If you missed the first half of this post, it’s here.

80: Mexico City

By 1950 William Burroughs – two months after accidentally shooting his wife Joan dead in Texas and spending two weeks in jail before his parents bailed him out – fled to 212 Orizaba Street in Mexico City. Bill’s first novel “Junkie” had just been accepted by Ace Books when, in May, Jack showed up. Having returned yet again to Denver and leaving Neal behind in New York, Jack was amazed to find that Neal had bought another car and followed him with the aim of driving both of them here and get a quickie divorce from Carolyn so he could marry his new sweetie in New York.

Burroughs used a pseudonym for his first novel to avoid embarrassing his well-to-do parents any further.

Neal got his divorce (though he didn’t remarry) and took off, but Jack stayed on at Burroughs’ place for two months, constantly smoking dope as he wrote, then went back to his mother in Ozone Park. The placemark here is Catedral Metropolitana, but if anyone knows where Orizaba Street is, please get in touch.

On his second visit to Mexico City in April 1951, Jack was applying spontaneous prose and a whole lot of pot to the writing of “Dr Sax”, part horror story, part childhood memoir, and launched his sprawling “Book of Dreams” project. He came back to Orizaba in August ‘55 and fell in love with Esperanza Villanueva, an Indian prostitute and drug addict who inspired “Tristessa”, which he wrote here along with the 244 “choruses” of “Mexico City Blues”. In September ‘56 he returned after his stint on Desolation Peak to finish off “Tristessa”, and presumably Esperanza too, before heading for NYC in November. And Jack spent another month here in mid-’57, just as “On the Road” was about to start shouting from everbody’s fire escapes.

In July 1961, now a resident of Orlando, Florida, Jack flew back to Mexico City and completed part two of “Desolation Angels” about, among other things, his time as a fire lookout. He had a brief affair with a liquor store clerk named Guillermo that ended badly when his suitcase containing his beloved baseball solitaire game and Buddhist prayer beads was stolen. He checked out of Mexico for good in August.

81: 94-21134th Street, Richmond Hill

Jack’s family home from 1950 to 1957, and the place he invariably returned when he’d had enough of the road. With his father now dead and Memere, as he called his mother, off working in a shoe factory in Brooklyn, Kerouac had many visitors, including Cassady and Ginsberg. Manhattan’s Historic Landmarks Preservation Center placed a plaque on the house long after Jack died.

Back from Mexico in December 1951, Jack hunkered down at his mother’s house for a few months to write “Maggie Cassidy”, an autobiographical novel about his time at Lowell High School and his first girlfriend, Mary Carney. After another spell in California with Cassady, he returned home in June 1953, only to sign aboard the SS William Carruth bound for South Korea, but he quit when the ship reached New Orleans, and by July was back in New York, meeting “Mardou”.

82: 454 West 20th Street, NYC

Jack met Joan Haverty (right) on November 3, 1950, and married her on the 17th, moving into her place at 454 West 20th Street the following January. Here he hammered out his first scroll version of “On the Road”, and when he was finished he packed his bags and left her, heading for his sister’s home in North Carolina, where he got word that Joan was pregnant and opted to do nothing about it.

Jack had started “On the Road” in November 1948, but revamped it several times before he found the voice that made it so unique. One such change came as a result of a letter he received from Cassady while he was living here in February ‘51, the 13,000-word “Joan letter”, which dazzled Kerouac with its “muscular rush” and prompted him drop Thomas Wolfe’s measured style in favour of the energetic spontaneity that his supercharged travelogue demanded. Jack also received a copy of Burroughs’ manuscript for “Junkie” and decided to similarly shift to the first person, using real names and making Neal the hero of his novel.

At the end April, in a three-week burst of benzedrine-fuelled typing on a 120-foot scroll of paper that Lucien Carr brought home from his United Press International news office, Kerouac produced the most famous version of “On the Road” as a single-spaced unbroken paragraph. The only rewrite he allowed at this stage was necessitated when Lucien’s cocker spaniel chewed up the last few feet of the scroll. Two days after finishing, Jack said goodbye to Joan and moved out.

Jack and Joan’s daughter, Janet Kerouac (below left), was born in 1952. Joan took Jack to court in ‘55 for child support, but the judge granted the jobless Kerouac a year’s suspension because his phlebitis kept him from working.

In February ‘62 Joan had another go, though her timing was inauspicious because Jack was just coming off a “30-day drunk”. On the 20th Kerouac met Jan, now 10, for the first time. In court he declared, “I do not admit that I am the father of this child, only that she bears my name.” He was ordered to give blood for a paternity test and the three antagonists went out to a hamburger joint in Brooklyn. “You’re a lovely little girl, but you’re not my daughter,” Jan later said he told her, adding that he took her to a liquor store and bought a bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream, the cork from which Jan saved for the rest of her short life. Jack ended up agreeing to pay $52 a week in child support.

In 1985, when “On the Road” came up for copyright renewal, the Sampas family in charge of the Kerouac estate responded to Jan’s threat of a lawsuit by agreeing to give her $4,000 and half of future royalties. By the 1990s, she was getting up to $100,000 a year.

In 1990, the St Petersburg Times reported, she knocked on the door of Jack’s last home on 10th Avenue North in St Petersburg – her old man’s name and number were still in the phonebook. John Sampas opened the door and invited her in to sit in her father’s swivel chair at his desk. She said she felt “like a little boy in the cockpit of his father’s plane, like I was at the controls”.

83: 124th St and Broadway

Somewhere near the corner of 124th St and Broadway there was a Chinese restaurant at which Ed Hinkle suggested to Jack in the spring of 1952 that he try “sketching” scenes, rather than writing them in the conventional sense. He was seized by the notion and it transformed his style, as quickly became evident in the new drafts of “On the Road”.

84: The White Horse Tavern

The White Horse Tavern is still near the corner of Hudson and 11th Streets where some noble developer put it in 1880. Seventy years later, the long-time longshoreman’s hangout was serving drinks to not only Jack Kerouac but Dylan Thomas, who made it his base of operations on his boozy regular tours of the US, and people lined up at the bar to watch him drink and talk and drink and talk. (That’s him at “the office” at left.) There’s a plaque on the wall commemorating the November night in 1953 when the 39-year-old Welshman staggered outside and collapsed. He lapsed into a coma at the nearby Chelsea Hotel, was rushed to St Vincent’s Hospital, and died.

Norman Mailer, Anais Nin and James Baldwin drank here too, and so did Kerouac, no doubt cooling down a benzedrine thirst ready for another blast at “On the Road”, then in mid-scroll over at his and Joan Haverty’s apartment. He often passed out here, they say, despite the speed, and one time made it to the toilet to find “Go Home Kerouac” scrawled on a wall, or so he wrote in “Desolation Angels”.

85: Toledo, Ohio

Holy Toledo, hasn’t this city posed for its class photo yet? In December ‘51 Jack tried to sign aboard the SS Harding sailing from Staten Island to Panama, but only Henry Cru could find a berth. Kerouac had the Merchant Marine send a letter of reference on to San Pedro so he could join the ship there instead, and took the bus to California, via Pittsburgh, Toledo and … “Bam, in Omaha it’s snowing – a blizzard – dirty old scabrous shithouse character watches me shit, another sells me comb for a dime, I eat sandwiches (now down to bread and boiled eggs) …”

86: Sixth and Main, San Francisco

En route to catching up with Henry Cru’s ship in December 1951 Jack spent a few days with Neal before hopping a train to Los Angeles and holing up at a hotel near the bus terminal at Sixth and Main. Cru’s freighter was due in San Pedro on Christmas Eve.

