The summer after I graduated from college, I read Jack Kerouac's On the Road and thought that Dean Moriarty was the coolest, wildest dude and that hanging out with him would be a non-stop carnival of insane adventure and mind-expanding conversation. He talked and talked and talked about all sorts of way-out ideas, took Sal Paradise (Kerouac's alter ego) to parties, listened to jazz like it was the most amazing thing on Earth and just burned burned burned.
This, I thought, is what I want to do: go on a cross-country trip that is full tilt all the way, meet new people, live on the edge, learn about new places, experience danger. You can read about how my expectations measured up to reality in my new memoir, Great/Dismal: My Four-Month Tour of Duty on the Battleship Patchouli.
As for Dean Moriarty -- known in real life as Neal Cassady -- I learned many years later that he was the kind of human firework who is fun to read about, but not for a guy like me to hang out with. He was a complicated guy who had a messed-up upbringing, sure. And he influenced Kerouac's writing style and featured not only in his books, but in the poetry of Allen Ginsberg. He was one of those characters we all meet on occasion in our lives, who seem like they walked off a movie screen because they're just so manic and funny and smart and loveable and frustrating and selfish that it's hard to believe somebody didn't create them on a written page.
But I would've tired of his shenanigans very quickly if he'd somehow been reincarnated and stuck his thumb out along the highway west from Oklahoma to New Mexico, looking for a ride that would've quickly turned into him taking the wheel and commandeering the conversation and putting my introverted ass into a tizzy. See for yourself, below.
No comments:
Post a Comment