Rereading Kerouac
Not long ago I made mention that I wasn't sure if I would want to have a beer with "the girl in Birks" who moved here in 2000. Wild eyed with untamed hair in shades of auburn with blondish highlights, her peasant blouses with tattered jeans, and tanks with long hippie skirts, leather knapsack on her shoulder and gypsy scarf around her neck spoke of her age more than anything else. In college she had read Jack Kerouac's On The Road no less than twenty-five times; always scenting the air with clove cigarettes and littering the desk floor, and any flat surface with beer bottles. Sadly, or maybe aptly, they were not uber cool micro-brews. Back then Miller and Bud Light called to her on Kentucky nights.
One of the roommates--Mere--"borrowed" the cherished book, but that should really read she "lost" the novel in the forlorn flat surface with papers, clothes, and trinkets. Most just call it a desk. Shortly before graduation the mysterious flat surface showed itself, giving me my book back. Perhaps it was an intervention, or just a fear for me, that my intense moment of collegiate clarity about cross country trips and writing feverishly into the night would currpt and derail me. Making me less whole. Making me more whole. Distancing me from my Kentucky past. The Midwest, Indiana, past. The Northwest . . .
Yet, the Kerouac lover of my 20s meddled with time--or rather, time fiddled with her--to a point not of extinction but of . . .
Wading through history, and material culture of patriotic iconography pushed the lit major to the bottom-shelf. No longer on a cold snowy night, rainy fall day, or warm spring afternoon would you find her immersed with Kerouac under and old quilt reclined in a faded (and most certainly torn) pair of jeans with a flannel, or sprawled under a tree in spring. Instead, she became mesmerized and lost in front of microfiche machines and in copies of vintage Wonder Woman and Good Housekeeping. Thinking back, her jeans were still tattered.
I told people I had no love for Kerouac, as my speech remained littered with "dude" and "fuck" with remnants of a hybrid southern drawl. Only northerners called me southern; southerners denounced the inaccurate accent of multiple regionalisms denoting me as little more than a Damned Yankee. Sadly, few got the humor of my Kerouac eschew.
A boyfriend tried to get me to purchase a copy one night while making out in the local bookstore. I fended him off, wondering how in the hell he could've missed the tattered copy on my home self. I would have only given his copy to Goodwill, for fear it would corrupt my well worn copy of yellowed and folded pages. He failed my test, and I left him to the side not long after.
Now my prized secondhand paperback copy sits in storage in Virginia because at six weeks shy of thirty-five I still live like a gypsy, in a rented room with roommates. The material goods of my life--mostly photos and books--largely remain locked away except for the 100 or so tomes in stacks in my room. I have a second-hand copy now; the irony that my first is also a second-hand tome.
Rereading Kerouac--on the N line--literally rocks me back to moments of my younger, sprier, and hipper self. I've traveled through and slept in much of Kerouac's route. Yet, my paths were staggered, well mannered, and orderly. Or something like that. My cross-country excursions occurred in moments of rapturess bliss as I flew to San Francisco--walking the city, often drunk on the city and mojitos. In Denver the mountains reminded me of my mother's youth, elements of my own, and New Mexico. As I sat on a kitchen floor playing with my agnostic daughter--then my only and about nine months old, now the oldest of two--the manufactured chaos of Kerouac paled in comparison to Harper's innocent stare as she suckled an oxygen tube smiling for Auntie Nessa.
Road trips and trains to Boston never brought the same sense of release twice. Once I fell in love along the Charles, another time I left a sense of love to float away in those waters. At nineteen life was still an adventure with rose colored lenses. A Greyhound from Norfolk, VA to Santa Fe, NM was filled with novel delights. At 28, or so, life was still an adventure, but taking a return Greyhound bus from Gary, IN to Hempstead, NY on account of getting robbed at the Chicago Public Library while reading those Good Housekeeping magazines did not make me love the Patriot Acts. Nearly twenty hours next to a twenty-something high on weed and cheap beer merely irritated me.
In each destination words formed to put my name in print, or reinforce it so that I would not be a faded enigma of time. As I ponder these moments I think of Kerouac's notebooks and eyeglasses on display for the New York Public Library's Centennial. Will there be a point in time when someone will want my papers, old moleskins and leather-bound journals filled with scribbles and images of thought? Will my modern-day hipster glasses show up? Or will the once favorite leather knapsack, now riddled with a singular hole in the bottom large enough to loose my printed thoughts and reduced to hanging from a hook on my wall, surface in a glass case for some more modern nerd to attach herself to the case in awe? Do I want that kind of longevity? What does it really mean in a world where On The Road has been bought by Hollywood to soon be scrubbed and packaged for mainstream consumption?
