Every year on or around March 12th, acolytes of the Beat writer Jack Kerouac cluster at the Flamingo Sports Bar in St. Petersburg, Florida, to celebrate his birthday. Kerouac would have turned ninety-six this
week had he not died just three blocks south, at St. Anthony’s Hospital,
on October 21, 1969. The official cause was an abdominal hemorrhage,
made fatal by several decades of ferocious drinking. He was forty-seven.
Two local acolytes, Pat Barmore and Pete Gallagher, have been organizing
Jack Kerouac Night at the Flamingo for five years. Folk and jazz
musicians play short sets, while poets read from battered notebooks.
(Sometimes, in true Beat style, both things happen at once.) Patrons are
encouraged to toss back “a shot and a wash,” Kerouac’s preferred tipple.
(When I texted a friend in New York a picture of a menu board displaying
the price of the Kerouac Special—two dollars and fifty cents for a whiskey and a plastic cup
of beer—he texted back, “That should be illegal!”) The Flamingo, which
opened in 1924, is more of a pool hall than a literary salon. A sign
warns against gambling, profanity, lifting tables, throwing pool balls,
and snapping sticks. Regulars, who tend to be over forty, gather at the
bar to light each other’s cigarettes and discuss the weather. Kerouac’s
novels are displayed on a rail in a side room. A mural, of him wearing a
red plaid shirt and poking a cue ball, has been painted on the south
side of the building. I liked the place immediately.
“The ghost of Jack Kerouac is definitely here,” Barmore announced at the
start of the evening. The previous Sunday, he added, all of Kerouac’s
novels “leapt off the shelf and fell on the ground,” apropos of no
apparent stimuli. A similar event had recently occurred at Haslam’s Bookstore, a few miles away on Central Avenue.
Per local lore, Kerouac used to wander into Haslam’s and rearrange his
own books, jockeying for better and more prominent shelf placement;
supposedly, this still goes on. A
couple dozen people crowded the room. The guitarist Big Jim Mason opened
the show with a handful of original folk songs. He was wearing a black
T-shirt that promised, “It’s not a wrong note, it’s jazz.”
At a certain point in a person’s life, liking Kerouac—and liking “On the Road,” especially—becomes embarrassing. It’s not a particularly
enlightened book. While there are a handful of female characters in it,
these women are largely unrecognizable as human, and to say that Kerouac
was inelegant about matters of race is generous. The plot isn’t
particularly riveting. A disenchanted and heartbroken dude named Sal
Paradise meets Dean Moriarty, a charismatic raconteur (he was inspired
by Kerouac’s real-life friend, the poet-madman Neal Cassady) who strives
for absolute liberation, no matter the emotional cost. Paradise buys it:
“Somewhere along the line I knew there would be girls, visions,
everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.”
Together they crisscross North America, hot for adventures.
I love “On the Road,” despite knowing very well that it’s a fantastical
and likely toxic account, blind to both engines of privilege and the
sacrifices inherent to endless meandering. Any ongoing affinity for the
book is a way of signalling to the world that you are still enthralled
by juvenile and illusory notions of freedom. Yet I’m nonetheless cowed
by the rhythm and the elegance of Kerouac’s prose, how he taps into
the wild energy of adolescent wanting. I was a brooding and sullen
high-school freshman when I first read “On the Road,” still doing the
hard and complicated work of figuring out how I fit into the world. It
seems apt that the most quoted line from “On the Road” suggests we
simply give in to our longings. To do otherwise is cowardly (or, worse,
boring): “ . . . the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad
to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the
same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn,
burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders
across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and
everybody goes ‘Awww!’ ”
The book was (supposedly) written on one continuous,
hundred-and-twenty-foot scroll of typing paper—a savage and unmediated
burst. In 1959, Kerouac told the talk-show host
Steve Allen that it took him three weeks, although this, too, was later
revealed to be an ingenious bit of self-mythologizing. (It turns out
nothing shatters the glamour of genius more quickly than admitting that you
spend hours every day moving commas around, or swapping out adverbs for
different adverbs.)
“Kerouac cultivated this myth that he was this spontaneous prose man,
and that everything that he ever put down was never changed, and that’s
not true,” the Kerouac scholar Paul Marion told NPR, in 2007. “He was
really a supreme craftsman, and devoted to writing and the writing
process.” The book went through several drafts between 1951 and 1957,
when Viking Press finally published it.
Kerouac was considered childish even in his lifetime. His obituary in the Times—it was written by Joseph Lelyveld, who decades later
became the executive editor of the paper —throbs with a vague disdain.
