I was at my parents' house at Christmas working at a restaurant in Pacific Grove that I used to work for. My friend Dean, we'll call him, was driving a bus in the San Francisco Bay area, but was laid off for January and wanted to see a friend in Arcata before this friend—why not Old Bull Lee?—left California for Georgia, that we should drive his truck one last time up 101 through the Sonoma oaks and the Mendocino redwoods to Humboldt County and back. I agreed because I wanted to be on the road still, I wasn't ready to let the OaklandtoSt.LouistoBerlintoAmsterdamtoAndorratoSpaintoBristol
toLondontoasmuchEnglandaswaspossiblebacktoBerlintoPraguebacktoBerlinbacktoSt.LouistoSaltLakeCitytoDavisbacktoMonterey snowball end and melt with the spring. I wanted it to keep rolling. And I wanted to go north to Portland to Seattle to Whidbey Island and south to Los Angeles for the birthday of my Marylou. Why not start out on the tried and true road that starts out of San Francisco as the Golden Gate Bridge and takes you to the lost redwood-lined coasts at the end of California. I packed my suitcase full of clothes and books and brought my ukelele and tape recorder leant to me in Salt Lake City.
I started out reading John Barth's book of essays that he wrote exclusively on Fridays, as he exhaustively explains, beginning in Santa Cruz while waiting for, let's say, Carlo Marx and his buddy who we played bocce with on the front lawn of a downtown church, and another friend whose name was Yes who drove us to the shooting range where we hired four different guns and bought four boxes of ammunition and shot bullets at human silhouette shooting posters, trading magnums for lugers, wearing ear protection because it was so loud. I recorded the shooting range on the tape recorder. Afterwards the bullet shots sounded like oblivion exploded upon the tape of the cassette. I lost my camera and my sunglasses that night as the three of them discussed Ghost Face Moon, a screenplay they had been writing for a week before I got there set in the Old West. The plot hovered on the air in their words like a disembodied ayahuasca vision.
I read mostly Barth and an information pamphlet for Saint Peter and Paul Church in North Beach where I bought a postcard and a card with an angel on it for Dean and crossed myself with holy water and then tape recorded the sounds of the park before walking up Telegraph Hill to dig the Coit Tower murals and views. [Did using the word "dig" there go too far? I am not aiming to impersonate Jack Kerouac, but it seemed like a fitting usage. What am I going to say? "Partake"—"Enjoy"? I went to a songwriting club a couple days ago and an old timer kept saying "dig" for "appreciate" without any self-consciousness, why can't I do the same? I have successfully introduced "far out" into my vocabulary, which I initially had trouble with. Perhaps it is a dead usage. Maybe I can't take it seriously because I have read On the Road twice now.]
I literally had no money, ID or credit cards when I walked around San Francisco that day because I had left my wallet on a piano bench in Livermore, California, a cookie-cutter bedroom community in the far east bay, the morning after an all-night six-person Parcheesi game for my friend's birthday, we'll just call him Neal Cassady. Carlo Marx came up for the party and we went with him and his friends to a brand-new suburb park in Dublin for a game of bocce on the brand-new courts before Dean drove me back to his place in Oakland where I realized I had no wallet. My french-canadian aunt happened to be at a hotel in San Francisco and invited me to stay the night so I got fare for the BART and took it over and met her at the place just by Union Square, took a bath and read Travels With Charley (Steinbeck was also in San Francisco), and slept in the big comfy bed, waking up to the Today show. We had room-service breakfast before she left and I hit the streets with one dollar in my pocket waiting for Neal and his lady to come into town to look for work, like they said they would, with my wallet in tow. It was an interesting several hour experiment to remember most of my life when I had no money (once I bought the postcard and the card with the angel on it), ID or credit cards, and to experience vicariously the way most people live and the way people always lived, and the way Sal Paradise hit the San Francisco streets (sorry, reader, I will not say "Frisco" no matter how nice the double iamb "the Frisco streets" may be) fifty years before. But then I met Neal and his girl at the Civic Center Library, got my wallet back and bought a coffee and a snack outside immediately (I had 30 dollars in my wallet!). Then we went inside and I photocopied and they looked for work on the internet. Neal would eventually get a job operating a zamboni.
I am so easily carried away. The story of my months on the road is certainly relevant, but not really the point. Kerouac and I share more than I care to admit. I recall another notebook that I possessed my first year of college, the year after I saw The Motorcycle Diaries twice, after the book club, and then after that a trip to Mexico where I read Desolation Angels, the last Kerouac book I would read for seven years. It was blue and had detachable graph-paper pages. I recall a rambling piece written in the second person to Kerouac. I don't know where that notebook is, but I shall certainly reproduce that writing once I do find it somewhere in the boxes that occupy a couple corners of my parents garage, the garage where my desk presently rests, along with myself, and my computer. It is now three weeks since I almost finished On the Road for the second time, two weeks since I wrote most of this, and one week since I came back again and struggled to continue with this piece of writing, to narrate myself to the present.
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