I nearly finished On the Road on the bus from San Luis Obispo to Salinas, but I misjudged the time or overestimated my reading speed, which is quite slow. That was nearly a week ago. I read the last four pages just now and took the refrain of the closing paragraph as this essay's title. I put off the final pages because I knew I would have to write this upon the book's completion, and that was scary for a number of reasons.
I put the book in my suitcase in January, thinking it would be meaningful to reread in the context of travel. The book belongs to Señor de los Ríos, my 12th-grade Spanish teacher, who lent it to me and my friend Jaymee in 2004 so we could translate sections of it for our final project, Sobre el Camino. Yesterday I found a piece of writing in an old notebook from 2005 about an incident in the Monterey Public Library—"'the people's university,' to Melville Dewey," I wrote, working at the John Steinbeck Library in Salinas at the time—that I facetiously referred to as a thwarted realization of "the best moment of my life." I was "enjoying the fine day on [the library's] patio translating On the Road in to Spanish."
Jaymee, who was my partner in this project, was downstairs looking at poetry. On this patio, amongst the tables and chairs—and on this day balloons—was a small kiosk outfitted with the components of a fully capable coffee bar. Talk had circulated for the last month or so that the library was going to be given a functioning café and the buzz shifted from the new Nicholas Sparks novel to this new possibility [I was a bit of a cynical snob at the time. Apologies]. It was definitely an exciting time [here I am not being at all sarcastic, I legitimately felt this was a profoundly meaningful event]. Anyways [I considered using this word as a transition was the trademark charm of my writing style. Seriously], I sat out there with my notebook, Kerouac, and a Spanish/English dictionary, and people in fancy clothes—middle-aged ladies in their best pant suits, and tweed covering the sparse arrangement of men—began to congregate at the entrance to the patio where the kiosk stood [I wrote "sat," but I am deciding now that a kiosk stands]. I realized something important was happening and, perhaps, I was to be a part of history. I knew it was true when a lady in a red business suit walked outside with a gigantic pair of scissors. The formerly inconspicuous ribbon across the front of the coffee bar suddenly revealed itself as very significant as I suddenly realized I was in the midst of a ribbon-cutting ceremony. A glass was clnked and a series of awkward speeches commenced. It struck me as rather surreal the way these stumbling introverts paused after obvious jokes and got courtesy chuckles, and someone started talking about "the dream of one day having a café on the patio" and that "today that dream is a reality," or something like that [I wasn't very committed to what I considered trumped up details]. Right then I realized, with the proper execution, I could be the first customer to buy something at the Monterey Public Library's patio café. I needed it. Slowly, I got up from my table on the periphery of the ceremony, and I sidled up to the edge of the crowd, timing the perfect swoop at the ordering counter. The ribbon cutting was prepared. The lady in the red suit picked up the [oversized (It seems a waste not refer back to the comedy of a massive stage prop in the midst of the scene)] scissors and walked up to the ribbon held up by two men. She brought the handles down together and the blades came together over the ribbon; and nothing happened; the scissors were dull. It was just for show. People clapped anyways [see!], the coffee bar was open. My place in history unveiled itself in front of me. I cooly walked into it, seeing it envelope me like rising bath water [I'm not sure of this metaphor. How can you walk into rising bath water? Maybe you could walk into one of those machines that blows money that you try to grab?] when this wretched old lady shoved her way in front of me and ordered a latte. Fucking shit [Another self-consciously colloquial attempt to thwart pretentiousness and an actual climax]. The idea of buying a coffee was suddenly quite odious [wow! "odious" seems a little over the top...]. I left the patio and went downstairs to find Jaymee. I tapped her on the shoulder and all I could do was stand there, speechless.
I also came across a piece of dialogue, unattached from anything else: "'But what I'm getting at is this. When a person knows and can't make the others understand, what does he do?'" I just googled it and it is from page 69 of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. In 2005 I failed to start a book club with that book as the first reading. Justin and I met at a coffee shop in Monterey to talk about it. Jaymee came as well, though she didn't read the book. I asked them to start calling me by a nickname from the book, Spareribs. They refused.
I never returned the book to Señor de los Ríos, and it sat on my bookshelf for nearly ten years, a testament to promises broken, before it sat in my suitcase for over two months, and then a week more in my tote bag and, alternately, my hands.
During this time the On the Road movie was slowly being unveiled to the United States. It premiered at Cannes in May as I was planning my move out of Monterey and debuted in North America at the Toronto Film Festival in September as I began what would become a sixth-month journey. It premiered in New York, December 21st, just as I was returning to California, to stay with my folks for Christmas [I just encountered a special issue of the Paris-based monthly periodical named Trois Couleurs, an issue entirely dedicated to Sur la route, "d'aprés Jack Kerouac—un homme, un livre, un film, l'odysée d'un mythe." And Kristen Stewart is in it, and Lana del Rey released "Ride"—it's not hard to convince me that my experience is in that moment a reflection of a worldwide zeitgeist. "The odyssey of a myth."
If you ask me, the kitsch of Lana del Rey is as good as that of Kerouac, because she is just writing a pop song—he is, supposedly, contributing to literature.
I once had a dream of becoming a beautiful poet, but upon an unfortunate series of events some of those dreams dashed and divided like a million stars in the night sky that I wished on over and over again, sparkling and broken. But I didn't really mind because I knew that it takes getting everything you ever wanted, and then losing it to know what true freedom is. When the people I used to know found out what I had been doing, how I'd been living, they asked me why—but there's no use in talking to people who have home.
