Well it would be an act of engagement, uh, with the book in a way that reading is actually very passive. You know I learned... I was once at Princeton lecturing, and uh, creative writing students were studying with one of America's best known novelists and they were complaining because of her lack of imagination. That a creative writing assignment that she had given them, an assignment to write in the style of Jack Kerouac. Now that's quite impossible to do, uh, you know, 60 years later, you know, in an electric age, and they went home the night before and they struggled to understand the assignment and tried to dash off something that seemed like Kerouac. And I thought to myself, well wouldn't it be better if they simply retyped a good chunk of On the Road. Wouldn't they have learned much more about the style of Kerouac than trying to be original, and my mind goes to the painters at the Metropolitan of Art who set up their easel in front of the Rembrandt in order to learn how to paint. Why can't writers do that as well? Somehow we've got to always be original. --Kenneth Goldsmith
Getting Inside Jack
Friday, December 27, 2013
ON THE ROAD
I first met Neal not long after my father died…I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about except that it really had something to do with my father’s death and my awful feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Neal there really began for me that part of my life that you could call my life on the road. Prior to that I’d always dreamed of going west, seeing the country, always vaguely planning and never specifically taking off and so on. Neal is the perfect guy for the road because he actually was born on the road, when his parents were passing through Salt Lake City in 1926, in a jalopy, on their way to Los Angeles. First reports of Neal came to me through Hal Chase, who’d shown me a few letters from him written in a Colorado reform school. I was tremendously interested in these letters because they so naively and sweetly asked for Hal to teach him all about Nietzsche and all the wonderful intellectual things that Hal was so justly famous for. At one point Allen Ginsberg and I talked about these letters and wondered if we would ever meet the strange Neal Cassady. This is all far back, when Neal was not the way he is today, when he was a young jailkid shrouded in mystery. Then news came that Neal was out of reform school and was coming to New York for the first time; also there was talk that he had just married a 16 year old girl called Louanne. One day that I was hanging around the Columbia campus and Hal and Ed White told me Neal had just arrived and was living in a guy called Bob Malkin’s coldwater pad in East Harlem, the Spanish Harlem. Neal had arrived the night before, the first time in NY, with his beautiful little sharp chick Louanne; they got off the greyhound bus at 50th St. and cut around the corner looking for a place to eat and went right in Hector’s, and since then Hector’s cafeteria has always been a big symbol of NY for Neal. They spent money on beautiful big glazed cakes and creampuffs. All this time Neal was telling Louanne things like this, “Now darling here we are in NY and although I haven’t quite told you everything that I was thinking about when we crossed Missouri and especially at the point when we passed the Bonneville reformatory which reminded me of my jail problem it is absolutely necessary now to postpone all
I first met Neal not long after my father died…I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about except that it really had something to do with my father’s death and my awful feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Neal there really began for me that part of my life that you could call my life on the road. Prior to that I’d always dreamed of going west, seeing the country, always vaguely planning and never specifically taking off and so on. Neal is the perfect guy for the road because he actually was born on the road, when his parents were passing through Salt Lake City in 1926, in a jalopy, on their way to Los Angeles. First reports of Neal came to me through Hal Chase, who’d shown me a few letters from him written in a Colorado reform school. I was tremendously interested in these letters because they so naively and sweetly asked for Hal to teach him all about Nietzsche and all the wonderful intellectual things that Hal was so justly famous for. At one point Allen Ginsberg and I talked about these letters and wondered if we would ever meet the strange Neal Cassady. This is all far back, when Neal was not the way he is today, when he was a young jailkid shrouded in mystery. Then news came that Neal was out of reform school and was coming to New York for the first time; also there was talk that he had just married a 16 year old girl called Louanne. One day that I was hanging around the Columbia campus and Hal and Ed White told me Neal had just arrived and was living in a guy called Bob Malkin’s coldwater pad in East Harlem, the Spanish Harlem. Neal had arrived the night before, the first time in NY, with his beautiful little sharp chick Louanne; they got off the greyhound bus at 50th St. and cut around the corner looking for a place to eat and went right in Hector’s, and since then Hector’s cafeteria has always been a big symbol of NY for Neal. They spent money on beautiful big glazed cakes and creampuffs. All this time Neal was telling Louanne things like this, “Now darling here we are in NY and although I haven’t quite told you everything that I was thinking about when we crossed Missouri and especially at the point when we passed the Bonneville reformatory which reminded me of my jail problem it is absolutely necessary now to postpone all
those leftover things concerning our personal lovethings and at once
begin thinking of specific worklife plans…” and so on in the way that he
had in his early days. I went to the coldwater flat with the boys and
Neal came to the door in his shorts. Louanne was jumping off quickly
from the bed; apparently he was fucking with her. He always was doing
so. The other guy who owned the place, Bob Malkin, was there but Neal had
apparently dispatched him to the kitchen, probably to make coffee while
he proceeded with his loveproblems…for to him sex was the one and only
holy and important thing in life, although he had to sweat and curse to
make a living, and so on. My first impression of Neal was of a young
Gene Autry---trim, thin-hipped, blue eyes, with a real Oklahoma accent.
