dear jack,
i got an email from one of my best friends this morning about how he never read On The Road, only pretended he did.
i never read it either. i read Vanity of Duluoz, and i have a good story about that but first, let me explain my friend.
he used to perform slam poetry pieces about you keeping in mind that anybody with some taste at least has a reaction to the beats (you all had that effect). they didn’t have to like you or your scumbag friends, they just had to be familiar with your style.
i don’t mean your literary style, i mean your style. you know. full frontal emotional instability, romanticized drug abuse, rampant & somehow apologetic womanizing, chicken tucked johnson fetal position sob war loss stories running out of gas, money, purpose, your men, fingernails, mescaline on the train, in the cabin, in the diner, in the navy, chain smoking away the red scare loom shhhick! bullets by your ears, fuck the pigs, there are no pigs, no bullets, help!, questionably tasteful use of the word Negro, “writing in jazz form” (bullshit) and seeking refuge in Paris.
i can’t say i’ve mastered your style, but i can mock it well enough, eh?
the critics would say you were embracing a new American compulsion to express an inborn self-hatred that eats away at self-esteem until it rebuilds itself on a greasy old typewriter.
your friends would say you were the gentleman of your lot. would open doors for women and knock a guy out for talking about somebody’s mother.
(but you loved to waste our time in your parenthetical sub-novels, wasting words, wasting words, wasting… words)
and the life to live. yeah man, i know. I know.
utter satisfying doom.
no greener grass. death squads of the mind. eyes as egg shells. treaded on by past and future moments grappling for oxygen. the ingredients of a serial killer, a pedophile, a rapist, a wife beater, a crook, somehow past expiration. the chills. sobbing. seeing red. living a nightmare. awaiting the next.
like, O.
a puppet to your dark passenger, strings pulling you pulling the audience’s reverent appreciation for what appears to be haphazard placement of words beside each other. little do they know.
you’ve never read on the road.
you’re just lost.
so, that’s me. me being you. being me. being the me that you let me become. i guess.
my friend never went that far. he had his own style. he just used bits and pieces of yours for a split second to get a rise out of the audience. for a good score.
i don’t think you would have liked slam poetry very much. i can’t say i dislike it, but it’s awful corny.
my friend was great at it. he told such beautiful and mature lies and low and behold applause, high scores, winning. off to national competitions. hugging sage francis and spitting on mics blessed by saul williams..
slam is definitely an artform born out of layers of cultural history partially created by you and your cohorts, but on the shoulders of hip hop. i don’t even know what body part of the metaphor the beats fit into. the bleeding liver, probably. jazz is the genitals.
i can’t really say my friend is a fraud for pretending to have read you. i wouldn’t be surprised if half the shit you wrote in on the road was a lie. lying is in the job description of a writer. let’s be honest.
for example.
if i write about the day i carried mary’s bloody mother from the bathroom to the bed, raiding her closet for the vodka so her liver wouldn’t kill her and leave two children with zero parents, a futile attempt of ours which didn’t keep her from dying months later of exactly that, i don’t tell you about the fried potatoes i had for breakfast, the video games i played that day, what positions i fucked my girlfriend in, our conversations about incense and the doors, CNN, or which shirt to wear to the party tomorrow, or about that essay i turned in late about descarte and hume – i don’t even remember that day so i’m making it all up.
ninety percent of intense experiences are surrounded by mediocrity. it’s people like you, and me, who obsess over the intense experiences. in my case they’re usually traumatic experiences, but we’ll call it whatever. lively ones. crazy times. they leave apocalyptic inkblots in parts of your brain you never want to see again, but you don’t have a choice, and somehow you don’t have a choice in seeking more inkblots and seeing them not as unicorns and grayscale rainbows but as predators cancers torture devices corpses sobbing children mother destiny foiling, death, death, death, looming DEATH.
you put these traumas into little nice sentences and people go “hey i liked that thing you wrote it was nice,” and you say “thanks for reading it i am no more than a vile piece of shit, just like you,” but you don’t say that out loud because they can’t handle the person who actually wrote what they read, they don’t realize that tormented art comes from tormented people, and the act of standing beside them for more than a moment is a challenge because you’re pretty sure they have a generally OK mental state, and you don’t know the first thing about what they’re thinking. probably the weather, food, iPods, the mall, a television show. like you. but without the thoughts about from which angles to shoot your own head. and without the memories that have lead you to obsess over such awful thoughts.