87: San Pedro, California

The SS Harding eluded Jack all the way in December ‘51. He’d failed to get on board when it left Staten Island and raced across the country to meet it here on Christmas Eve, but the skipper turned him down. In consolation Henry Cru, who was sailing on her, took Jack out for a night of drinking, at the end of which they sneaked on board to sleep. Jack returned the next day to Neal’s place in San Jose and a job on the railroad.

88: The Tamalpais Apartments, San Francisco

In early 1952, when Jack was staying with Neal and Carolyn Cassady at their home on Russell Street, Jack went out for a walk one evening and stopped to watch the filming of scenes for “Sudden Fear”, starring Jack Palance and Joan Crawford, here at the eleven-storey Tamalpais Apartments at 1201 Greenwich Street at Hyde. He returned to Russell Street and wrote an account that eventually appeared as “Joan Rawshanks in the Fog”, a section of “Visions of Cody”.

89: San Jose, California

I have no idea where Neal and Carolyn’s place in San Jose was, so Juff’s prior placemark for the Mission Ale House seems appropriate. (He calls it “a local legend … one of San Jose’s ‘everyman’ watering holes”.)

Jack, seen at left with Carolyn and one of her daughters, bounced in and out of the Cassady homestead in San Jose repeatedly over the years, starting in January ‘52 when Neal drove all the way to New York to get him and bring him back here to work alongside him as a railroad brakeman. The old buddies were soon bickering and Jack left for Mexico City, but he returned to San Jose in May and June 1953, again toiling on the Southern Pacific. He worked a 100-mile stretch from SF to Gilroy subdivision at Watsonville and on and off the rail cars wrote the poems that later emerged as “October in the Railroad Earth”.

By this trip Jack was heavily into Buddhism and Cassady had discovered the mystic prophet Edgar Cayce, and they got into a daft argument that resulted in Neal dumping Jack at a hotel in Frisco.

In the fall of ‘56 Kerouac ended his self-imposed exile atop Desolation Peak in the Cascade Mountains with a massive blowout with his friends in San Francisco that ultimately saw him and Neal grab the train (riding their brakemen’s passes) to San Jose, where Jack spent a few days with Carolyn and their two daughters before moving on to Mexico once again. He took refuge with estranged Carolyn here in October ‘55 after that nasty little incident with Neal’s girlfriend on Liberty Street in Frisco.

While he was doing time at San Quentin in ‘64 for selling a bit of weed to undercover cops, Neal boasted in an interview that he’d never had an accident while high, including while he was working as a brakeman. “I even drove President Eisenhower’s train and it didn’t seem to get off the track any,” he laughed, recalling the ‘52 campaign run when he was having a puff at the rear of the train during a stop and “crunch, crunch – I hear footsteps behind me and what I didn’t know was that when the train stopped that the Secret Service men were supposed to walk out on the tracks behind it … So they come up and one of them says, ‘Cold night out here tonight,’ and there I am with a lungful of marijuana smoke and I couldn’t answer. So I used a railroad man’s prerogative and I acted grumpy and I didn’t say anything.”

90: Nogales, Mexico

After a brief stint as a railway brakeman in early ‘52 Jack was driven this far on his way to Mexico City by Neal in a two-year-old Chevy station wagon, with Carolyn and little Cathy Cassady along for company. After having bickered so much lately, Jack and Neal had planned a leisurely drive, with picnic stops in the Imperial Valley and Arizona, but Neal went in a hurry as always, and the trip was non-stop and fast, faster, fastest.

91: Paradise Alley, NYC

In the late summer of 1953 Jack fell in love with a young half-Cherokee black woman named Alene Lee (right), who was typing up Ginsberg and Burroughs’ manuscripts at Allen’s apartment on East 7th Street. The girl who would become “Mardou Fox” in “The Subterraneans” brought him to her flat in Paradise Alley on East 11th Street off Avenue A to begin a stormy two-month relationship documented in his novel, which he wrote in the course of three long nights soon after, transposing the setting to San Francisco.

92: Former site of the Open Door, NYC

Called the Red Drum in “The Subterraneans”, the Open Door nightclub witnessed performances in the early ’50s by the likes of Charlie Parker that were in turn witnessed by the likes of Kerouac (probably in August ‘53).

93: Former vicinity of Fugazzi’s, NYC

Somewhere along Sixth Avenue here was Fugazzi’s – named Dante’s in “The Subterraneans”. There’s a great essay by Ted Joans about the beat gang hanging around Manhattan’s jazz clubs circa 1953 at http://www.nathanielturner.com/charlieparker.htm that’s well worth a visit.

94: Former site of the San Remo, NYC

Somewhere at the corner of Bleecker and Macdougal was the San Remo, another famed watering hole that also had great jazz on tap. Jack, a regular in 1953, renamed it the Black Mask in “The Subterraneans”.

95: Los Gatos, California

Jack showed up here at the Cassadys’ new place here in February 1954, having hitchhiked most of the way from New York. He stayed awhile but felt less than comfortable, and in March moved into the Cameo Hotel in San Francisco, where he wrote “San Francisco Blues” and did more work on “Book of Dreams”. He headed east again in April.

Neal worked at the Los Gatos Tire shop for nearly three years starting in 1960, after completing his time in San Quentin for selling a couple of joints to undercover cops. The stories of Neal’s prowess as a driver and tire capper still make the rounds here, like when he’d sail into the yard from up the hill and turn off the ignition and step out of his car while it was still going, and the door would slam and he’d be walking into the tire centre and the car would just roll up to a dirt berm across the way and ease to a stop. The guys had a bet going on what day he’d screw it up, but no one ever collected.

96: Brooklyn waterfront

Yet another trip to the west coast in early ‘54 bounced Jack right back to his mum’s place in Richmond Hill again, and he briefly had a go at working on the Brooklyn waterfront before his phlebitis flared again, rendering him a virtual cripple.

97: St Joseph the Worker Shrine, Lowell

Jack made a brief return appearance in Lowell in September 1954, staying at the Depot Chambers Hotel, and it was during this visit that he claimed to have had a mystical experience at St Joseph’s Church, seeing in a flash that the word “beat” in fact meant “beatific”. This psychic boost for the man who’d just been outed in Saturday Review as the founder of the beat generation didn’t last: Increasingly dependent on booze and bennies, in December he wrote in his journal that he was at “the lowest, beatest ebb of my life”.

Kerouac was back in town again in September ‘62, where he made friends with a fellow French Canadian named Paul Bourgeois and paid a social call on his old sweetheart Mary Carney. After being interviewed on a local radio station, he and Bourgeois set off for Florida with a week-long boozer’s pit stop in New York City.

It’s not clear whether St Joseph the Worker Shrine has anything to do with a “St Joseph’s Church”, which doesn’t show up in the guides.

98: 1624 Milvia Street, Berkeley

Allen Ginsburg was living here, just north of the Berkeley campus, in September ‘55 when Jack arrived from Mexico. He was soon introduced to the local literati, including many of the young writers who would form what was erroneously dubbed in the media – after the following month’s celebrated Six Gallery joint reading – “the San Francisco poetry renaissance”, among them Kenneth Rexroth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Michael McClure.

When Ginsberg left the Milvia cottage, Phil Whalen moved in, and in May ‘57 he greeted Jack and his mother after their Greyhound trek from Florida. He got them rooms at a cheap hotel nearby until Jack found them a home on Berkeley Way.

