...99 years old today.
Although Kerouac (the author of Satori in Paris) was savvy to the concept of awakening (the opposite of woke), he became an abrasive, cynical alcoholic—and a prisoner of his Catholic upbringing.
But Kerouac remains a literary hero: the beat writer who
brought the road alive with spontaneous prose largely influenced by
letters from Neal Cassidy, whom he
immortalized as Dean Moriarty in...
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| First Edition |
Jack Kerouac Alley, North Beach, San Francisco.
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| Alfred's steakhouse, SF |
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| Kerouac's SF house |
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| Final resting place, Lowell, MA |
Onward we roll across the border into Massachusetts, to Lowell, the birthplace of Jack Kerouac whose 1957 book On the Road was my early inspiration. I had wandered Larimer Street in Denver five years earlier with Van Stein looking for Jack’s ghost. A week after that, the artist and I had rolled to San Francisco’s North Beach to visit City Lights Bookstore where Kerouac and the beats congregated and Vesuvio where they drank.
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| Van Stein: Vesuvio |
And now here I am in Jack’s hometown, Lowell
(“a Lowell point,” wits Huckleberry Howard, glumly gawking at grim city streets),
a blue-collar town known these days for boarded-up diners, tattoo parlors and
addiction problems.
Lowell is also where Kerouac’s bones
eternally rest, in Edson Cemetery. His simple
gravestone—on Lincoln, between Seventh and Eighth—is littered with items left
by pilgrims like me: A Jack Daniel’s
miniature, a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon, a shot glass emblazoned with Jesus, a
lot of pens. I leave a wooden nickel
good for a free beer at the bar I once owned and now a ghost like himself.
Nearby, a more recent memorial wall is
inscribed, “The Road is Life.”
We all, in life, are on a journey, on the road.
And it’s definitely the journey that counts because the destination
is the same for everyone.
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| "My Brother's Bar" (oldest in Denver), Kerouac's hangout, then (and still). |
