On The 50th Anniversary Of The Passing Of The “King Of The Beats” -Ti Jean Kerouac-A Series Of Appreciations-
By Contributing Editor Allan Jackson
[Back in 2007 and then in 2017 when we commemorated the 50th and 60th anniversaries respectively of the publication of Jack Kerouac’s landmark travel book of a different kind On The Road which ignited a generation maybe two to “hit the road” I was the site manager, then called general editor, a throw-back from the times when American Left History was a hard copy publication. At those times I had been re-reading a series of Ti Jean’s books after senior writer Sam Lowell had pointed out to me that the previous years had been the 50th and 60th anniversaries respectively of fellow Jack “beat” brother Allan Ginsberg’s landmark poem (really screed) Howl which for a while took poetry into a different direction which we had neglected to commemorate (and which we did belatedly). Now Sam has again reminded that we have come to a certain commemoration date, the 50th anniversary of the death of Jack Kerouac and we are again in need of evaluation, no, re-evaluating the place of his work, his place as “king of the beats” whether than title fits or not and his place in the sun.
Of course on those prior occasions I could assign whatever I wanted to whomever I wanted since I was the person who was handing out the assignments. Now after a prolonged internal fight in which I was deposed and sent into “exile” I am back but solely as a contributing editor, not as the person handing out assignments. That task is now in the capable hands of one Greg Green whom I knew over at American Film Gazette many years ago and had brought over a couple of years ago to run the day to day operation here. Greg and I have had our ups and downs especially after I was in desperate straits when I was sent into exile and had no current source of income and had to depend “on the kindnesses of strangers.” But that is past and since I was instrumental in the previous commemorations Greg decided that I should as with a couple of other major projects that I have done since my return oversee the Kerouac death watch this year.
Needless to say, since this dark cloud anniversary is upon us I have to do a new introduction, a setting of the tone. One thing that I was not able to do when I was overseeing the previous commemorations was to write about something that has haunted me for a long time-how different Jack’s experiences were from those of my parents, from any Acre neighborhood parents despite some very strong similarities between the way he grew up and the way they did. In short they were near contemporaries having all been born and raised in the 1920s and forward. Nevertheless they could not have been more different in their lifestyles and life dreams. It would take their son, and their son’s generation to at least momentarily connect with the older man and what he brought to the table. Maybe the link between “beat” and “hippie” was tenuous, but it was there, and is there fifty years after his passing to the unsettled grave. That will be the thread that runs through this new series. Adieu, Ti Jean.
*************
Jack fifty tears, fifty years gone in some bastard grave in holy, holy, holy Edson Merrimack River ground busted asunder by holy goofs looking for timely relics, looking for that one word which would spring them into some pantheon, some parity with the king (we will not even mention that other king that animated our dreams for we now speak of parent, parent of class of ’68 dream. Funny non-Catholic ground Lowell given his deep sea dive to right his ship around the beatitudes that the class of ’68 left in the shade if you wished to know. Mere turning in her old Quebec come down to the textile mills from desolate turn of the century farms which gave to the bloody English overlords, another common sticking point against heathen English overrunning the small patch farms with enclosures and encumbered debts devotion grave, with the times out of sorts the young passing before ancient hatreds mother. Not a stranger come the end on Hard Rock Mountain and no place but some stinking trailer benny and that fucking crucifix that never helped anybody that far gone into the haze.
Not strange for assuredly lapsed Catholic cum Buddha swings devotee coming out of Desolation Mountain, Dharma bum frills and assorted other spiritual trips, (won’t even think about that black boy, and he was just a boy, who against some grandmother dreads blew the high white note out to the China Seas, via, well, via Frisco Bay drove the writing, the what, the unvarnished truth until it drove him into the ground. That and those endless whiskeys and cheap Thunderbird wines when dimes were scarce a few times down on his luck cadging wino bottles from buying for underaged kids, with his bottle the kicker and what the hell if he didn’t go it, didn’t get his some sterno junkie would dip into Salvation Army surplus and the thirst was great. Not “his” thirst but “the” thirst and don’t mix the two up buddy as he told that straggly bearded kid, some hippie bastard from Omaha clueless about the decadent night which lie ahead, the compromises too.
