***Off The Road With On The Road-Take Five

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

As I search the western, American western shoreline blue-pink skies just before dark I  think we will always have fugitive memories, fugitive as we lead our ordinary go along lives not filled with detours or time for detours, emerging out of the fog-horn Frisco town night. Late 1940s fugitive memories as that town readied itself to take refugees, car-borne just enough gas to get over the Bay Bridge refugees, out of the Route 101(breezing past Paseo Robles), Route 66 (out through the Arizonas and Nevadas where it counted), Route 20 (via Portland and then down), hell, even up and down the Pacific Coast Highway(up through those endless beach towns), hell, maybe especially up and down that highway, coming in from the cold war red scare Denver/Chi Town/Jersey Shore (dare I say Trenton or Paterson)/Village/Lowell/Hullsville American monster dreaded night. Second-hand fugitive memories in some cases transported by books and strange human travelogues. Some of us having been just a little too young to have been word-blasted directly by that fog-horn beat, that high white Sonny note floating out of some basement café toward the cruel seas at the time.

Later once the horde, the ones who actually made the scene, gathered in the North Beach, Big Sur and other points south sweeps and began listening, be-bop frantic listening, to some homoerotic scatological son of Abraham howling forth the new dispensation, the new beat, the new blessed, the new meek shall inherit the earth or at least have a voice coming from the depths, the be-bop, be-bop message if they would only heed the beat, we would add that factor in as well. Yes add in that wounded mad monk, all be-spectacled, all loaded on cheap wine, tea and unfiltered cigarettes, speaking churchly deadpan of Negro streets, hipster angels, that sanctified tea, constant tea-induced dreams, and Moloch dreads, spreading and spewing out of their industrial-sized flames. A bit later still mocking to no one in particular speaking of one million Trotskyite revolutions in order to de-flame the night except for stars and fogged city lights (if only that were true, the one million part rather than the one millionth part).   

Of course he/they/the motley brethren who cruised the Embarcadero wharf streets of the mind spoke, speak, will speak unto the umpteenth generation to those who seek their own open roads. Sweet Jesus there will always be a few who must devour road miles, a few who dream of surviving outside the box, who take seriously the open road expanses and movement, and so we too will always have Jack Kerouac’s novel, On The Road. The Sal-Dean stream dream filled with stolen (borrowed/lent/rented/travelers aided?) broken down standard- shift cars shift right on the steering wheel made when automobiles were automobiles stirring every young blade with dreams of the open road and hidden sex. Not some robotic flash lighted inventions made to make choke-hold commutes easier cars. Then a dollar’s worth of gas in pocket flashing out in some desperate smoke-hazed (unnamed smokes) wine jug-swigged (get Thunderbird wine it is cheaper and lasts longer under human thirst beatings), bed jumped night novel that sent one, and maybe the next two, generations on the road, on the road to some mystical discovery thing never quite explained, never quite grasped.  Some foreboding search for language, for words, for the right words that never seemed to come, or if they came came in million word torrent deluges for chrissakes. Words to explain our short existence, to make sense of things in the Moloch-fumed (beautiful word) modern world that required explanation but that has no time for reflection on the big cosmic questions. The Zen/koan/infinity/circle questions.  

Yes, we will always have Kerouac’s finely wrought be-bop word plays jumping off the page out in the desolate 1950s chicken-in-every-pot-and-two-cars-if-not-three-cars-in-every-garage, in every suburban ranch house sub-division garage. (And he of secret cravings for such a life although kept well-hidden from smoky waterfront taverns. Village juke joints and cabarets, riverside snorts, hobo jungles, bracero sweated labor fields, jazz joints, poetry garages and Big Sur cabins.)

Speaking out of the vastness of the fellaheen world like some broken down drummer from Merrimack rivers (although speaking, not strangely, not strangely at all, for a guy trying to half break-out of that river world, not to that world but the city literati make no mistake) about lost adventures, about lost time (like some bedded sniffling Proust not river-bend Wolfe  was some ancient kin), about lost remembrances but mostly about the desolate life for the dusty bedraggled fellahin left without words down in the sinking sweated sun-bake fields of the world. Not the million Trotskyite words, not the Negro streets words, not the North Beach hipster angel words (although he tried) but cool be-bop words refracting the total mass anxieties of a long-gone daddy world, a world from which one had to to run and hide, with or without a bottle or some tea.

Yes, we too will always have Sal (a.k.a Jeanbon Kerouac) the errant river-borne son searching for that tea dream high world to make the anguish stop and will always have Dean, Dean Moriarty (a.k.a. Neal Cassady), the father we did not know, could not know, while we were vicariously sitting on those Jersey shores (damn I will not say Trenton or Paterson), be-bopping in the oil slick Hudson night, shooting “pools” in Larimer Street Denver, looking for a long gone daddy fixer man in some Division Street Chi town dark night, sweating out in those Ames cornfields like some busted sod-buster, worse, doing stoop bracero labor in Fresno, hell, even sitting second-hand on the seawall down in those old Hullsville beach fronts looking for the great blue-pink great American West night.

We will always have Charlie, Sonny, Slim, Big Red, the Duke, blowing out brass, trying to reach and sometimes making it, that high white note, after hours, after the paying customers, the carriage trade, went home to bed and they blew to heaven, or tried to, with the boys, with the guys who knew when that note floated out of some funky cellar bar door winding its way down to the harbor, down to the turgid bay seeking passage to the Japan seas. With more blows at that dark hour before the dawn to get the hemp squared, to be right with that tangled mass of brethren who constituted the beat-down, beat around world.

We will always have Sal, Carlos, Bull, Dean and an ever changing assortment of , well, women, women, mainly, at their beck and call, riding, car-riding, riding hard over the hill and dale of this continent searching, well, just searching okay. We will always have the lost father and son (odd combination since they could have been brothers), Sal and Dean, playing off of each other’s strengths (and weaknesses) as they try to make sense of their world, or if not sense then to keep high, keep moving, and keep listening. And we will always have a great American novel to pass on to the next wanderlust generation, if there is another wanderlust generation.           

We will always have that beat down novel, praise be.