Yet, as I reread Kerouac and revisit senses of ponder I look down and see my torn jeans and wife beater tank . . . yea, parts of that old girl still remain. The hair isn't red--or more aptly orange--anymore. It still isn't tamed, and I may not want to have a beer with her. But, she can read Kerouac with me any day. Somethings remain mainstays, only morphing with time.
As for still owning a pair of Birks . . . I'll plead the fifth.
One of the roommates--Mere--"borrowed" the cherished book, but that should really read she "lost" the novel in the forlorn flat surface with papers, clothes, and trinkets. Most just call it a desk. Shortly before graduation the mysterious flat surface showed itself, giving me my book back. Perhaps it was an intervention, or just a fear for me, that my intense moment of collegiate clarity about cross country trips and writing feverishly into the night would currpt and derail me. Making me less whole. Making me more whole. Distancing me from my Kentucky past. The Midwest, Indiana, past. The Northwest . . .
Yet, the Kerouac lover of my 20s meddled with time--or rather, time fiddled with her--to a point not of extinction but of . . .
Wading through history, and material culture of patriotic iconography pushed the lit major to the bottom-shelf. No longer on a cold snowy night, rainy fall day, or warm spring afternoon would you find her immersed with Kerouac under and old quilt reclined in a faded (and most certainly torn) pair of jeans with a flannel, or sprawled under a tree in spring. Instead, she became mesmerized and lost in front of microfiche machines and in copies of vintage Wonder Woman and Good Housekeeping. Thinking back, her jeans were still tattered.
I told people I had no love for Kerouac, as my speech remained littered with "dude" and "fuck" with remnants of a hybrid southern drawl. Only northerners called me southern; southerners denounced the inaccurate accent of multiple regionalisms denoting me as little more than a Damned Yankee. Sadly, few got the humor of my Kerouac eschew.
A boyfriend tried to get me to purchase a copy one night while making out in the local bookstore. I fended him off, wondering how in the hell he could've missed the tattered copy on my home self. I would have only given his copy to Goodwill, for fear it would corrupt my well worn copy of yellowed and folded pages. He failed my test, and I left him to the side not long after.
Now my prized secondhand paperback copy sits in storage in Virginia because at six weeks shy of thirty-five I still live like a gypsy, in a rented room with roommates. The material goods of my life--mostly photos and books--largely remain locked away except for the 100 or so tomes in stacks in my room. I have a second-hand copy now; the irony that my first is also a second-hand tome.
Rereading Kerouac--on the N line--literally rocks me back to moments of my younger, sprier, and hipper self. I've traveled through and slept in much of Kerouac's route. Yet, my paths were staggered, well mannered, and orderly. Or something like that. My cross-country excursions occurred in moments of rapturess bliss as I flew to San Francisco--walking the city, often drunk on the city and mojitos. In Denver the mountains reminded me of my mother's youth, elements of my own, and New Mexico. As I sat on a kitchen floor playing with my agnostic daughter--then my only and about nine months old, now the oldest of two--the manufactured chaos of Kerouac paled in comparison to Harper's innocent stare as she suckled an oxygen tube smiling for Auntie Nessa.
Road trips and trains to Boston never brought the same sense of release twice. Once I fell in love along the Charles, another time I left a sense of love to float away in those waters. At nineteen life was still an adventure with rose colored lenses. A Greyhound from Norfolk, VA to Santa Fe, NM was filled with novel delights. At 28, or so, life was still an adventure, but taking a return Greyhound bus from Gary, IN to Hempstead, NY on account of getting robbed at the Chicago Public Library while reading those Good Housekeeping magazines did not make me love the Patriot Acts. Nearly twenty hours next to a twenty-something high on weed and cheap beer merely irritated me.
In each destination words formed to put my name in print, or reinforce it so that I would not be a faded enigma of time. As I ponder these moments I think of Kerouac's notebooks and eyeglasses on display for the New York Public Library's Centennial. Will there be a point in time when someone will want my papers, old moleskins and leather-bound journals filled with scribbles and images of thought? Will my modern-day hipster glasses show up? Or will the once favorite leather knapsack, now riddled with a singular hole in the bottom large enough to loose my printed thoughts and reduced to hanging from a hook on my wall, surface in a glass case for some more modern nerd to attach herself to the case in awe? Do I want that kind of longevity? What does it really mean in a world where On The Road has been bought by Hollywood to soon be scrubbed and packaged for mainstream consumption?
Yet, as I reread Kerouac and revisit senses of ponder I look down and see my torn jeans and wife beater tank . . . yea, parts of that old girl still remain. The hair isn't red--or more aptly orange--anymore. It still isn't tamed, and I may not want to have a beer with her. But, she can read Kerouac with me any day. Somethings remain mainstays, only morphing with time.
As for still owning a pair of Birks . . . I'll plead the fifth.
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