99: The Six Gallery, San Francisco

In what quickly became gold-plated as one of the ground-breaking literary moments of the day, the Six Gallery hosted a reading on October 7, 1955, at which Allen Ginsberg debuted his devastating poem “Howl”. He was among the “remarkable collection of angels” (as it said on the invitations Allen circulated) performing that night – the others were Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Phil Whalen, Philip Lamantia and Kenneth Rexroth.

Jack was there in fine form, passing a hat and rushing out at intervals to buy gallon jugs of Thunderbird, which he took among the audience of about 150, “urging them to glug a slug from the jug”, and cheering on the poets as they recited from the stage. The extraordinary evening has been described in many books, but perhaps none quite as memorably as Kerouac’s own “Dharma Bums”.

The Six Gallery hosted a repeat performance with the same poets in May 1956, just as “Howl” was about to be published by City Lights, dedicated to Jack, Burroughs, Neal and, in its first edition, Lucien Carr. Ann Charters was there that night, and wrote about it in her loving biography “Kerouac”.

100: The Matterhorn, California

On October 21, ‘55, just after the Six Gallery poetry jam session, John Montgomery drove Jack and Gary Snyder (below) up Route 395 east of Yosemite to Bridgeport and into the Sierra Mountains to Upper Horse Creek for a two-day climbing expedition. Kerouac didn’t make it all the way to the 12,000-foot summit of the Matterhorn, but seeing Snyder run back down past him smacked him with the half-poignant, half-hilarious zen lightning bolt that “it’s impossible to fall off a mountain, you idiot”. The episode earned Kerouac the nickname “The Buddha Known as the Great Quitter” from Snyder, who would go on to climb more mountains, win the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 and be named America’s Poet Laureate.

From “Dharma Bums”: “One frosty night in the woods in the dead silence it seemed I almost heard the words said: ‘Everything is all right forever and forever and forever’. I let out a big Hoo, one o’clock in the morning, the dogs leaped up and exulted. I felt like yelling it to the stars. I clasped my hands and prayed, ‘O, Wise and serene spirit of Awakenhood, everything’s all right forever and forever and forever and thank you and thank you and thank you amen’. What’d I care about the tower of ghouls, and sperm and bones and dust, I felt free and therefore I was free.”

101: Riverside, California

Jack skittered out of Frisco at the end of ‘55 after Cassady’s girlfriend was killed in a freak accident, and he spent a few days with Carolyn Cassady in San Jose. From there he took the train to LA, heading home, then the bus to Riverside, walking out of town looking for a place to climb into his sleeping bag somewhere here alongside the Los Angeles River.

102: Mexicali, New Mexico

Jack hitchhiked here in December ‘55 heading east to be with his mother for Christmas at his sister’s place in North Carolina. From here he got a ride with a trucker to Tucson.

103: Tucson, Arizona

Jack’s weary homeward trek in December ‘55 saw him roll through here on one of a series of rides with truckers. He’d been round the bend again with Neal Cassady on the west coast and just wanted to get back to his mother and into some more heavy writing.

104: Springfield, Ohio

Delivered unto Springfield by friendly truck drivers, Jack figured he had enough cash in his pocket to get the bus to his sister’s home in North Carolina, where he knew his mother was spending Christmas. He’d had enough of the road but, as usual, was already thinking about his next trip – although this time it would involve travelling only as much as necessary to get him to a place of absolute stillness – the top of a mountain in Washington state.

105: City Lights on Kerouac Alley, San Francisco

This was Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s launching pad for most of the beat writers, beginning with Ginsberg’s “Howl”, which was the fourth title he published, in 1956, and which got him arrested the following year on charges of selling obscene material. The publicity surrounding the case played a role in his later acquittal.

In 1960 Jack sneaked into San Francisco with the intention of dodging his drinking buddies and going straight to Ferlinghetti’s remote cabin further down the California coast. As he wrote later in “Big Sur”: “Lorenz Monsanto [Ferlinghetti] and I’d exchanged huge letters outlining how I would sneak in quietly, call him on the phone using a code name like Adam Yulch or Lalagy Pulvertaft (also writers) and then he would secretly drive me to his cabin in the Big Sur woods where I would be alone and undisturbed for six weeks just chopping wood, drawing water, writing, sleeping, hiking, etc, etc – But instead I’ve bounced drunk into his City Lights bookshop at the height of Saturday night business, everyone recognized me (even tho’ I was wearing my disguise-like fishermans hat and fisherman coat and pants waterproof) and t’all ends up a roaring drunk in all the famous bars the bloody ‘King of the Beatniks’ is back in town buying drinks for everyone.”

106: Desolation Peak, Washington

In June 1956 Jack hitchhiked to Washington state for a job with the US Forest Service as a fire lookout in Mt Baker National Forest. He spent the rest of the summer, 63 days, alone in a ranger’s hut atop 6,100-foot Desolation Peak in what is now North Cascades National Park, just south of the Canadian border. The radio voices of fellow fire watchers were his only human contact, and it just about drove him nuts, staring at what he called “The Void” of 8,000-foot Mount Hozomeen to the north and down upon Ross Lake, but he didn’t see a single puff of smoke. It all went into a novel, though, called “Desolation Angels”.

107: Seattle, Washington

Jack came banging down from Desolation Peak in September ‘56 out of his mind with, well, desolation. He hitched to Seattle, found a cheap hotel here on First Avenue and presumably got loaded, fuelling up for a bus ride to California to see some actual people, something he hadn’t experienced in his entire 63 days stuck on top of a mountain in the wilderness.

108: Third Street, San Francisco

Allen Ginsberg and his lover Peter Orlovsky were living here on Lower Third Street “by the water tanks and the railway tracks” in early September 1956 when Jack came down from his mountain in the Pacific Northwest and made a beeline for civilisation. Jack had stayed in this neighbourhood in 1950, checking into the Cameo Hotel after one of his arguments with Neal, but on this trip it was all forgotten as Kerouac rounded up Cassady, Ginsberg and Gregory Corso in a Broadway coffeeshop and they carried their reunion party over to Allen’s place. A very soused Jack, Allen and Gregory were photographed for Mademoiselle magazine.

109: Wheeling, West Virginia

It was in while trundling through West Virgina in November ‘56 – Allen, Jack and some strangers helping some other guy get his car cross country to New York – that Kerouac drove a car for the first and probably only time in his life. Where exactly this took place is unclear, but Wheeling seems a poetic choice to place the credit.

110: 1219 Yates Street, Orlando, Florida

Jack’s sister Nin lived here through the late ’50s, her brother often rambling through and staying for varying lengths of time, starting in December 1954. He came again in December 1956, having just learned that Viking Press had accepted “On the Road” for publication, but he would soon ship out for Tangier. After “Road” came out Jack bought a house for his mother and him around the corner on Clouser.

111: Old Saybrook, Connecticut

Flushed with the news that “On the Road” was finally going to be published, Jack came to Coonecticut in 1957 with Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky to see John Clellon Holmes (below). They stayed the weekend with the author of “Go” (in which Jack was “Gene Pasternak”), who had drawn so much of his inspiration from Kerouac in the late ’40s.
On September 9, 1962, Kerouac began a week-long visit with Clellon Holmes that started with Jack doing some well-intended but fruitless house-hunting in nearby Essex and Deep River and ended with his old buddy pouring him into a taxi bound for Lowell, with reassurances to the driver that Kerouac, though pissed as a newt, was gentle as a lamb. He handed Jack a massive snifter of brandy to keep him company on the ride.
In late ‘65 Kerouac had a couple of Florida friends drive him up for another visit here with Clellon Holmes, who was among a handful of beat writers at Jack’s funeral four years later.