Lelyveld refers to the Beat Generation as “a bizarre bohemian phenomenon
confined to small coteries in San Francisco and New York” and points out
that critics of Kerouac’s work “found something ludicrous in his search
for sensation and instant salvation on the byways of America.” He even
refers readers to “On the Sidewalk,” a satire by John Updike that ran in this magazine, in 1959. (The punch
line is, “But what do they mean grown up? I’m thirty-nine now?”)
Yet the way that novel is so enduring—so impervious to shifting cultural
winds—seems to indicate something about how successfully it articulates
a very American rootlessness. I don’t mean our seemingly inborn (and now
faded) frontier instincts—a hunger to keep charging at the horizon,
scouting greener pastures—but, rather, some implacable desire to be of
nowhere, and indebted to nothing. “It is the fundamental
contradictoriness of the United States of America—the illogical but
optimistic notion that you can create a union of individuals in which
every man is king,” Susan Orlean writes, in “The Orchid Thief.”
Americans tend to be obsessed with freedom and self-determination.
Notions that would seem selfish and unsatisfying to other cultures are
treasured here. Concede nothing and be beholden to no one: “Do You.”
It wasn’t until much later in my life that I recognized Kerouac’s
thrashing as gendered: the book is a hysterical elegy for threatened
male freedom, and a siege against feminized domestic routines. Staying
in one place—giving your life over to a single person or landscape—is
akin, he suggests, to spiritual death. Instead, men ditch clingy women
for the company of other men, and the freedom they allow each other. “On
the Road” might be the last great American novel about masculine
seduction.
Kerouac had just turned twenty-nine when he started writing the book in
earnest. Most covers of “On the Road” feature a grainy, black-and-white photograph of a young
Kerouac looking rakish and cavalier. Sometimes, like on the Penguin
edition, from 1994—my first copy—he’s leaning against a brick wall and
smoking.
By the time Kerouac moved to St. Petersburg, in 1966, he was a different
kind of man: chubby and discontent, living with his mother and his third
wife in an unremarkable one-story home with a screen door and an
overgrown concrete walkway. It had been his mother’s idea to move to Florida.
She thought the mild weather might be good for her health. (Kerouac was
born and raised in Lowell, Massachusetts.) Kerouac occasionally dragged
a cot into the back yard and slept there. I imagine it felt good, lying
shirtless in that thick, humid air. Florida has long been a beacon for
oddball scoundrels seeking refuge of one sort or another. The atmosphere
can return a person to some wet and primal place.
In 1969, a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times knocked on the door.
“Jack Kerouac, author, artist, cult hero, was watching Walter Cronkite
on the evening news, volume turned silent, while Handel’s Messiah blared from the record player. He was smoking Camels, drinking whiskey
from a medicine vial and chasing it with Falstaff beer in a half-quart
can,” the paper later reported. Kerouac complained a lot that day: about his hernia, and his finances.
Shortly after he died, his wife admitted that he had been drinking
heavily. “He was a very lonely man,” she said.
After a couple hours, I left the Flamingo Bar. I drove past a nail salon
called “Get Nailed” and stopped at El Cap, a hamburger restaurant that
opened in the nineteen-sixties. I picked up a cheeseburger and an order
of onion rings, and found myself driving toward Kerouac’s old house, on
Tenth Avenue. I parked my car under a streetlight, rolled all the
windows down, and arranged my food on the dashboard. While I ate, I
stared at Kerouac’s doorknobs and untended lawn. There have been
thoughtful efforts by Friends of the Jack Kerouac House, the nonprofit run by Barmore and
Gallagher, to turn the house into a museum. It’s been empty since the
nineteen-seventies. In early 2017, John Sampas, Kerouac’s brother-in-law
and closest living heir, bought out his twin sister’s half of the estate
for fifty-five thousand dollars. Sampas seemed vaguely amenable to
working with the Friends to restore the property. But less than two
months later Sampas—who was eighty-seven, and lived in Greenwich,
Connecticut—died. Now the fate of the house remains unclear. Before the
mailbox fell down, fans used to leave letters for him there.
Is this weird? I thought, dragging an onion ring through
ketchup. For whatever reason it felt good just to sit there, looking at
the house. The books we read as teen-agers—the ones that get inside us
and rearrange things—are sacred, even when they’re plainly imperfect.
Yet pilgrimages of any kind can feel melodramatic, in part because the
act itself presumes that there is real meaning to be wrought from objects and
vistas. Kerouac is buried in Lowell—when I visited his grave a couple
years back, it was covered with wine bottles and pens—but he spent his
last moments in St. Petersburg. Years earlier, he had called the city “a
good place to come die.” I want to think that maybe, in those last
moments, he was ready. “Ah, life is a gate, a way, a path to Paradise
anyway,” he wrote in “Big Sur,” from 1962. “Why not live for fun and joy
and love or some sort of girl by a fireside, why not go to your desire and laugh.”
*The original photo caption misattributed the source of the photograph.