if they’ve absorbed any of your work they know you’re fucked up, but if you’re in a conversation with them (most of them), that shit stays in the art. that shit is not you, and if it is, get yourself to a ward, give that psycho some sedatives. that motherfucker is a threat to my mediocrity.
write it, don’t live it. pretty much.
but if you write it and you don’t kill yourself – if you’re that tormented – well then you’re just bragging. “here’s the struggle, in 300 pages, with bits of maturity to mask the ego, now give me a cookie.”
you sporadically wrote about how people got obsessed with you, writing you letters mimicking your style (like this, a bit, I guess), women in love with you, men in jail, hatemail. it’s nice to get a rise. but did you ever feel like they just met somebody as fucked up as them and felt comfortable opening up to you? i mean face it, people are lonely. they don’t look for company on the road, in the cabins, on the trains. they look to Jack Fucking Kerouac to find themselves. i’m no exception. well, i am, but i’ll be modest. somebody is reading this for christ’s sake.
in your last book (only one i’ve read in full) you basically said at the end “i’m done braggin. hav a good night,” then you died a week later. that’s kind of nice.
there probably was something unique about the kind of life and literature you are known for, but as somebody who is pretty adventurous and tormented i think the only thing really special about you is that you had an audience, you milked it, you knew somebody who knew somebody, and you got to be Jack Fucking Kerouac. that’s kind of nice.
the first time I read you was on the cobblestone pigeon shit infested banks of the River Seine in smelly old Paris, France. somewhere between june and july. kind of nice.
i was layin under the eternal nuclear powered yellow lamps reading Vanity of Dulouz. i needed a friend. i was lonely. all i had was a backpack with some stuff and a loose itinerary. and i don’t know French, so. making friends is impossible.
all the young frenchies were singing together with their radios and cheese and wine on blankets keeping their slender bodies from touching the thousands and thousands of years of imperial pigeon shit, and they were happy. i could steal glances, and their glee made me happy, but in a melancholy way that anchored me back into you.
you were somebody i could really depend on. kind of.
i woke up the next morning drool and Kerouac in my face, noisy tourist boats and pigeons and i walked for two hours to the bottom of paris with all my heavy stuff and put out my thumb, inspired to hitch hike to Barcelona. nobody told me that Parisians don’t pick up hitch hikers. maybe when you were around they did, and you’re pretty good looking and you speak French.
i had plans to meet my friend in Barcelona within the week so i decided to take the bus, feeling very failed. not too adventurey. so i got on a bus and i sat down and i continued my romance with you. i also wrote about seventy pages in a little notebook during this trip, and by the end it was all one run-on sentence. thanks for that.
i finished Vanity and the bus stopped. everybody was getting out to go eat food at some place. there was a blonde girl and i was lonely and i can’t stick my dick into your books so i talked to her. actually she talked to me first. asked me a question i didn’t have an answer to. talking, talking. her head was on my shoulder once we got back on the bus and my heart was stirring with the horrors of feeling incipient love boiling, out to destroy me kind of thing. she was Canadian, 27, had fake tits, was a social worker and a sex addict, orgies, movies, believes in true love and is addicted to pills.
a month before i left for europe a man did my horoscope and said i would find love somewhere near paris, between june and july of that year. he knew nothing about my plane ticket.
her name was Kristin. we spent three nights together in the same bed, doing dinners, the beach, talking about love all the time. i don’t remember if i told her about the horoscope thing. after three days we had to go separate ways. i got her to the train and when she left i began to hate her. she pried for some emotion and i wouldn’t give it to her. that’s my kryptonite. giving in to women. giving into myself. always a bad idea. but then it turns into being their fault. mommy issues of course.
for a while I thought Kristin was my chance, my one true love, that i had lost my chance at permanent happiness by letting her get on that train.
since then i’ve decided that while Kristin had a great body and an awful mind – the kind i really, really enjoy – she wasn’t the love i found in paris. you were. thanks for writing, jack. for all the insanity i’m pleased you decided to write it all down.
Yours,
A Pimp Named Professor Cuddle Core