112: Tangier, Morocco

In 1957 William Burroughs lived at the Villa Muniria, at the corner of Cook Street et de Calle Magallanes in the port city’s ancient medina district. Tangier was in other times home to the painters Delacroix and Matisse and the writers Tennessee Williams and Jean Genet.

Burroughs finally succeeded in kicking his drug habit with a radical apomorphine treatment in London and, returning to Tangiers, fuelled instead by marijuana and coffee, began writing what would become “Naked Lunch” at top speed for hours at a time, letting the pages of yellow foolscap fall to the floor as they were finished. He then summoned his New York friends, and Kerouac arrived on the SS Slovenia in January, taking the room above Bill’s, and Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky came in March, just before Jack moved on, having finished typing up the manuscript – and giving it its title (Burroughs had wanted to call the novel “Word Hoard”). Olympia Press in Paris published it in 1959 and it was promptly banned in the US, only emerging after Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” was cleared of obscenity charges in 1962.

Below, from left, Paul Bowles, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Gregory Corso and a friend in Tangier.

113: The “Beat Hotel”, Paris

The Relais Hotel du Vieux at 9 Rue Git-le-Coeur in the Latin Quarter occupies the site of the so-called “Beat Hotel”, which in 1957 and ‘58 counted among its guests Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Gregory Corso, although Kerouac never came by.

For 10 years it was the original “live-in retreat and study centre”, but it was torn down in 1967.

Burroughs completed the text of “Naked Lunch” there and began a lifelong collaboration with Brion Gysin, who introduced him to the “cut-up” technique of writing composition. There, too, Ginsberg wrote his moving poem “Kaddish” for his late mother and Corso wrote the mushroom-cloud-shaped poem “Bomb”.

114: La Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris

Jack left Tangier in April 1957 and had a rummage through Paris, visiting the Louvre, among other places, before moving on to England. At the beginning of June 1965 he flew to Paris from Miami intent on tracing his Bretagne ancestry, but the allure of the bars prevented him from making much progress here at the Bibliotheque Nationale or in Brest (he missed his initial flight). Back in Florida he wrote up his woozy adventure in seven nights as “Satori In Paris”.

115: Brest, France

Jack managed to finally peel himself away from the Paris bistros in June 1965 and catch a flight to Brest, but his constant boozing kept him from tracing his “Kerouack” roots anywhere close to his imagined royalty. “My manners, abominable at times, can be sweet,” he wrote of the trip. “As I grew older I became a drunk. Why? Because I like ecstasy of the mind. I’m a wretch. But I love love.”

116: The Marlton Hotel, NYC
In January ‘57 Jack spent a few days at the Marlton, which stood at this intersection. He wanted to be be alone so he could retype the manuscript for “The Subterraneans”.

117: El Paso, Texas

It’s hard to imagine what Jack’s mother must have made of El Paso when they rolled through town in May ‘57, en route from Orlando to California, but she must have taken some comfort in the deep Catholicism of the Hispanic South, and they made a point of crossing the border to Juarez so she could see the grand cathedral there. Jack wanted her to see all of “his places” along the road before they got to Berkeley, where he was going to link up with Ginsberg and the burgeoning SF beat scene.

Jack had been through El Paso in April ‘56, having hitched rides from Florida through Georgia. He got the bus to El Paso, paid for rides to LA, hopped a freight train to Santa Barbara, then rode the Midnight Ghost freight to Frisco. His destination on that trip was Gary Snyder’s shack in Mill Valley.

118: Berkeley Way

Just back from Africa and Europe in the spring of ‘57, Jack talked his mother in Orlando into moving to California with him. They arrived by Greyhound on May 6 and rented this cottage at 1943 Berkeley Way. By mid-May, though, she’d had enough of his new literary crowd and he escorted back to Orlando, again by bus, to her new home on Clouser Avenue. Having got to Phil Whalen’s cottage (Ginsberg’s former residence) on Milvia Way, they took cheap hotel rooms nearby until Jack found them this place.

Memere was out shopping and Jack was alone here the day a box of advance copies of “On the Road” arrived. Neal came around later and Jack presented him a copy of the novel that would make them both famous. Kerouac wrote later that there was a strange look on Neal’s face and fretted that he might have offended him. It amounted to a premonition that nothing between them would ever be the same.

119: 1418 Clouser Avenue, Orlando

The house where Jack was living when “On the Road” was finally published in 1957 now belongs to the Jack Kerouac Writers in Residence Project of Orlando, Inc. The project makes “Kerouac House” available to aspiring writers rent-free for six months at a time.

Having given Berkeley a shot in the spring of ‘57, Gabrielle Kerouac was ensconced in this home by her son, who didn’t stick around himself: He had Mexico on his mind, and left in July, but was back here again by mid-August.

Joyce Glassman, Jack’s girlfriend in New York in ‘57 and an aspiring writer herself, wired him $30 for bus fare so he could come up for the official launch of “Road” at the beginning of September.

120: Thunder at the newsstand, NYC

At midnight on September 5, 1957, Jack and Joyce Glassman (now Johnson) went to a newsstand near the subway entrance at 66th and Broadway to pick up a copy of the New York Times. They knew it would contain the first review of “On the Road”. Jack read it and turned to Joyce. He seemed, she said in her 1984 memoir “Minor Characters”, to know he should feel happier than he was. Times critic Gilbert Millstein (filling in for the regular guy, who would do his own, less appreciative review later) called the novel “an authentic work of art” and “a major novel”, and its publication a “historic occasion”. Jack’s world turned upside down.

In “Minor Characters” Joyce wrote of the glowing first review in the : “It was all very thrilling – but frightening too. I’d read lots of reviews from my two years in publishing: None of them made pronouncements like this about history. What would history demand of Jack? What would a generation expect of its avatar? I remember wishing Allen was around to make sense of all this, instead of being in Paris. Jack kept shaking his head. He didn’t look happy, exactly, but strangely puzzled, as if he couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t happier than he was. We returned to the apartment to go back to sleep. Jack lay down obscure for the last time in his life. The ringing phone woke him the next morning and he was famous.”

In 2007, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of “On the Road”, Slate magazine published the recollections of several of Kerouac’s friends, including Joyce Johnson.

“When Jack published ‘On the Road’ and also when Allen Ginsberg published ‘Howl’,” she said, “it was like taking the cork out of a bottle. The audience had been waiting for someone to say these things. I think that’s why the whole thing caught on so quickly.

“I met Jack when I was 21. I had met Allen Ginsberg through the Columbia scene when I was going to Barnard; he knew my friend Elise Cowen. Allen had just come back from San Francisco, in the fall of ‘56, and was staying with my friend Elise and with his lover, Peter Orlovsky, and Jack had come back from San Francisco too. In January, Allen decided to arrange a blind date between me and Jack — not for any romantic reasons, but because I was that rare thing: a girl with her own apartment.

“I was at Elise’s apartment one night when the phone rang, and it was Jack calling from 18th Street, and he said he was at Howard Johnson’s and did I want to meet him. I would recognise him because he was wearing a red-and-black-checked shirt. I was excited because I had just read ‘The Town and the City’ and was struggling to leave home, and it seemed to me ‘The Town and the City’ was very much about that struggle.

