IN MEMORY OF JACK KEROUAC

Born 103 Years Ago Today

Excerpted from Unstuck—a nonfiction work-in-progress about spiritual road tripping.

It starts like this:

If there is a recurring sub-theme in this text it is Mark Twain, the spiritual mentor of the Clubhouse on Wheels (COW) and my road trip journeys.

Virginia City NV

My first road trip in the COW was to Angels Camp in the Sierra Nevada mountains where a young Sam Clemens went “slinking” to escape humiliation after a newspaper story went wrong and, while drinking in a bar, overheard a story about a jumping frog that he wrote up as The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.

Its publication many months later in the New York Saturday Press put him on the map as a humorist and a speaker.

And then driving with my friend Curt through the American heartland we rolled into Missouri where Clemens was born.

Hannibal MO

A couple years later I visited the gothic castle Sam built in Hartford when that city teemed not with insurance executives (worse than used car salesmen) but with writers and publishers.

This is the house where Clemens spent his happiest days until his favorite daughter Susy died here at the tender age of 24 from spinal meningitis.

The Mark Twain House (now a museum), Hartford CT

Sam was in Britain when that happened, resting after a worldwide lecture tour he’d undertaken to buy himself out of bankruptcy. That’s where he learned losing all your money is not the worst thing that can happen in life.

On this dank New England day I seat myself on a porch among ethereal traces of Sam and his family, a gloomy estate encapsulated by a soulless city of actuaries and underwriters, before wandering around a museum gift shop with all the usual trinkets and trash.

Onward we roll, into Massachusetts, spilling into Lowell, the birthplace of Jack Kerouac whose 1957 book On the Road was my early inspiration.

Five years earlier I’d wandered Denver with Van Stein looking for Jack’s ghost.

My Brother’s Bar (Denver’s oldest), where Kerouac drank, corner of Platte & 15th

I pictured myself in a Denver bar that night, with all the gang, and in their eyes I would be strange and ragged and like the Prophet who has walked across the land to bring the dark Word, and the only Word I had was "Wow!" (On the Road)

A week after that, the artist and I ventured to San Francisco’s North Beach to visit City Lights Bookstore where Kerouac and the Beats congregated, especially across the alley inside Vesuvio, a landmark bar where they drank.

Jack Kerouac Alley, oil on board, Van Stein

And now here I am in Jack’s hometown (“a Lowell point,” wits my friend Howard, gawking glumly at the grim city streets), better known these days for boarded-up diners, tattoo parlors and addiction problems—like so many small towns across the country 25 years into the 21st century.

Lowell MA

Lowell is also where Kerouac’s bones rest eternal beneath a simple gravestone in Edson Cemetery on Lincoln between Seventh and Eight, littered with items left by pilgrims: a Jack Daniel’s miniature, a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon, a shot glass emblazoned with Jesus, a lot of pens. I leave a wooden nickel, good for a free beer at the bar I once owned.

But now, like Kerouac himself, a ghost.

A more recent memorial wall nearby is engraved with this inscription: “The Road is Life.”

Meaning: Enjoy the ride; the destination for everyone is the same.

Jack’s 30 Writing Tips: