s dream of conquering everything in sight like any other poor-boy
arriviste with too much money and not enough imagination and not East Egg of
the fervid elites but anytown, Levitttown of those who would escape to Boston
or Wisconsin to face the angel of death up front and say no go, pass, under
luminous moons which light up sparks and say to that candid world which could
have given a fuck hard times please come again no more.
Saw
hipsters cadging wine drinks from sullen co-eds staying out too late in the
Harvard Square night who turned out to be slumming from some plebian colleges
across the river maybe good Irish girls from frail Catholic parishes with
rosaries in their fair-skinned hands and a novena book between their knees who
nevertheless has Protestant lusts in their pallid hearts but unrequited (here’s
how-they would arrive at the Café Lana with ten bucks and their virginity and
leave with both and some guy with dreams of salty sucking blowjobs walking out
the backdoor and doing the whack job behind the dumpster –a waste of precious
fluids and according to Norman Mailer world-historic fucks which would product
the best minds of the next generation all dribbled away). Maybe tasty Jewish
girls from the shtetl in not East or West Egg who flocked to the other side of
the river and gave Irish guys who previously had dribbled their spunk behind
dumpsters after losing out to ten bucks and virginity in tack tickey-tack
Catholic girls who refused to give that head that would have brought some of the
best minds some freaking relief (better not say fucking relief because that
would be oxymoronic). Maybe some sullen fair-skinned and blonded Protestant
girls who spouted something about one god and no trinities, no god and no
trinities and just feel good stuff. All three varieties and yes there were more
but who knew of Quakers, Mennonites, lusty Amish girls run away from home,
Tantic card-wheelers, and fresh- faced red light district sluts who at least
played the game straight-played the cash nexus for pure pleasure and maybe to
even up some scores. All-Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, yeah, Quakers (fakirs,
fakers and Shakers included), the sluts, Mennonites and yes those lusty
red-faced Amish runaways all coming together after midnight far from the negro
streets but not far from the all night hustlers and dime store hipsters with
their cigar store rings and cheap Irish whiskeys bought on the installment plan
who converged around the Hayes-Bickford just a seven league jump from the old
end of the line dead of night Redline subway stop in order to keep the angel of
death at arms’ length. There to listen until dawn to homosexuality- affixed
hungry for the keyhole blast or the running sperm fakir poets and slamming
singsters fresh out of cheapjack coffeehouses where three chords and two- line
rhymes got you all the action you wanted although maybe a little light on the
breadbasket sent around to show that you were appreciated. Yeah, now that I think
about the matter more closely hard times please come again no
more.
Saw
the angel of death make her appearance one night at the Café Lana and then
backstopped the Club Nana to fetch one young thing who warbled like heaven’s
own angel. Some Norman Mailer white hipster turned her on to a little sister
and then some boy and she no longer warbled but did sweet candy cane tricks for
high-end businessmen with homely wives or fruitless ones who had given up that
sort of “thing” after the third junior had been born and who were ready to make
her his mistress if she would just stop singing kumbaya after every fuck like
she was still a freaking warbler, a freaking virgin or something instead of
“used” goods or maybe good for schoolboys whose older brothers took them to her
for their first fling at going around the world, welcome to the brotherhood or
maybe some old fart who just wanted to relive his dreams before the booze, the
three wives and parcel of kids did him in and then the hustler sent her back to
the Club Nana to “score” from the club owner who was connected with Nick the
dream doper man, the Christ who would get him- and her well –on those mean
angel-abandoned death watch streets but who knew that one night at the Hayes
(everybody called it just that after they had been there one night), one after
midnight night where they had that first cup of weak-kneed coffee replenished
to keep a place in the scoreboarded night where hari-kara poets dreamed toke
dreams and some Mister dreamed of fresh-faced singer girls looking for kicks.
So please, please, hard times come again no
more.
I
have seen frosted lemon trees jammed against the ferrous night, the night of
silly foolish childhood dreams and misunderstanding about the world, the world
that that poet spoke of in a teenage dream of indefinite duration about who was
to have who was to have not once those minds were de-melted and made
hip to the tragedies of life, the close call with the mental house
that awaits us all.