“He seemed immediately larger than life. He just didn’t look like anyone in New York. He had a ruddy complexion and jet-black hair. He looked like he had just walked in from the woods. He was surprisingly diffident at first, but as we started talking he found out that I also was a writer, and began to tell stories; I told him I liked Henry James, and he didn’t approve at all. As he often was, Jack was dead broke the night I met him; he was down to his last five bucks. He said that he’d heard I had an apartment near Columbia and said, I love the neighbourhood, and suggested we go up there. I said, if you wish. And I remember we walked to the subway where TWA had put up a sign with its new slogan, ‘Fly Now Pay Later’. And Jack pointed to the sign and said that would be a good title for my novel …

“He also had mixed feelings about ‘On the Road’; he must have had. He felt that the original manuscript had been compromised by all the editing. Viking was terrified of libel and obscenity; it was a hard time to publish a book like ‘On the Road’. They really went to work on the manuscript, and also on Jack’s voice, particularly an in-house editor named Helen Taylor. When ‘On the Road’ was finally sent to Jack as a bound book, he had never seen a lot of the changes that had been made. It was a denial of his basic author’s rights. Viking didn’t treat him with respect. They weren’t going to stand by him for the long haul. In fact, they rejected three other books he’d written in the intervening years, books he really felt were greater than ‘On the Road’. It’s a shame that some of the other books aren’t well-known. The best of that late work is ‘Big Sur’.”

After the initial fanfare in New York in 1957, Jack returned to Clouser Avenue to write “Dharma Bums”, which he completed on December 9. But the era of the phonecalls and reporters’ pleading had begun – most memorably there was an interview with Mike Wallace in the New York Post – and the noise only got louder when Grove Press put “The Subterraneans” out in February ‘58. Jack was soon house-hunting in New York.

121: Gilbert Street, Northport, NY
Man, Jack always loved having a football field nearby wherever he lived, didn’t he? He came up from Orlando to househunt in February ‘58 and bought this place at 34 Gilbert the next month, moving Memere up in April. She laid down the law about having dope and certain of his friends in the house because Cassady had just been thrown in San Quentin for five years for selling pot to undercover cops.

“Dharma Bums” was published on October 15, ‘58, followed in April by “Doctor Sax” and “Maggie Cassidy” in July ‘59, but these were from his “back catalogue” – Jack didn’t write another book for two years, instead issuing a stream of magazine articles and attempting a play with Neal called “The Beat Generation”. Meanwhile there were always reporters at the door and “beatnik” parodies in the media. Kerouac fumed at a TV show that featured a “Jack Crackerjack”, and Truman Capote’s quip about “On the Road” didn’t help his mood one little bit. “That’s not writing,” Capote infamously said on television, “that’s typing!”

MGM bought the film rights to “The Subterraneans” for $15,000 and Tri-Way Productions proffered $25,000 to turn “On the Road” into a movie, though Kerouac only saw $2,500 of that before Tri-Way went bankrupt. Ranald MacDougall, who also directed Liz Taylor in “Cleopatra”, handled the Robert Thom script for 1960’s “The Subterraneans”, in which Mardou was as white as Leslie Caron and George Peppard played Jack’s character. Also in the cast were Roddy McDowall, Jim Hutton and Arte Johnson.

122: The Kettle of Fish, NYC

Now the Fat Black Pussycat, this used to be the famous folkie bar Kettle of Fish, where Dylan supposedly wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind” and, a few years earlier, in the late ’50s, a newly published and very drunken Kerouac stirred up some patrons to the point one of them socked him so hard his head smacked against the ground and there were fears of brain damage. It wasn’t the first time Kerouac got beat up, and it wouldn’t be the last, but he got a little quieter … for a while. The Kettle of Fish is still running on Christopher Street, where it displaced Norman Mailer’s favourite joint, the Lion’s Head.

123: The Village Vanguard, NYC

At the height of his fame in December 1958 Jack was booked for a week of readings at the popular Village Vanguard nightclub, with Steve Allen, Al Cohn and Zoot Sims providing the backing music for his poetry and ad libs. The engagement had to be cut short, though, because Jack was invariably bombed out of his mind, and for a curtain closer one night he puked into the piano. Kerouac dumped the suit for the 1959 college reading pictured at left.

124: Hunter College, NYC

Hunter was the setting for a classic Kerouac smackdown on November 6, 1958. It hosted a “debate” on “Is There a Beat Generation?” with Kingsley Amis, Ashley Montague and James Wechsler joining Jack on the panel. Drunk and disorderly, the “king of the beats” scored random points in demonstrating that All is Nothing etc etc and pissing off Wechsler by fiddling with his fedora.

125: Los Angeles

Jack was a bright comet in the American media sky when he returned to LA in November 1959, the celebrated author of five sensational novels and one that everyone ignored (”The Town and the City”).

This time he jetted into town to appear on the TV show hosted by his club and recording collaborator Steve Allen (left).

Buxom actress Mamie Van Doren was his date for dinner afterward and people crowded around everywhere he went, including the San Francisco premiere of the nutty beat film “Pull My Daisy”, which starred Ginsberg and Gregory Corso and which Jack narrated.

The words “bois terous” and “booze” were greatly in evidence for a few days before his pals managed to pile him into an eastbound car driven by Frisco poet Lew Welch, who happily made frequent stops at liquor stores all the way across the USA en route to his mum’s place in Long Island.

126: 49 Earl Avenue, Northport

Now (suddenly) the author of no fewer than six published novels, Jack couldn’t hack living in the middle of Florida for long, nor did his mother like it much, so in October 1959 they moved back to Northport, to 49 Earl Avenue.

The following month Jack flew to Los Angeles to appear on “The Steve Allen Show”, had dinner afterwards with blonde screen bombshell Mamie Van Doren, attended the San Francisco premiere of the film “Pull My Daisy”, which starred Ginsberg and Gregory Corso and which he narrated, enjoyed a few stormy drinking sessions with friends old and new and was driven back here, one bottle of whisky after another, by Frisco poet Lew Welch.

In May 1960 Jack was drinking in New York’s Bowery when he took a nasty spill and smacked his head, which enforced some sobriety and the first of his many experiences of delirium tremens. The following month, though, “Tristessa” came out, as did the movie version of “The Subterraneans”, and the Kerouac media whirlwind wasn’t about to slow down. He turned down an offer from Holiday magazine to tour Europe and do a write-up, instead seeking refuge of a sorts in Big Sur’s isolated Bixby Canyon, a debacle that resulted in his return here in September a moody, jagged mess.

Neal Cassady visited him here in August 1963, and a year later picked him up here to drive him into New York City for his “historic” summit with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters at a Park Avenue apartment. Jack and Memere left Earl Avenue in August ‘64, retreating once again to Florida.

127: Bixby Canyon

Jack was already against the ropes in his battle with inner demons and the demon drink by the time he reached Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s cabin in the woods above Big Sur in late 1960, and from the start of his stay he was freaked out by strange sounds and sights, fuelled by the primal surroundings, not to mention the fact he was reading “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” at the time.

He soon enough brought in his friends in for company, to try and elude the imminent necessity of facing himself alone, but he ended up having a nervous breakdown. Later he wrote in “Big Sur” that “to be afraid of nature is to be afraid of yourself”, but it wasn’t nature stalking him through life.

Kerouac arrived in San Francisco aboard the California Zephyr from Chicago, planning to go straight to Bixby Canyon, as he’d arranged by phone and letter with Ferlinghetti. But instead he went to Lawrence’s bookshop, City Lights, and met up with his pals for a two-day bender. He woke up at the end of it in his skid-row hotel of choice alongside Phil Whalen and Rob Lavigne, dragged himself to the bus station and at 2am arrived in Monterey, from where cab took him the 14 miles to Bixby. Ferlinghetti found him asleep in a meadow near the cabin in the morning, and that afternoon drove him to Monterey to buy groceries for three weeks, after which he would return for a resupply trip.