To reiterate: this is not good literature, but it is interesting pop music, at the least. If the bohemianism of Kerouac is aesthetically able to be retold in a glitzy music video, if the logic of Rebecca Black's "Friday" can contain it, then it is not everlasting, it is kitsch, potentially interesting, important in its time, as any work is that popularizes an underground phenomenon, but kitsch. I wanted to mark every time the adjectives "American" or "mad" or the like were used in On the Road to have an objective representation of the poverty of the book's vocabulary, but I ultimately decided that would be a dull way to read a book, and unrealistic considering the transient nature of my existence as I was reading it. "I believe in the country America used to be...."]
Eight years ago, after I saw the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the library, after I graduated from high school, and before I returned to Monterey, worked at the library, and wrote about the ribbon-cutting, The Motorcycle Diaries came out. I saw the movie at the Bijou Theater in Eugene twice while on the road from Monterey to Seattle. I liked it a lot, which is why I agreed to see it a second time with someone who hadn't seen it, and was flattered by its portrayal of a young man enlisting in adventure in lieu of responsibility and thereby encountering a higher truth than what is possible by adhering to the bourgeois straight and narrow. Perhaps I would become a latin american hill-residing marxist revolutionary one day, too! I joke, but it's ludicrous to take seriously how seriously I took the world at the time. Since I have come back, instead of finishing the last four pages of On the Road, I have been watching hours of Dawson's Creek, thinking about how silly I must have acted at the ages of 18 and 19, the whole time trying to avoid the very self-righteous, self-involved teenage qualities that I probably embodied. I made myself privilege to an ironic detachment from the superficialities of life, at least those that Dawson's Creek revolves around, and I had access to this privilege and expressed it by the very thing that tied me to Ernesto Guevara, Jack Kerouac, and all the other greats who never got tied down by responsibility, dullness and fretting about superficial social drama: I was on the road, indefinitely in transit.
I swore I read my dad's copy of On the Road when I was sixteen, but I couldn't find it when I was 18 and was instead loaned a copy by my Spanish teacher in order to translate sections of it. Perhaps I ruined it, carrying it in my tote bag to 10th grade along with all of my required reading, perhaps even stuffing it in my back pocket as I hiked hills to oak groves where I lounged in the knee-high grass to read it. Who knows. I don't really remember the experience other than that I had never read anything like it before, and that I then read five more Kerouac books, that I had not realized that a counterculture preceded the Beatles, and I remember my life becoming a faux bohemian cliché afterward with stacks of books taken from my dad's upstairs bookshelves in my bedroom, Burroughs then Brautigan then Bukowski and then everybody, and formative expeditions into cigarette-smoking and pot-smoking and beer-drinking and wine-drinking and five hour visits to the coffee shop, reading and 50-cent refilling my mug until my dad picked me up and drove me home to the Pastures of Heaven where I retreated into my room, putting down D.T. Suzuki so I could pick Sartre back up, or Hemingway or Fitzgerald, because even thought they weren't Beats and had probably never been to San Francisco or even California (I know now that Fitzgerald sold out to Hollywood) they still saw beneath the facade of American life and tapped into the sad and meaningless drunken currents underneath.
I soon realized they weren't stuffy and restrained compared to Kerouac—they just actively wrote literature. In the words of Truman Capote, they didn't just type. Like everybody else who one day turns a certain age older than 16 I abandoned JK Sprawling, dismissed him as an alcoholic hack that sold out his life story as accessible, however untamed, counterculture narrative that gives suburban white society access to jazz, sex, madness, drugs, adventure, immorality, fieldworkeing, trains, hitchhiking, without having to experience it themselves.
When a person knows and can't make the others understand, what does he do?
You learn wordlessly an endless internal catalogue of lessons by traveling without a schedule or agenda. You betray these lessons with words—life is transitory...some people are great where as others are great but stuck, with repressed and unfulfilled desires, "hung up"...life is adventure, movement, change...life is not stability so success, fortune, possessions are unnatural hypocrisies—and it becomes silliness when you do. It sounds like a teenager. It becomes a cartoon version of itself. Turning to a random page, it happens to be 125 in Señor de los Ríos' 1976 Penguin edition—
Dean was having his kicks; he put on a jazz record, grabbed Marylou, held her tight, and bounced against her with the beat of the music. She bounced right back. It was a real love dance. Ian MacArthur came in with a huge gang. The New Year's weekend began and lasted three days and three nights. Great gangs got in the Hudson and swerved in the snowy New York streets from party to party. I brought Lucille and her sister to the biggest party. When Lucille saw me with Dean and Marylou her face darkened—she sensed the madness they put in me.
"I don't like it when you're with them."
"Ah, it's all right, it's just kicks. We only live once. We're having a good time."
"No it's sad and I don't like it."
The book is a constant replication of paragraphs like these, catalogues of drunken herd-like movement punctuated by arbitrary bits of dialogue. This reading, though dubiously, is aided by the random selection of this passage. "It was a real love dance," sounds like a good line of self-consciously hyper-naïve Brautigan writing, but has none of the sense of humor. If you consider how seriously its benzedrine-filled author knocked the line out you can't take it very seriously, unless you see Kerouac as aware of the compromise he has made with methamphetamine, that he is self-consciously losing himself to a delusion, self-destructively acting as a medium of his moment, adventuring and continuing the spirit of that adventure in an avant-garde performance piece which is actually more interesting than the clichéd repetitive attempt at narrative that cascades across the fabled 120 feet of taped together scroll. The text is irrelevant compared to the text that he constructs of his own life.
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