In fact, he’d just been working on a ranch, Ed Uhl’s in Sterling Colorado
before marrying L. and coming East. Louanne was a pretty, sweet little
thing, but awfully dumb and capable of doing horrible things, as she
proved a while later. I only mention the first meeting of Neal because
of what he did. That night we all drank beer and I got drunk and
blah-blahed somewhat, slept on the other couch, and in the morning,
while we sat around dumbly smoking butts from ashtrays in the gray light
of a gloomy day Neal got up nervously, paced around thinking, and
decided the thing to do was have Louanne making breakfast and sweeping
the floor. Then I went away. That was all I knew of Neal at the outset.
During the following week however he confided in Hal Chase that he
absolutely had to learn how to write from him; Hal said I was a writer
and he should come to me for advice. Meanwhile Neal had gotten a job in a
parking lot, had a fight with Louanne in their Hoboken apartment God
knows why they went there and she was so mad and so vindictive down deep
that she reported him to the police, some false trumped up hysterical
crazy charge, and Neal had to lam from Hoboken. So he had no place to
live. Neal came right out to Ozone Park where I was living with my
mother, and one night while I was working on my book or my painting or
whatever you want to call it there was a knock on the door and there was
Neal, bowing, shuffling obsequiously in the dark of the hall, and
saying “Hel-lo, you
remember me, Neal Cassady? I’ve come to ask you to show me how to
write.” And where’s Louanne?” I asked, and Neal said she’d apparently
whored a few dollars together or something of that nature and gone back
to Denver… “Whore!” So we went out to have a few beers because we
couldn’t talk like we wanted to in front of my mother, who sat in the
livingroom reading her paper. She took one look at Neal and decided from
the very beginning that he was a madman. She never dreamed she too’d be
driving across the mad American night with him more than once. In the
bar I told Neal, “For krissakes man I know very very well you didn’t
come to me only to want become a writer and after all what do I really
know it except you’ve got to stick to it with the energy of a benny
addict,” and he said, “Yes of course, I know exactly what you mean and
in fact those problems have occurred to me but the thing that I want is
the realization of those factors that should one depend on Schopenhauer’s
dichotomy for any inwardly realized…” and so on and on in that way,
things I understood not a bit and he himself didn’t, and what I mean is
to say, in those days he really didn’t know what he was talking about;
that is to say, he was a young jailkid all hung up on the wonderful
possibilities of becoming a real intellectual and he liked to talk in
the tone and using the words but in a jumbled way that he had heard
“real intellectuals” talk although mind you he wasn’t so naïve as that
in all other things, and it took him just a few months with Leon
Levinsky to become completely in there with all the terms and the jargon
and the style of intellectuality. Nonetheless I loved him for his
madness and we got drunk together in the Linden bar behind my house and I
agreed that he could stay at my house till he found a job and we
furthermore agreed to go out West sometime. That was the winter of 1947.