In “Big Sur”, which many regard as his last decent novel, Jack vividly describes his stay in the canyon beneath Bixby Bridge, one of the world’s highest single-span concrete bridges, towering nearly 300 feet over the gully.

After two weeks he’d had enough and tried hitching into Monterey (his first time hitchhiking in nine years), but there were no rides so walked half the way before a trucker picked him up. Back in Frisco he lodged in his cheap hotel and went again to City Lights, where Ferlinghetti failed to persuade him to get back to the cabin. Jack went to Mike’s Place, a bar nearby, with Whalen and Lew Welch, then other bars in East Bay, and phoned Neal at his home in Los Gatos.

Cassady, who’d just got out of San Quentin, invited the gang out to his place and Jack played Samuel Johnson, introducing Bosley Neal as the fabled Dean Moriarty. Neal had to get to work in San Jose, and everyone followed him so they could watch him put on one of his awesome performances capping tires. Jack spent another two days recovering at Whalen’s apartment, and when Neal phoned to say he’d been laid off and needed $100 to pay his rent, Jack got Welch to drive him out to Los Gatos. Ferlinghetti and others came along in a second car, they picked up Neal and his family and everyone went to Bixby. They cooked steaks over a bonfire on the beach, drove up to some hot springs and the Nepenthe restaurant in Carmel, famously built out of the cabin that the then-lovers Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles bought on a war bonds tour. Everyone returning to Frisco the next afternoon, leaving Jack in terrible shape at the cabin.

Kerouac perked up again when Neal and Michael McClure and their families showed up again and the party resumed. (Neal by then had daughters Cathy and Jami and nine-year-old son John. You can read a quirky tale of John’s return to the picnic site a few years ago with the guys behind the wonderful BeatMuseumOnWheels.com.

That’s John with his folks at right. The next day Jack travelled to Los Gatos and Neal drove him into Frisco to meet his new girlfriend, Jackie Gibson, who decided she preferred Kerouac and got him to stay with her a week. Jack got Welch to drive him and Jackie and her kid to Bixby, with detour past Neal’s “to pick up clothes” but really so Carolyn could get a look at Jackie. He didn’t get the fireworks he was hoping for, and at the cabin Jack got mean drunk and ended up with a case of the DTs that’s grimly described in the last few pages of “Big Sur”. Jack Kerouac, it seemed, had reached the end of the road.

In 2007, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of “On the Road”, Slate magazine published the recollections of several of Kerouac’s friends, including Carolyn Cassady, who had been the inspiration for Camille in “On the Road”:

“My first impression of it was that Jack was unusual in that great celebration of all kinds of life. Whether it was rivers or mountains and Indian names or hobos. He was so unjudgmental and so thrilled by everything that was alive. The glorification of nature — I thought it was pretty rare. Our generation was reacting to the horrors of World War II. So what they were really trying to do, both of them, in their living and reading about things, was to find out, Why are we all here? What is life all about? They were looking for ‘it’.

“There were an awful lot of people concerned about that. That was their big quest, all of ours, really. Then the hippies came along. They thought Jack gave them freedom to turn the world into chaos. They thought he was giving them carte blanche to be selfish. That’s why he vowed to drink himself to death …

“People seemed to think that he was a serious poet; in some of his photos he looks like one. But really he was a hunk, a football star and a klutz. He was always making faces and using funny voices. He was paranoid, at times, but otherwise, he was a cut-up. I never did see him looking all that serious, though he was down in the dumps a lot. He was so self-conscious, and terribly shy. That was of course one thing he admired about Neal — Neal was so swift and graceful. Opposites attract. Jack was the observer, Neal the actor. Of course, it all comes out very energetically when he wrote, because that was how he felt; in person he couldn’t behave that way. But you felt his compassion and his kindness.”

128: Wisconsin Street, San Francisco

The Bancroft Library at the University of California Berkeley credits this photo to early 1959 and says it was taken by Kirby Ferlinghetti in front of the family’s house at 706 Wisconsin Street.

Poet and City Lights owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti lived here in 1960 when Jack crashed through town in his abortive pursuit of some peace and quiet. Lawrence tried to deliver a measure of calm at his cabin in Bixby Canyon near Big Sur, but that effort drowned in a drunken maelstrom, and at the end of it Kerouac laid low here at his home for a few days before retreating eastward.

Ferlinghetti told Slate magazine in 2007, on the 50th anniversary of “On the Road”, that “the road doesn’t exist anymore in America”.

“There is this huge nostalgia for it. That’s one of the reasons ‘On the Road’ is more popular than ever. Kerouac is writing about an America that no longer exists and a spirit of America that no longer exists. A spirit of the open road that was a part of American literature — in Whitman, Jack London, Ginsberg, and others. The America of ‘On the Road’ was almost a pre-World War II America. It was not so different from Thomas Wolfe’s ‘Look Homeward, Angel’ …

“In ‘Dharma Bums’ there is a passage in which he describes a party in Mill Valley in great detail and makes a satire of Kenneth Rexroth, whose name in the book is the French for ‘Peanut’. Kerouac was at that party, but he was on the floor, and everyone thought he was passed out. Then later he reproduced everyone’s conversations in the book.”

129: Newton Center, Massachusetts

It was here in 1962 that Kerouac, in the company of Ginsberg, sampled some psilocycbin provided by Timothy Leary. Long dependent on benezedrine and with a healthy appetite for cannabis, Jack never took a liking to hallucinogenics. Ginsberg recalled that Jack looked out the window and said, “Walking on water wasn’t built in a day”.

But another quite credible account has Kerouac sampling hallucinogens elsewhere, and earlier. The screenwriter and novelist Dan Wakefield, in a 1996 essay in the online journal Image, said he was present at Ginsberg’s apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan one afternoon in 1961 when Leary dosed Allen, Jack and several other assembled writers with psilocybin and “see what amazing results it might produce”. Leary told Wakefield the drug made people “mellow” and suggested he talk to the often hostile Kerouac to see for himself.

“When I introduced myself to Jack, he recalled I had written an article making fun of a drunken reading he gave at a Village nightclub. He threatened to throw me out the window. I retreated, deciding the drug hadn’t taken effect … Leary gave Kerouac a pencil and a piece of blank paper and told him to create, to write something in his famous style of ‘bop prosody’. Kerouac groggily turned away, expressing no interest. Leary then reminded Jack that he was taking part in a scientific experiment, and if he didn’t do his part by writing, he wouldn’t get any more of the drug; if he wrote something, though, he’d be rewarded.

This got Kerouac’s interest; he made a grunting sound of agreement, and applied the pencil to the paper as Leary and I looked on, with heightened anticipation. Leary hovered over the scene as if expecting a miracle, and for a moment I wondered if perhaps the avatar of the Beats, with the aid of the alleged miracle drug, might spew forth the beginning of his own hallucinogenic ‘War and Peace’ or turned-on ‘Moby Dick’.”

Jack filled up the paper with parallel lines, turned it sideways and drew some lines across them, then handed the paper to Leary and went to lie down. “Leary looked at the paper, and laughed nervously. He said there might be another burst of creativity later, but I thought I’d seen enough. Kerouac wrote later in the Chicago Tribune that he believed the psilocybin had harmed him. Dennis McNally writes in ‘Desolation Angel’ that Jack at age 41 spoke of his psychedelic experience with Leary as ‘a frightening descent into lostness that Kerouac now swore had ruined him’.”

