On the road downward, an artist would be smart to pick up younger friends along the way…not necessarily the free spirits hitchhiking, but the ones who spend their weekends in car lots, inspecting the shiny new convertibles, knowing how good they'll look compared to the guy in his beat 50's wreck with all that mileage and all that baggage.
By 1964, Allen Ginsberg, recently lifechanged while padding around India, easily made friends with the hippies and the'd hold him high on their shoulders as they marched throughout the decade; William Burroughs, in another ten years, would make acolytes of the punks and they'd sit at his feet. Jack Kerouac did none of this. In 1964, booze-n-weed Jack despised the young acid tripping generation - the ones who'd hang an American flag on the wall as art, or worse - as a sofa cover. Jack would be damned sure to fold that American flag neatly and reverently. His former travel buddy, Neal Cassady, touched base one last time, driving the bus that helped usher in the 1960's (this is not metaphor; Neal was the one driving Ken Kesey's dayglo road trip bus, Further, as it made its way cross country on-the-road style.)
Kesey to Kerouac: your place in history is assured.
Kerouac: i know.
According to his letters, Kerouac wouldn't be a film with former friends Ginsberg and Gregory Corso because they were now "political fanatics". Jack wanted his writing to bring him back to a time and place where more conservative morals were respected. His former colleagues and their writing were a "betrayal of any truly 'beat' credo." and at their age, Jack saw them all as "frustrated hysterical provocateurs". Kerouac's back-to-basics autobiographical work did indeed go back to his childhood (Visions of Gerard - Gerard being his dead brother), and the critics were not kind to this elegy. Desolation Angels, although pieced together some years before, was still in the process of being "discovered" and would be released the following year.
During the summer of 1964, Jack went to live with his mother in once quiet St. Petersburg, FL. (Kerouac biographer Dennis McNally perpetuates the myth that the city was the "world's largest open-air mausoleum") Jack worried about his new address becoming public ("a 70-year old mother's house is not a PAD for krissakes!"), but still wrote that 1964 St. Petersburg life was all "baseball games, bars, pool games, beach parties…wild dances…" By Thanksgiving, he'd also be visiting St. Petersburg jail after urinating in the street.
Jack and his mother spent the days excelling at being functioning alcoholics, their states of mind further tested when Jack's sister died suddenly, giving Jack even more to ruminate about days rushing by, writing John Clellon Holmes about the "red-neoned funeral parlor" at the end of everyone's road. Photos of Jack from 1964 show the 42 year old looking some 15 years older. Kerouac couldn't last much longer like this - and he didn't - becoming yet another artist who drank themselves into an early grave. (His former muse, Neal Cassady, had already been a victim of the times a year and a half before Jack's final whiskey.) Was he a man out of time, unable to come to grips with a new generation who still carried dog-eared paperbacks of On the Road in their back pockets? Or had he run out of different versions of his life story in order to feel more relevant in a year of blunt hyperreal fiction like Hubert Selby Jr's Last Exit to Brooklyn?
His last years were spent with young hangers-on bilking him out of drink money and cheating at poolgames behind his back. Any one of these younger generation could have been the spark to bring him out of his post-hasbeen funk and into a newer understanding in a decade where the world was going wild. Instead, he bailed out without appointing a designated driver.
Fantastic essay
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