“I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”

--Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

Big Sur was Kerouac's autobiography of “getting tired of it all” and turning again into a drunk. He had run into fame and some fortune with On The Road and found the success annoying and intrusive. So, off to a small shack hidden in the woods on the coastline of California he went to restore himself. Nature and Buddhism weren't enough as he returned to the bottle, and hard too.

I've read On The Road by Kerouac a thousand years ago and I thought, “Ah, so what.” I thought The Dharma Bums or Desolation Angels were better. In honesty, it was probably because I could grasp them with the life experience I had gained at that point. As for On The Road, I've never had the balls to throw everything away and just take off on my own, spinning a bottle and taking the direction it pointed to once it stopped. There's no guarantee of happiness down that route. There are plenty of potholes if you don't know what you're doing. Learning curves for me have always been rocky at first. Sometimes so I found it “not worth it” to pursue whatever goal I was aiming at because the payoff was quickly losing against the costs I was incurring.

A teacher in the fifth grade once told me: “The experience of dealing with adversity will help you grow!”

I retorted, “Yeah, but that isn't my goal, I wanted to gain the thing I was aiming for.”

At ten I could understand life's “profit/loss” statement. I was also far too practical to spin any loss into some higher, nobler plain, though it would've eased the sting.

Once, on a lark, my brother, w/o telling me the details, up and shot off for Eastham Cape Cod to see an old friend and wanted me to come along. I went. It had been years since I was that far out on the Cape and thought it would be a nice diversion. I never asked what his plan was in order to get there or where we'd stay. His idea, his itinerary.

Things got off to a bad start when he was driving west on Rt 44, heading to Connecticut. I had him turn around and we wormed our through Providence to pick up 195 east. We brought no extra clothing or food, just the dollars in our wallet. I was told by him we'd be welcomed by his friend and we could crash the night there. On our way there, he began telling me his new wife was a control freak. Her new husband had to be trained to give up his previous lifestyle of being an adolescent at 33. No more keg parties, no more traveling from state to state finding crap jobs. It was time to grow up.

We arrived late in the afternoon. I met his wife who eyed us with some trepidation. My brother stood there with a bottle of Absolut vodka in his hand and I am sure she appraised we two as bad influences. She corralled us to the backyard where we couldn't break any furniture, I swear that was the reason. As the night wore on on that backyard porch, we became buzzed but not drunk and she gently reminded her new husband that they had to visit her relatives down at Chatham the next morning. Time to end the party.

“So, where are you guys staying? The husband asks.

Hearing this, I'm getting worried. I thought we had his place.

“We can't stay here? We'll sleep on your living room floor. We'll be out of here by sunup.” My brother says.

The two then go outside for a private talk. Apparently he wasn't going to buck his wife's authority in any fashion and suggested we find a camping ground instead.

“Great...more impromptu changes.” I think

We find a camping ground at 11pm at night, totally full up. We manage to convince the owner to let us park there, for the same fee as we would have if we did have tents and such.

I never did like sleeping in cars. The next morning my neck is bent in such a strange position that it takes a good two hours to loosen it up before I can twist it comfortably. Not only that, the morning summer sun turns the inside of a car into an oven by 6:30 AM, so I can't really sleep in whatsoever.

We leave, find a Quickie Mart so I can grab a paper on the way back. I ask my brother if we have enough gas to get home. “Yeah, some” he says.

“Get some gas NOW” I tell him. I don't want any more surprises. I didn't want to be stuck on Rt6, further complicating our efforts to return to base.

On the way back, we further talk of his friend's new life. I supposed that a Mom styled wife would straighten him out. I also mentioned that the next trip we take, let's not “wing it.”

I'm not good material for being “On The Road” at all. You can romanticize it all you want but the realities you can't glamorize.

*****

Well, that wasn't the story I wanted to tell. The first quote on the top of the page was to lead you into a conversation I had with a young woman and finding “happiness.” I sort of let her down somewhat. To her mind, she thought older people knew a few answers. We do, but the question she raised was the wrong one to ask. Her question was, “How can I be happy?” The last word she left out was”...forever?” It was then when I shot  “forever” down that ruined her usual bright face for a few moments.

*****

This I found after finding out Kerouac had a daughter and never owned up to.  Jan Kerouac, strode in her Dad's footsteps as a wanderer, druggie, whore and whathaveyou. She died of kidney failure at 44.

"I am described as " Bruce from Oklahoma” in Jan’s second book, Trainsong. Jan and I spent a year together in 1976-77. I knew it then as I certainly know it now, Jan was lost.  She never had a chance.  Joan Haverty, Jan's mother, was a neurotic flake posing as a hipster moll, dreadful and entirely neglectful mother. Kerouac may have seperated himself from Joan because of her taste for the bizarre and outlandish.  After her alienation from Kerouac, Joan took up with a black cook who worked aboard merchant ships.This man’s name was Harry Pease ( sp. ? ).  I had met Joan at her hippy abode in a small town in Central Washington, living with her son David, Jan’s half-brother, the son of  Harry Pease.

Jan acted tough and worldly on the outside, but on the inside she was a little girl who wanted her Daddy to love her and he would not.  She wanted her mother to protect her but she was not protected.

What is a man’s life worth when, though he is a celebrated author, he fails dreadfully at the only chance he had in his life to do something noble and dutiful and truly worthwhile.

Jack Kerouac was a gob of spit in a sea of pus.

Michael R. Hagberg Hester