Meanwhile, over at WordsAreImportant.com, Leary himself recalls his own bum trip with Jack, though the setting is given as “New York, 1960″: “Kerouac continued to drink and rant like a sailor in a port-town bar, striding around the room, jumping on chairs, declaiming funny, poetic gibberish. He leaped on the couch. ‘I’m King of the Beatniks. I’m François Villon, vagabond poet-rogue of the open highway.

Listen while I play you hot-lick, spiral improvisations from my tenor typewriter.’ It was charming, witty, and lovable, but when the drug started to expose my tender tissues, the noise became jarring. I longed for the familiar mushroom silence. By this time I had shared voyages with over a hundred persons, but no one had tried to control, dominate, overwhelm the experience like Kerouac. He was imposing his saloon style on it, and for me it was simply too much.”

Leary’s experimental commune in Newtown Center was on Kenwood Avenue, but I thought the placemark might be more fun hovering over this paisley-shaped location.

130: 1309 Alfred Drive, Orlando

Still riding a tsunami of success but badly battered by the overindulgences that came with it, Jack sold the Earl Avenue home on Long Island and moved here in April ‘61. He spent some more time in Mexico City in the summer and on his return here in August hammered out “Big Sur” in 10 straight nights.

In January ‘62 Kerouac was in New York on a 30-day binge and the following month met his daughter there for the first time in a child-support session, which may have prompted him on his return to Orlando so spend some quality time with his nephew, Nin’s boy Paul. In July that year Jack took a couple of leisurely trips north, seeing Old Orchard Beach in Maine and Cape Cod in Massachusetts, possible eyeing new escape routes lest the press and the alcohol get too heavy again.

131: 7 Judyann Court, Northport

On Christmas Eve 1962 Jack and his mum rode the train from Orlando to their new home, their third in Northport. Jack may well have taken Neal Cassady over to his pet drinking and pool hangout, Gunther’s Bar, when his old road companion showed up for a visit in August that year.

132: 5155 10th Avenue North, St Petersburg, Florida

Jack and his mother moved to St Petersburg in late August 1964. He liked to drink and play pool at the Tic Tac Club not far from here, and later at the Wild Boar Tavern near the University of South Florida (which coincidentally has the Salvador Dali Museum as its neighbour – Kerouac met Dali in 1956). On September 19 Jack’s sister Nin died, and during the winter he was arrested for urinating in public. Right, Jack and his mother.

133: Chapel Hill, North Carolina

A lovely stop on a trip by car that Jack made in November ‘65 with his St Petersburg pals Cliff Anderson and Paddy Mitchell en route to visit John Clellon Holmes in Connecticut and then on to Lowell to see Tony Sampas and his sister Stella (whom Jack would soon marry). He carried on to Albany, New York, with Tony Sampas.

134: 20 Bristol Avenue, Hyannis, Massachu- setts

In yet another coastal lap, Kerouac sold the St Petersburg home in March 1966 after buying this house in Hyannis, Massachusetts, and moved up with his mother in May. It coincided with the publication of “Satori in Paris” by Grove Press.

This is where Jack was living when Ann Charters visited him while compiling his official bibliography, a project that resulted in her remarkable biography, “Kerouac”.

And it was in Hyannis on November 18 ‘66 that Jack married Stella Sampas of the Lowell Sampases, the family he had idealised in “The Town and the City”. Stella’s older brother Sebastien (Sammy) had been Jack’s best friend as a teenager, and her younger brother, John, became executor of the Kerouac Estate after she died in 1990. in Hyannis. Jack had genuine affection for Stella, but he also needed someone to be a nurse to his ailing mother. In December he was twice arrested for being drunk in public, and the following month they moved to Lowell.

The local writer Robert Boles arranged for Jack to meet fellow novelist Kurt Vonnegut, who also lived in Barnstable. “I knew Kerouac only at the end of his life,” Vonnegut recalled, “which is to say there was no way for me to know him at all, since he had become a pinwheel … I doubt that Kerouac knew anything about me or my work, or even where he was.

“He was crazy. He called Boles, who is black, ‘a blue-gummed nigger’. He said that Jews were the real Nazis, and that Allen Ginsberg had been told by the communists to befriend Kerouac, in order that they might gain control of American young people, whose leader he was. This was pathetic. There were clearly thunderstorms in the head of this once charming and just and intelligent man. He wished to play poker, so I dealt some cards. There were four hands, I think – one for Boles, one for Kerouac, one for Jane [Kurt’s wife at the time], one for me. Kerouac picked up the remainder of the deck, and he threw it across the kitchen.”

135: 271 Sanders Avenue, Lowell

Jack returned to Lowell in January 1967, with his ailing mother and his new wife Stella. Here he wrote “Vanity of Duluoz” in between trips to Nicky’s Bar. When Carolyn Cassady phoned him on February 5, 1968, to report that Neal had been found dead in Mexico the day before, Jack went on a bender that ended with him spending a night in jail. In fact his drinking got so bad that by the end of ‘68 Stella persuaded him to move south again. Supposedly, on the eve of their leaving, Jack disappeared and wasn’t found again until two days later, sleeping it off in a field.

In November 1967, 15-year-old wild child Jan Kerouac – Jack’s only offspring (by Joan Haverty in 1952) – came to visit him here. She’d met him just once before, when she was nine and her mother had him in court in New York over child support, and she never would again. In her own autobiography “Baby Driver”, she recalled coming in the house to find him “sat in a rocking chair about one foot from the Tv, upending a fifth of whiskey and … watching ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’.” The Sampas kin gave her a boisterous welcome, berating Jack for not telling them he had a daughter, while her father reacted with “shrugs and uncertain smiles”.

“When the doorway back-slapping and bantering was done with, he went back to his rocking again, calling to his brethren across the room, ‘Hey, why doesn’t somebody turn this thing down, I can’t hear myself think!’ This seemed odd, for he was closer to the TV than anyone else in the room. But someone did turn it down for him, and he continued to guzzle his giant baby bottle, rocking himself as if in a cradle.” Jan died in 1996 of a rare blood disease.

136: Nicky’s Bar, Lowell

Jack’s boyhood friend and, late in life, his brother-in-law Nick Sampas owned and managed this place during Kerouac’s last residency in Lowell, in 1967, and Jack was a regular. It’s now a restaurant.

137: Montreal

Jack was invited to the land of his forebears in January 1967 to appear on the TV show “Sel de la Semaine”. He made the drive with Lowell friend Joe Chaput and took in the town of Riviere du Loup and visited Expo ‘67, the World’s Fair.

138: Lisbon, Madrid, Geneva, Munich, Stuttgart

In 1968 Kerouac and the Lowell brothers Tony and Nick Sampas enjoyed a tourist’s ramble through Europe, visiting Lisbon, Madrid, Geneva, Munich and Stuttgart. The previous year Jack had been in Italy promoting the just-released “Big Sur”.

143: 5169 10th Avenue North, St Petersburg

In September ‘68 Jack’s friend Joe Chaput drove him and his mother here to what turned out to be Jack’s final home, at 5169 10th Avenue North. They were back on the same street, a few doors up.

He wrote to his first wife, Edie Parker: “I’m not rich like you think but the house is a beaut, the yard has fenced-in grass, shrub, tree and jungled area: There’s a screened porch. Walk to store. Hurricane proof Spanish modern CASTLE, which explains where all the money went.” But he wasn’t happy about returning to “the town of the newly wed and the living dead”. His mother and Stella wanted to get him away from his drinking buddies in Lowell, but in St Pete’s he got friends to drive him into Tampa, to the Wild Boar or the Shipdeck at Treasure Island.