Shortly after meeting Neal I began writing or painting my huge Town and
City, and I was about four chapters on when one night, when Neal ate
supper at my house, and he already had a new parkinglot job in New York,
the Hotel New Yorker lot on 34th St., he leaned over my shoulder as I typed
rapidly away and said “Come on man, those girls won’t wait, make it
fast,” and I said “Hold on just a
minute, I’ll be right with you soon as I finish this chapter,” and I did
and it was one of the best chapters in the whole book. Then I dressed
and off we flew to NY to meet some girls. As you know to go from Ozone
Park to New York takes an hour by elevated and subway, and as we rode in
the El over the rooftops of Brooklyn we leaned on each other with
fingers waving and yelled and talked excitedly and I was beginning to
get the bug like Neal. In all, what Neal was, simply, was tremendously
excited with life, and though he was a con-man he was only conning
because he wanted so much to live and also to get involved with people
that would otherwise pay no attention to him. He was conning me,
so-called, and I knew it, and he knew I knew (this has been the basis of
our relation) but I didn’t care and we got along fine. I began to learn
from him as much as he probably learned from me. As far as my work was
concerned he said, “Go ahead, everything you do is great.” We went to
New York, I forget what the situation was, two girls---there were no
girls there; they were supposed to meet him or some such thing and they
weren’t there. We went to his parkinglot where he had a few things to
do---change his clothes in the shack in back and spruce up a bit in
front of a cracked shack mirror and so on, and then we took off. And
that was the night Neal met Leon Levinsky. A tremendous thing happened
when Neal met Leon Levinsky…I mean of course Allen Ginsberg. Two keen
minds that they are they took to each other at the drop of a hat. Two
piercing eyes glanced into two piercing eyes…the holy con-man and the
great sorrowful poetic con-man that is Allen Ginsberg. From that moment
on I saw very little of Neal and I was a little sorry too…Their energies
met head-on. I was a lout compared; I couldn’t keep up with them. The
whole mad swirl of everything that was to come then began which would
mix up all my friends and all I had left of my family in a big dust
cloud over the American night---they talked of Burroughs, Hunkey, Vicki,
…Burroughs in Texas, Hunkey on Riker’s Island, Vicki hung up with
Norman Schnall at the time…and Neal told Allen of people in the West
like Jim Holmes the hunchbacked poolhall rotation shark and cardplayer
and queer saint…he told him
of Bill Tomson, Al Hinkle, his boyhood buddies, his street buddies…they
rushed down the street together digging everything in the early way they
had which has later now become so much sadder and perceptive... but then
they danced down the street like dingledodies and I shambled after as
usual as I’ve been doing all my life after people that interest me,
because the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who
are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time,
the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing.. but burn, burn,
burn like roman candles across the night. Allen was queer in those days,
experimenting with himself to the hilt, and Neal saw that, and a former
boyhood hustler himself in the Denver night, and wanting dearly to
learn how to write poetry like Allen, the first thing you know he was
attacking Allen with a great amorous soul such as only the common can
have. I was in the same room, I heard them across the darkness and I
mused and said to myself “Hmm, now something’s started, but I don’t want
anything to do with it.” So I didn’t see them for about two weeks
during which time they cemented their relationship to mad proportions.
Then came the great time of traveling, Spring, and everybody in the
scattered gang was getting ready to take one trip or another. I was
busily at work on my novel and when I came to the halfway mark, after a
trip down South with my mother to visit my sister, I got ready to travel
west for the very first time. Neal had already left. Allen and I saw
him off at the 34th Street Greyhound station. Upstairs they have a place
where you can make pictures for a quarter. Allen took off his glasses
and looked sinister. Neal made a profile shot and looked coyly around. I
took a straight picture that made me look, as Lucien said, like a 30
year old Italian who’d kill anybody who said anything against his
mother. This picture Allen and Neal neatly cut down the middle with a
razor and saved a half each in their wallets. I saw those halves later
on. Neal was wearing a real western business suit for his big trip back
to Denver; he’d finished his first fling in New York. I say fling but he
only worked like a dog in parkinglots, the most fantastic parkinglot
attendant in the world; he can back a car forty miles an hour into a
tight
squeeze and stop on a dime at the brickwall, and jump out, snake his way
out of close fenders, leap into another car, circle it fifty miles an
hour in a narrow space, shift, and back again into a tight spot with a
few inches each side and come to a bouncing stop the same moment he’s
jamming in the emergency brake; then run clear to the ticket shack like a
track star, hand a ticket, leap into a newly arrived car before the
owner is hardly out, leap literally under him as he steps out, start the
car with the door flapping and roar off to the next available parking
spot: working like that without pause eight hours a night, evening rush
hours and after theater rush hours, in greasy wino pants with a frayed
fur-lined jacket and beat shoes that flap. Now he’d bought a new suit to
go back home in; blue with pencil stripes, vest and all, with a watch
and watch chain, and a portable typewriter with which he was going to
start writing in a Denver roominghouse as soon as he got a job there. We
had a farewell meal of franks and beans in a 7th Avenue Riker’s and
then Neal got on the bus that said Chicago on it and roared off into the
night. I promised myself to go the same way when Spring really bloomed
and opened up the land. There went our wrangler. And this was really the
way that my whole road experience began and the things that were to
come are too fantastic not to tell. I’ve only spoken of Neal in a
preliminary way because I didn’t know any more than this about him then.
His relation with Allen I’m not in on and as it turned out later, Neal
got tired of that, specifically of queerness and reverted to his natural
ways, but that’s no matter. In the month of July, 1947, having finished
a good half of my novel and having saved about fifty dollars from old
veteran benefits I got ready to go to the West Coast. My friend Henri
Cru had written me a letter from San Fransisco saying I should come out
there and ship out with him on an around-the-world liner. He swore he
could get me into the engine room. I wrote back and said I’d be
satisfied with any old freighter so long as I could take a few long
Pacific trips and come back with enough money to support myself in my
mother’s house while I finished my book. He said he had a shack in Marin
City and I would have all the time in the world to write there
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