In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60th
Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)-"One Fast Move Or I’m Gone: Jack Kerouac’s “Big Sur”'- A Film Review
By Book Critic Zack James
To be honest I know about On The Road Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of his generation’s search for
something, maybe the truth, maybe just kicks, stuff, important stuff has
happened or some such happening strictly second-hand. His generation’s search
looking for a name, found what he, or someone associated with him, maybe the
bandit poet Gregory Corso, king of the mean New York streets, mean, very mean
indeed in a junkie-hang-out world around Times Square when that place was up to
its neck in flea-bit hotels, all night Joe and Nemo’s and the trail of the
“fixer” man on every corner, con men coming out your ass too, called the “beat”
generation. Beat, beat of the jazzed up drum
line backing some sax player searching for the high white note, what somebody
told me, maybe my older brother Alex thy called “blowing to the China seas” out
in West Coast jazz and blues circles, dead beat, run out on money, women, life,
leaving, and this is important no forwarding address for the desolate repo man
to hang onto, dread beat, nine to five, 24/7/365 that you will get caught back
up in the spire wind up like your freaking staid, stay at home parents, beaten
down, ground down like dust puffed away just for being, hell, let’s just call
it being, beatified beat like saintly and all high holy Catholic incense and a
story goes with it about a young man caught up in a dream, like there were not
ten thousand other religions in the world to feast on- you can take your pick
of the meanings, beat time meanings. Hell, join the club they all did, the
guys, and it was mostly guys who hung out on the mean streets of New York, Chi
town, North Beach in Frisco town cadging twenty-five cents a night flea-bag
sleeps, half stirred left on corner coffees and cigarette stubs when the Bull
Durham ran out).
I was too young to have had anything but a vague passing
reference to the thing, to that “beat” thing since I was probably just pulling
out of diapers then, maybe a shade bit older but not much. I got my fill, my
brim fill later through my oldest brother Alex. Alex, and his crowd, more about
that in a minute, but even he was only washed clean by the “beat” experiment at
a very low level, mostly through reading the book (need I say the book was On The Road) and having his mandatory
two years of living on the road around the time of the Summer of Love, 1967 an
event whose 50th anniversary is being commemorated this year as
well. So even Alex and his crowd were really too young to have been washed by
the beat wave that crashed the continent toward the end of the 1950s on the
wings of Allan Ginsburg’s Howl and
Jack’s travel book of a different kind. The kind that moves generations, or I
like to think the best parts of those cohorts. These were the creation
documents the latter which would drive Alex west before he finally settled down
to his career life (and to my sorrow and anger never looked back).
Of course anytime you talk about books and poetry and then add
my brother Alex’s name into the mix that automatically brings up memories of
another name, the name of the late Peter Paul Markin. Markin, for whom Alex and
the rest of the North Adamsville corner boys, Jack, Jimmy, Si, Josh, and a few
others still alive recently had me put together a tribute book for in
connection with that Summer of Love, 1967 just mentioned. Markin was the vanguard guy, the volunteer odd-ball
unkempt mad monk seeker who got several of them off their asses and out to the
West Coast to see what there was to see. To see some stuff that Markin had been
speaking of for a number of years before (and which nobody in the crowd paid
attention to, or dismissed out of hand what they called “could give a rat’s
ass” about in the local jargon which I also inherited in those cold, hungry bleak
1950s cultural days in America) and which can be indirectly attributed to the
activities of Jack, Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, that aforementioned bandit
poet who ran wild on the mean streets among the hustlers, conmen and whores of
the major towns of the continent, William Burroughs, the Harvard-trained junkie
and a bunch of other guys who took a
very different route for our parents who were of the same generation as them but
of a very different world.
But it was above all Jack’s book, Jack’s book which had
caused a big splash in 1957, and had ripple effects into the early 1960s (and even
now certain “hip” kids acknowledge the power of attraction that book had for
their own developments, especially that living simple, fast and hard part). Made
the young, some of them anyway have to spend some time thinking through the
path of life ahead by hitting the vagrant dusty sweaty road. Maybe not
hitchhiking, maybe not going high speed high through the ocean, plains,
mountain desert night but staying unsettled for a while anyway.