Strangely bisected, fuck finally my real point (another luxury of not having to be general editor with parsing and editing to make “nice” for the academic journals which thrive, which throttle on Jack’s sputum and can get down in the mud with the real critics like Artie Shaw and Bugs Malone and not worry about half-ablaze in the head, half fire in the head Patti Griffin called it once), through my own parents too who had no idea of hip, no idea of “beat,” except maybe mother in beatitude but that is a different story, a story about common roots high holy day Catholic stuff. Another common point, emerged in veiled tears, speaking of tears, to rear their ugly heads come feast days. (Wondering if her, their fairy sons would see the light, would submit to the calling that every grandmother hoped without saying leaving it to transient daughters to do their own parsing. Father no hipster born to the hills and hollows which hallowed by memory played no part in big boom beat-beat time coming out of World War II like houses on fire. No speedy cross-country by 1947 Hudson (hell no car a public transportation might as well say welfare crude bum and fuck that is all a guy like that deserved.) With big ideas of shaking things up, making merry with the always with us squares and other geometric forms. Jesus the worst part knowing that they knew not of square or any other geometric dreams. Too bad, too bad when they chance came around and the call went out looking for junkie hipsters, con men and queers hanging around public toilets on Seventh Avenue in New York City.
No Dean Moriarty, hell call a thing by its right name, no Max Fame, no Allan Ginsberg, no Kenneth Rexforth, no Hank James, or his brother William speaking in tongues trying to figure what a guy named Freud meant when he wanted to go where his mother lived, after killing cosmic fathers and brothers, no Gregory Corso, no John three names somebody a throwback to ancient Boston Brahmin bouts with legitimacy speaking of bastards, trace the genealogy back to Mayfair swells days, nothing for the bastard who is bothering one Laura Perkins who I have been sweet on for an eternity but who only has eyes for Sam Lowell about her sexy takes on serious 19th century artist who were as capable of going down into the mud, blowing some high white note out in the Japan seas for a change. Above all no Neal Cassidy, no fake Dean Moriarty to skirt the libel laws with wives and mistresses searching for vagrant unknown fathers in some dusty coal bins but a poor old good old boy and maybe in another time said Dean, Adonis Dean against Father Sheik, would have wandered out in the cowboy West night looking for drunken fathers with hip-ness but that was not the play, not at all. Father Sheik coming like a bat out of hell from those hazardous coal bins looking to break the eternal hills and hollows existence that plagued his fathers since the time the first clan were cast out of England for stealing pigs or consorting with them in any case with not unfamiliar family refrain of “leave, or the gallows,” such were the tempers of the times.
And Father Sheik, hell, Adonis Dean too, with no way out except that passport via some Nippon adventure over Pearl always Pearl nothing else needed and he off to Pacific battles and raiments. Jack to the North Seas and merchant marine bunks with odd-ball seasick sailors (and me wondering whether having looked of late at YouTube should attribute my borrowed words but the hell with it plenty of seasick sailors had nothing to do with YouTube or song lyrics). And forsaken Dean too young to know the face of battles hung up in reformatory secret vices which an earlier generation (and later ones too) would “dare not speak their names” (Catamite, Sodomite, homosexual, pug ugly, suck-head, your call.) How quaint.
Two years and two places do make a different no Bette Davis eyes in the hills and hollows but Jack-induced Merrimack adventures of boys seeking pleasures in riverside woods and hamming it up for all the world to see. If only the old man could have written out his dreams, if he could have written out anything. Jack to the library born to take his fill of whatever classics that river textile town had to offer and whiskey you’re the devil which should have given even a blinded son something to think about with dear Jack fifty years dead and the old man still trembling in his teeth. My God.
But he never made, he the old man never made New York ever as far as I could tell, knew none but obvious landmarks like tall Empire State Building or Lady Liberty. Mother Jacked on some Cape Cod Canal cutaway small steamer to the Big Apple (not Big Apple then but who knows) and Automats, evoking Laura’s Edward Hopper sad-assed dreams of a guy who couldn’t even draw smiling faces and hence the queen of 20th century angst and alienation and five cent ferry rides to Staten Island. The Village, okay for me to call it Village as I was a denizen once for Jack too might as well have been on some planet’s moon for all she knew-him too, too rich for his blood but Jack’s meat, no problem. Even if strangely Times Square hipsters, grifters, drifters and Howard Johnson hot dog eaters were mixed into the new wave, then new wave against Big Band Duke, Artie, Lionel jazz boys coming up with their sullen lipped riffs to spring a new alienated be-bop on the square world. Jack knew square, knew father square, knew mother, Mere, square in large letters of unrequited love but shook it off long enough to cross the great desert America giving Lady Liberty the boot, the un-shod sole, or maybe taking a cue from Jack book lamming it out on Bear Mountain just for the hell of it. But this old mother, not Mere mother, never knew, never had an idea of even in her big Catholic, Irish Catholic dream of meeting the boy next door and finding steady white-collar civil servant heaven. Jesus is that what she was about when the deal went down and Jack split for Ohio with two bucks and six bologna sandwiches stale well before Toledo believe me I know.
Life took a different tact though she never found that clever test-worthy boy next door (he was some greaser with a big hog of a bike which would have inflamed Dean, would have gotten his wanting habits on and maybe a run to the Coast). So she having had her fill of Coney Island dreams and Automat five cent pies took a chance on the Sheik (strange on looking at Jack photographs how sheik-like our boy was and father too like some lost tribe members) found guarding the country’s defense not far from her home but he of Pacific wars, many with manly Marines. Jack flopped the Navy but did dangerous merchant marine runs out in the North Atlantic, out to the Murmansk seas (that makes three China and Japan alongside) not honored even in Washington until much later down in front of Arlington National bravos resting places. And a not so funny twist of sagging fate brought her dish loads of kids and some undefined alienation from which she was excluded, and he too by association. They didn’t prosper far from it but they also didn’t have that run, no, those runs, to the West looking for lost fathers, looking for the Adonis of the West to shake up his love. Could two worlds be any more different and only about say forty miles apart. That not a question but maybe a quiet condemnation for some woe-begotten life of quiet desperation, her mantra for all the good it did her.
It would take a son, some son, some great girth of sons and daughters to jailbreak, to Jack their ways out of that parent, remember their parents’ contemporary, that snare set for those who didn’t get to Times Square, didn’t get to the Village but stuck it out in Hoboken, Elko, Oceanside. It would take some unsettled sense that all was not right with the world, that too many kids were stuck with Modesto hot-rod dreams, Hell’s Angels angers, Louisville thwarts, and many La Jolla searches for perfect waves to jumpstart what Jack, and not just Jack but he is fifty tears, fifty years gone. Oh, what might have been.
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 for kicks, for stuff, important stuff that
had happened down in the base of society where nobody in authority was looking 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. (Yes, I know that the actual term “beat” was first
used by Kerouac writer friend John Clemmon Holmes in an article in some arcane
journal but the “feel” had to have come from a less academic source so I will
crown the bandit prince Corso as genesis)
Beat, beat of the jazzed up drum line backing some sax
player searching for the high white note, what somebody told me, maybe my oldest
brother Alex who was washed clean in the Summer of Love, 1967 but must have
known the edges of Jack’s time since he was in high school when real beat
exploded on the scene in Jack-filled 1957, they called “blowing to the China
seas” out in West Coast jazz and blues circles, that high white note he heard
achieved one skinny night by famed sax man Sonny Johns, 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 Jack’s kid
stuff 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 poet princely mean streets of New York, Chi town, Mecca beckoning North
Beach in Frisco town cadging twenty-five cents a night flea-bag sleeps (and the
fleas were real no time for metaphor down in the bowels where the cowboy
junkies drowse in endless sleeps, raggedy winos toothless suck dry the dregs
and hipster con men prey on whoever floats down), half stirred left on corner diners’
coffees and groundling 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
and so very appropriate to mention since there were a million threads, fibers,
connections between “beat” and “hippie” despite dour grandpa Jack’s attempts to
trash those connection when the acolytes and bandit hangers-on came calling looking for the “word.” 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 (not found on the AAA, Traveler’s Aid, Youth Hostel
brochure circuit if you please although Jack and the crowd, my brother and his
crowd later would use such services when up against it in let’s say a place
like Winnemucca in the Nevadas or Neola in the heartlands).
Literary stuff for sure but the kind of stuff that moves
generations, or I like to think the best parts of those cohorts. These were the
creation documents the latter of which would drive Alex west before he finally
settled down to his career life as a high-road lawyer (and to my sorrow and
anger never looked back which has caused more riffs and bad words than I want
to yell about here).