Like I said above Alex was out two years and other guys,
other corner boys for whatever else you wanted to call them that was their
niche back in those days and were recognized as such in the town not always to
their benefit, from a few months to a few years. Markin started first back in
the spring of 1967 but was interrupted by his fateful induction into the Army
and service, if you can call it that, in Vietnam and then several more years
upon his return before his untimely end. With maybe this difference from
today’s young who are seeking alternative roads away from what is frankly
bourgeois society and was when Jack wrote although nobody except commies and
pinkos called it that. Alex, Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader, Jack
Callahan and the rest, Markin included, were strictly from hunger working class
kids who when they hung around Tonio Pizza Parlor were as likely to be thinking
up ways to grab money fast any way they could or of getting into some hot chick’s pants as anything else. Down at
the base of society when you don’t have enough of life’s goods or have to
struggle too much to get even that little “from hunger” takes a big toll on
your life. I can testify to that part because Alex was not the only one in the
James family to go toe to toe with the law, it was a close thing for all us
boys as it had been with Jack when all is said and done. But back then dough
and sex after all was what was what for corner boys, maybe now too although you
don’t see many guys hanging on forlorn Friday night corners anymore.
What made this tribe different, the Tonio Pizza Parlor
corner boys, was mad monk Markin. Markin called by Frankie Riley the “Scribe” from
the time he came to North Adamsville from across town in junior high school and
that stuck all through high school. The name stuck because although Markin was
as larcenous and lovesick as the rest of them he was also crazy for books and
poetry. Christ according to Alex, Markin was the guy who planned most of the
“midnight creeps” they called then. Although nobody in their right minds would
have the inept Markin actually execute the plan that was for smooth as silk Frankie
to lead. That operational sense was why Frankie was the leader then (and maybe
why he was a locally famous lawyer later who you definitely did not want to be
on the other side against him). Markin was also the guy who all the girls for
some strange reason would confide in and thus was the source of intelligence
about who was who in the social pecking order, in other words, who was
available, sexually or otherwise. That sexually much more important than otherwise.
See Markin always had about ten billion facts running around his head in case
anybody, boy or girl, asked him about anything so he was ready to do battle,
for or against take your pick.
The books and the poetry is where Jack Kerouac and On The Road come into the corner boy
life of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor life. Markin was something like an antennae
for anything that seemed like it might help create a jailbreak, help them get
out from under. Later he would be the guy who introduced some of the guys to
folk music when that was a big thing. (Alex never bought into that genre, still
doesn’t, despite Markin’s desperate pleas for him to check it out. Hated whinny
Dylan above all else) Others too like Kerouac’s friend Allen Ginsburg and his
wooly homo poem Howl from 1956 which
Markin would read sections out loud from on lowdown dough-less, girl-less
Friday nights. And drive the strictly hetero guys crazy when he insisted that
they read the poem, read what he called a new breeze was coming down the road. They
could, using that term from the times again, have given a rat’s ass about some
fucking homo faggot poem from some whacko Jewish guy who belonged in a mental
hospital. (That is a direct quote from Frankie Riley at the time via my brother
Alex’s memory bank.)
Markin flipped out when he found out that Kerouac had grown
up in Lowell, a working class town very much like North Adamsville, and that he
had broken out of the mold that had been set for him and gave the world some
grand literature and something to spark the imagination of guys down at the
base of society like his crowd with little chance of grabbing the brass ring.
So Markin force-marched the crowd to read the book, especially putting pressure
on my brother who was his closest friend then. Alex read it, read it several
times and left the dog- eared copy around which I picked up one day when I was
having one of my high school summertime blues. Read it through without stopping
almost like he wrote the final version of the thing on a damn newspaper scroll.
So it was through Markin via Alex that I got the Kerouac bug. And now on the 60th
anniversary I am passing on the bug to you.
A "YouTube" film clip for the movie trailer of "One Fast Move Or I’m Gone: Jack Kerouac’s “Big Sur”.
DVD Review
One Fast Move Or I’m Gone: Jack Kerouac’s “Big Sur”, Jack Kerouac, his “beat” friends, and some latter-day literary followers, Kerouac Films, 2008
No one who knows this space, or at least knows this space since sometime last year needs to be reminded of my admiration for the literary work of the “king of beats”, Jack Kerouac. I have reviewed most of his beautifully, if painfully, written works that illuminated the middle third of the 20th century for those of us who had hungry “be-bop” rhythm- craving ears to listen and blossoming word- starved eyes to read. On the top of the pyramid, way up on top as it turns out, of course, is the master work of beatitude, “On The Road”. That mad adventure of a Dean Moriarty/Neal Cassady-mastered-minded, now very lost hitchhike old road, fast car-driving, white-lined, two-laned road America, even at a remove, gave us a way to plod through those lonely Eastern (or Western) nights when the road was dark and we wandered to find some light, even if only a flicker from someone else’s lantern in the distant skyline. Thanks, Ti Jean.