Of course anytime you talk about books and poetry and then
add my brother’s Alex 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, Frankie, Jack, Jimmy, Si,
Josh (he a separate story from up in Olde Saco, Maine and so only an honorary
corner boy after hitching up with the Scribe out on a Russian Hill dope-filled
park), Bart, and a few others still alive recently had me put together a
tribute book for in connection with that Summer of Love, 1967, their birthright
event, just mentioned. Markin was the
vanguard guy, the volunteer odd-ball unkempt mad monk seeker, what did Jack
call his generation’s such, oh yeah, holy goofs, 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 1967 (and which nobody in the crowd paid any 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 travel adventure book
which had caused a big splash in 1957(after an incredible publishing travail
since the story line actually related to events in the late 1940s and which
would cause Jack no end of trauma when the kids showed up at his door looking
to hitch a ride on the motherlode star, 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, like I say I think the best
part, 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 on the road 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 and semi-tragic end down some dusty
Jack-strewn road in Mexico cocaine deal blues. 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 for fear of being tarred with those brushes. 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 any way they could 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 bit “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 back then when
the coppers were just waiting for corner boy capers to explode nay Friday or
Saturday night, 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 “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 now also like Alex a high-road lawyer 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
Bob 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 Jack wrote the final version of the thing on a damn newspaper
scroll in about three weeks. So it was through the Scribe via Alex that I got
the Kerouac bug. And now on the 60th anniversary I am passing on the
bug to you.
The Son Of
Dharma-With Jack Kerouac’s On The Road
In Mind
From The Pen Of Sam
Lowell
Jack Callahan thought
he was going crazy when he thought about the matter after he had awoken from
his fitful dream. Thought he was crazy for “channeling” Jack Kerouac, or rather
more specifically channeling Jack’s definitive book On The Road that had much to do with his wanderings, got him going
in search of what his late corner boy, “the Scribe, Peter Paul Markin called
the search for the Great Blue-Pink American West Night (Markin always
capitalized that concept so since I too was influenced by the mad man’s dreams
I will do so here). That “crazy” stemmed from the fact that those wanderings,
that search had begun, and finished, about fifty years before when he left the
road for the hand of Chrissie McNamara and a settled life.
But maybe it is best
to go back to the beginning, not the fifty years beginning, Jesus, who could
remember, maybe want to remember incidents that far back, but to the night
several weeks before when Jack, Frankie Riley, who had been our acknowledged
corner boy leader out in front of Jack Slack’s bowling alleys from about senior
year in high school in 1966 and a couple of years after when for a whole
assortment of reasons, including the wanderings, the crowd went its separate
ways, Jimmy Jenkins, Allan Johnson, Bart Webber, Josh Breslin, Rich Rizzo, Sam
Eaton and me got together for one of our periodic “remember back in the day”
get-togethers over at “Jack’s” in Cambridge a few block from where Jimmy lives.
We have probably done this a dozen time over the past decade or so, most
recently as most of us have more time to spent at a hard night’s drinking
(drinking high-shelf liquors as we always laugh about since in the old days we
collectively could not have afforded one high-shelf drink and were reduced to
drinking rotgut wines and seemingly just mashed whiskeys).
The night I am
talking about though as the liquor began to take effect someone, Bart I think,
mentioned that he had read in the Globe up
in Lowell they were exhibiting the teletype roll of paper that Jack Kerouac had
typed the most definitive draft of his classic youth nation travel book, On The Road in honor of the fiftieth
anniversary of its publication in 1957. That information stopped everybody in
the group’s tracks for a moment. Partly because everybody at the table, except
Rich Rizzo, had taken some version of Kerouac’s book to heart and did as
thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of certified members of the generation
of ’68 did and went wandering in that good 1960s night. But most of all because
etched in everybody’s memory were thoughts of the mad monk monster bastard
saint who turned us all on to the book, and to the wanderings, the late Peter
Paul Markin.
Yeah, we still moan
for that sainted bastard all these years later whenever something from our
youths come up, it might be an anniversary, it might be all too often the
passing of some iconic figure from those times, or it might be passing some
place that was associated with our crowd, and with Markin. See Markin was
something like a “prophet” to us, not the old time biblical long-beard and
ranting guys although maybe he did think he was in that line of work, but as
the herald of what he called “a fresh breeze coming across the land” early in
the 1960s. Something of a nomadic “hippie” slightly before his time (including
wearing his hair-pre moppet Beatles too long for working class North Adamsville
tastes, especially his mother’s, who insisted on boys’ regulars and so another
round was fought out to something like a stand-still then in the Markin
household saga). The time of Markin’s “prophesies” was however a time when we
could have given a rat’s ass about some new wave forming in Markin’s mind (and
that “rat’s ass” was the term of art we used on such occasions). We would
change our collective tunes later in the decade but then, and on Markin’s more
sober days he would be clamoring over the same things, all we cared about was
girls (or rather “getting into their pants”), getting dough for dates and
walking around money (and planning small larcenies to obtain the filthy lucre),
and getting a “boss” car, like a ’57 Chevy or at least a friend that had one in
order to “do the do” with said girls and spend some dough at places like
drive-in theaters and drive-in restaurants (mandatory if you wanted to get past
square one with girls in those days).