In a very direct sense, but a bad, bad sense, as this documentary, poignantly at times, makes very clear, that vision projected out beyond those lonely, hard fought roads was Jack’s downfall. Jack’s vision of the pitfalls, pratfalls and punkishness of the modern world, as filtered through the stream-of-consciousness prism of a medieval-craving mind, crushed him beneath the weight of his new found notoriety, fame, and media and fan targetability after the too, too belated 1957 publication and positive reviews (and hurtful negative reviews, as well) of “On The Road.” Some writers might have craved the limelight generated by that notoriety; swinishly bellied-up and hogged it; cleared everyone else away from its reflected glow; asked for more, hell, demanded more; or, at least, wrapped it around themselves for the entire world to see. Novelist Norman Mailer, Jack’s near contemporary, comes readily to mind.
But not Jack. He, frankly, wrapped himself around that old favorite of an older generation of American writers, alcohol, to stop the ringing in his head that all the notoriety produced and that was fogging up his mind from creative activity. And, maybe, wrapped himself, as well, around his ever-hovering mother’s shield, which could also help explain his later literary and personal decline. But that is a separate story, and a lesser one for the subject here. The long and short of it was that Jack, San Francisco-ed, West Coasted, toasted, and roasted as “king of the beats” had to get away, away from the crowds, away from the questions, away from the acolytes. And get away not just anywhere but, like a lemming to the sea, to his Breton-rooted ocean. Well, before they became some kind of Mecca for the ill-at-ease of the world such a place in Northern California would either be Mendocino or Big Sur. Here, it comes up Big Sur courtesy of poet, bookman, and City Lights Bookstore entrepreneur, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. And what comes out of it, beyond a deeper, deeper, drinking problem (to be kind) is a secondary masterpiece of Kerouacian word play and thought, the novel/confession/diary/ cry in the wilderness, “Big Sur”.
This documentary, including a run through of the cast of usual suspects seen in other, earlier such efforts reviewed in this space; his surviving (as of 2008) old “beat” buddies and old flames (including old, best buddy and inspiration Neal Cassady’s wife, Carolyn, keeper of the Neal "flame"), new aficionados, creative personalities influenced by Jack’s work, like Tom Waits and Dar Williams, and the usual crew of “talking heads” who add “color” to such productions walk, talk, and cry their way though the creative process that lead to “Big Sur”. Some of it is over-blown, some mere trade-puffing. However, collectively, they have some very decent insights into what Jack was trying to do, trying to work through, and trying to break out by his various sojourns to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s cabin in Big Sur in an attempt to figure out his new world reality.
As a fellow aficionado I am here to say they all get part of the story right, including Lowell’s Paul Marion who has assigned himself the task of being the local “keeper” of the Kerouac flame. But, I am still left with a hole in my head about what the sodden Jack was all about in “Big Sur”, which when all is said and done, is not a masterwork on the level of “Road”, other than as an example of the maddening descend into hell. Unless great works can thrive and survive the bouts with alcohol. It is certainly left as an open question, this film commentary aficionados’ novel puffing aside, about its world view value, at least in my mind.
To give my two cents worth I do not believe that Kerouac ever got over his big man in a small pond status in youthful football-drenched Lowell and certainly never broke, despite Buddha-tranced, Desolation Angel momentarily escape, from that damn Catholic thing that drove, and inhibited, his work. I know that Catholic weight-heavy chain by heart, and his Gallic-derived version which is even worst, as well. One quick ride up the road to Lowell convinced me of that- Lowell is still that old beat mill town that Jack left long ago. But here is what you don’t realize until you get up close- there are about eight zillion Catholic churches there. Well maybe not that many but the place reeks of ritual, relics and that everlastin’ guilt. Guilt for living, guilt for not living, guilt at maybe living. Jesus, how did he get out alive, except by pure writerly inspiration. So watch this thing but just don’t get carried away with the “skinny” from the talking heads and other aficionados about “Big Sur’-go back to the roots and read the earlier Lowell-based stories, like “Maggie Cassidy”, for that.