Markin was whistling
in the dark for a long time, past high school and maybe a couple of years
after. He wore us down though pushing us to go up to Harvard Square in
Cambridge to see guys with long hair and faded clothes and girls with long hair
which looked like they had used an iron to iron it out sing, read poetry, and
just hang-out. Hang out waiting for that same “fresh breeze” that Markin spent
many a girl-less, dough-less, car-less Friday or Saturday night serenading the
heathens about. I don’t know how many times he dragged me, and usually Bart
Webber in his trail on the late night subway to hear some latest thing in the
early 1960s folk minute which I could barely stand then, and which I still
grind my teeth over when I hear some associates going on and on about guys like
Bob Dylan, Tom Rush and Dave Von Ronk and gals like Joan Baez, the one I heard
later started the whole iron your long hair craze among seemingly rationale
girls. Of course I did tolerate the music better once a couple of Cambridge
girls asked me if I liked folk music one time in a coffeehouse and I said of
course I did and took Markin aside to give me some names to throw at them. One
girl, Lorna, I actually dated off and on for several months.
But enough of me and
my youthful antics, and enough too of Markin and his wiggy ideas because this
screed is about Jack Kerouac, about the effect of his major book, and why Jack
Callahan of all people who among those of us corner boys from Jack Slack’s who
followed Markin on the roads west left it the earliest. Left to go back to
Chrissie, and eventually a car dealership, Toyota, that had him Mr. Toyota
around Eastern Massachusetts (and of course Chrissie as Mrs. Toyota). In a lot
of ways Markin was only the messenger, the prodder, because when he eventually
convinced us all to read the damn book at different points when we were all,
all in our own ways getting wrapped up in the 1960s counter-cultural movement
(and some of us the alternative political part too) we were in thrall to what
adventures Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty were up to. That is why I think Jack
had his dreams after the all-night discussions we had. Of course Markin came in
for his fair share of comment, good and bad. But what we talked about mostly
was how improbable on the face of it a poor working-class kid from the textile
mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, from a staunch Roman Catholic
French-Canadian heritage of those who came south to “see if the streets of
America really were paved with gold” would seem an unlikely person to be
involved in a movement that in many ways was the opposite of what his
generation, the parents of our generation of ’68 to put the matter in
perspective, born in the 1920s, coming of age in the Great Depression and
slogging through World War II was searching for in the post-World War II
“golden age of America.” Add in that he
also was a “jock” (no slur intended as we spent more than our fair share of
time talking about sports on those girl-less, dough-less, car-less weekend
nights, including Markin who had this complicated way that he figured out the
top ten college football teams since they didn’t a play-off system to figure it
out. Of course he was like the rest of us a Notre Dame “subway” fan), a guy who
played hooky to go read books and who hung out with a bunch of corner boys just
like us would be-bop part of his own generation and influence our generation
enough to get some of us on the roads too. Go figure.
So we, even Markin when he was in high flower, did not “invent” the era whole, especially in the cultural, personal ethos part, the part about skipping for a while anyway the nine to five work routine, the white house and picket fence family routine, the hold your breath nose to the grindstone routine and discovering the lure of the road and of discovering ourselves, and of the limits of our capacity to wonder. No question that elements of the generation before us, Jack’s, the sullen West Coast hot-rodders, the perfect wave surfers, the teen-alienated rebel James Dean and wild one Marlon Brando we saw on Saturday afternoon matinee Strand Theater movie screens and above all his “beats” helped push the can down the road, especially the “beats” who along with Jack wrote to the high heavens about what they did, how they did it and what the hell it was they were running from. Yeah, gave us a road map to seek that “newer world” Markin got some of us wrapped up in later in the decade and the early part of the next.
Now the truth of the matter is that most generation of ‘68ers, us, only caught the tail-end of the “beat” scene, the end where mainstream culture and commerce made it into just another “bummer” like they have done with any movement that threatened to get out of hand. So most of us who were affected by the be-bop sound and feel of the “beats” got what we knew from reading about them. And above all, above even Allen Ginsberg’s seminal poem, Howl which was a clarion call for rebellion, was Jack Kerouac who thrilled even those who did not go out in the search the great blue-pink American West night.
Here the odd thing,
Kerouac except for that short burst in the late 1940s and a couple of vagrant
road trips in the 1950s before fame struck him down was almost the antithesis
of what we of the generation of ’68 were striving to accomplish. As is fairly
well known, or was by those who lived through the 1960s, he would eventually
disown his “step-children.” Be that as it may his role, earned or not, wanted
or not, as media-anointed “king of the beats” was decisive.
But enough of the
quasi-literary treatment that I have drifted into when I really wanted to tell
you about what Bart Webber told me about his dream. He dreamed that he, after
about sixty-five kind of hell with his mother who wanted him to stay home and
start that printing business that he had dreamed of since about third grade
when he read about how his hero Benjamin Frankin had started in the business,
get married to Betsy Binstock, buy a white picket fence house (a step up from
the triple decker tenement where he grew up) have children, really
grandchildren and have a happy if stilted life. But his mother advise fell off
him like a dripping rain, hell, after-all he was caught in that 1960s moment
when everything kind of got off-center and so he under the constant prodding of
Markin decided to hit the road. Of course the Kerouac part came in from reading
the book after about seven million drum-fire assaults by Markin pressing him to
read the thing.
So there he was by
himself. Markin and I were already in San Francisco so that was the story he
gave his mother for going and also did not tell her that he was going to hitchhike to save money and hell just to
do it. It sounded easy in the book. So he went south little to hit Route 6 (a
more easterly part of that road in upstate New York which Sal unsuccessfully
started his trip on. There he met a young guy, kind of short, black hair, built
like a football player who called himself Ti Jean, claimed he was French-
Canadian and hailed from Nashua up in New Hampshire but had been living in
Barnstable for the summer and was now heading west to see what that summer of
love was all about.
Bart was ecstatic to
have somebody to kind of show him the ropes, what to do and don’t do on the
road to keep moving along. So they travelled together for a while, a long while
first hitting New York City where Ti Jean knew a bunch of older guys, gypsy
poets, sullen hipsters, con men, drifters and grifters, guys who looked like
they had just come out some “beat” movie. Guys who knew what was what about
Times Square, about dope, about saying adieu to the American dream of their
parents to be free to do as they pleased. Good guys though who taught him a few
things about the road since they said they had been on that road since the
1940s.
Ti Jean whose did not
look that old said he was there with them, had blown out of Brockton after
graduating high school where he had been an outstanding sprinter who could have
had a scholarship if his grades had been better. Had gone to prep school in
Providence to up his marks, had then been given a track scholarship to Brown,
kind of blew that off when Providence seemed too provincial to him, had fled to
New York one fine day where he sailed out for a while in the merchant marines
to do his bit for the war effort. Hanging around New York in between sailings
he met guys who were serious about reading, serious about talking about what
they read, and serious about not being caught in anything but what pleased them
for the moment. Some of this was self-taught, some picked up from the hipsters
and hustlers.
After the war was
over, still off-center about what to do about this writing bug that kept
gnawing at him despite everybody, his minute wife, his love mother, his carping
father telling him to get a profession writing wasn’t where any dough was, any
dough for him he met this guy, a hard knocks guys who was something like a
plebeian philosopher king, Ned Connelly, who was crazy to fix up cars and drive
them, drive them anyway. Which was great since Ti Jean didn’t have a license,
didn’t know step one about how to shift gears and hated driving although he
loved riding shot-gun getting all blasted on the dope in the glove compartment
and the be-bop jazz on the radio. So they tagged along together for a couple of
years, zigged and zagged across the continent, hell, went to Mexico too to get
that primo dope that he/they craved, got drunk as skunks more times than you
could shake a stick, got laid more times than you would think by girls who you
would not suspect were horny but were, worked a few short jobs picking produce
in the California fields, stole when there was no work, pimped a couple of
girls for a while to get a stake and had a hell of time while the “squares”
were doing whatever squares do. And then he wrote some book about it, a book
that was never published because there were too many squares who could not
relate to what he and Ned were about. He was hoping that the kids he saw on the
road, kids like Bart would keep the thing moving along as he left Bart at the
entrance to the Golden Gate Bridge on their last ride together.
Then
Bart woke up, woke up to the fact that he stayed on the road too short a time
now looking back on it. That guy Ti Jean had it right though, live fast, drink
hard and let the rest of it take care of itself. Thanks Markin. 