Jimmy Carter biographer Douglas Brinkley, chosen by the Kerouac Estate in 2000 to sift through 200 volumes of Kerouac’s archives stashed in a Lowell bank vault – letters and other writings by Kerouac from age 14 to his death, found Jack by this stage in his life eschewing the beat movement as some of its leading lights, most notably Ginsberg, became more politicised. Stung by (among other things) an August ‘68 Boston Globe article entitled “Off the Road…the Celtic Twilight of Jack Kerouac”, Jack reunited in New York with Burroughs and Lucien Carr, then turned around and sold all the letters he’d received from Ginsberg and Cassady to the University of Texas and those from Burroughs to Columbia.

One day in the fall he swallowed a large dose of LSD at a buddy’s cabin in the woods outside St Pete’s, but he was still full of bile for the hippies among his old friends. He wrote a syndicated newspaper article called “After Me the Deluge” (retitled in the press “I’m a Bippie in the Middle”) in which he expressed dismay that hippies, let alone the Yippies, had evolved from his work.

“What these bozos and their friends are up to now is simply the last act in their original adoption and betrayal of any truly ‘beat’ credo,” Kerouac wrote of his former friends. “Now that we’re all getting to be middle-aged I can see that they’re just frustrated hysterical provocateurs and attention-seekers with nothing on their mind but rancor towards ‘America’ and the life of ordinary people. They have never written about ordinary people with any love, you may have noticed.”

As the 1960s progressed, Kerouac could not understand how Ginsberg could flash the peace sign and pronounce the imminent “fall of America” while ignoring, as Kerouac saw it, mass murders by China’s Mao Zedong, a brute worse than Stalin.

In 2004 Brinkley published “Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954″.
Fans still come by to see this house in “Salt Petersburg”, as Jack called the city. It was, he said, “a good place to come to die”.

144: One last will in St Pete’s

One morning in the late summer of 1969 an evidently very drunk Jack walked into the Central Avenue law office of Fred Bryson, establishing his identity by producing from a brown groceries bag a tattered copy of “On the Road” with his picture on the cover. “It’s obvious since that picture that the guy’s hit a few bumps in the road, but it’s Jack Kerouac,” Bryson told the St Petersburg Times in 2002.

Jack wanted to make a will for his mountain of personal letters, manuscripts and books, valued in court papers at less than $30,000, including this three-bedroom home, leaving everything to his mother, or if she died before him, to his nephew Paul.

Thirty-three years hence, homeless in California, “Little Paul”, as he was called in some of Jack’s novels, would still be seeking his day in court and a share of the fortune.

145: Cactus Club, St Petersburg

Who’s to say if this frizzy place, which calls itself the Cactus Club, isn’t the “Cactus Bar” mentioned as the joint where Jack got himself beaten up (yet again) in the fall of 1969? He died less than a month later of internal haemorrhaging.

146: St Anthony’s Hospital, St Petersburg

Jack was vomiting blood when he was brought by ambulance to St Anthony’s early on the morning of October 21, 1969. He’d been suffering with a hernia and hadn’t felt well in weeks, but he kept up his routine of sitting at a typewriter in a dimly lit room and typing all night just for the pleasure of it.

On the morning of the 21st he made an entry in his diary and went to the bathroom, but when Stella heard him vomiting and it sounded different than his usual toilet purgings, she called the ambulance. There was an emergency operation to try and stem the massive internal bleeding, but to no avail. Kerouac was 47. A wake was held in St Pete’s before Stella and Jack’s mother took his body back to Lowell.

147: “Funeral Row”, Lowell

So called because there were and are a string of funeral homes along this stretch of Pawtucket Street, this was at least formerly the site of the Amadee Archambault & Sons Funeral Home, where Jack’s wake was held on October 23, 1969. Today an Archambault Funeral Home is listed as being across the river on VFW Highway. Jack’s wake was held at Archambault. There was an open casket, showing Kerouac laid out in a checked sports jacket and a red bowtie, clutching rosary beads in his hands.

148: Nuestra Senora del Carmen

This church used to be St Jean Baptiste Roman Catholic Church, which Jack once described as “the ponderous chartreuse cathedral of the slums”. His funeral was held here on October 24, 1969.

149: Final rest

The ground-level marker for Jack and his last wife Stella at Edson Roman Catholic Cemetery often sees fans congregating and leaving half-full bottles of wine or beer, poems and other offerings. The stone reads “Ti Jean – John L Kerouac – he honored life” and is also inscribed as the resting place of Stella, who died in 1990.

At the burial on October 24, 1969, Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, John Clellon Holmes and Peter Orlovsky were among those who dropped roses on Jack’s coffin. Corso recorded the scene with a home-movie camera. Above, Kerouac’s grave with a portrait of Neal Cassady placed there by Neal’s son John, on a visit a few years ago with the guys from BeatMuseumOnWheels.com.

150: The Kerouac Commemorative

Also known as Kerouac Park, this little square was opened on June 25, 1988, two years after the Corporation for the Celebration of Jack Kerouac in Lowell drew 300 people to its inaugural fund-raiser, a poetry reading and bull session with Ginsberg and Gregory Corso (Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Joyce Glassman Johnson and John Updike starred at later such events).

City Council decided in 1986 to proceed with the memorial by a vote of 8-1 – the lone dissenter didn’t think Kerouac was a proper role model for American youth – and Texas sculptor Ben Woitena won the nod to design it. The benches, columns, brick and granite pavers form a mandala, with red bricks and light grey stone on the ground as a combination Christian cross and “entry to the road” arrow. The eight three-sided granite panels, each eight feet high, have 15 passages from 11 of Jack’s books.

The commemorative’s unveiling was attended by Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, fellow beat poets Robert Creeley and Michael McClure, Ray Manzerek of the Doors, old pal Henri Cru and Jack’s wife Stella and first wife Edie Parker.

151: Lowell National Historic Park

The LNHP’s office here is the place to go if you’re visiting Lowell with visions of Kerouac in mind. The staff will provide directions and let you know if you’re in time for any of the commemorative activities held regularly in the city. Lowell, which was the first American city to be declared a National Historical Park (the “park” opened in 1978), celebrates its most famous son with a week of events each October.

152: Working People Exhibit

Located inside the Mogan Cultural Centre on French Street, this arm of Lowell National Historic Park displays one of Jack’s typewriters and his rucksack among its memorabilia.
When Jack died someone put the value of his worldly assets at $91. The figure may be spurious, but in any event it couldn’t have been much. His estate managed his writings well, however, and today it’s worth something like $10 million.

In the early 1990s, Jan Kerouac – Jack’s ignored only child, born to his second wife Joan Haverty in 1952, who’d had a chaotic upbringing that involved a lot of hitchhiking and, once, a marriage proposal from Neal Cassady’s son John – launched what became a protracted and bitter legal dispute with John Sampas, owner of the Jack Kerouac Estate, over the signature on Gabrielle Kerouac’s will that left Jack’s archives and personal effects to Stella.

Jan and Gerald Nicosia, who wrote the terrific Kerouac biography “Memory Babe”, contended that Jack’s mother’s signature on the will had been forged. Jan, who published two autobiographical books, “Baby Driver” and “Trainsong”, died in 1996 of a rare blood disease, and the case was forgotten until 2002, when Paul Blake Jr, the son of Jack’s sister Caroline and only surviving direct blood relation, produced a letter his Uncle Jack had allegedly written him the day before he died.

Jack wrote Paul, at the time with the Air Force in Alaska, to say he was divorcing Stella and leaving everything to his mother, or if she died first, to Paul, “because we’re old buddies … and not to leave a dingblasted fucking goddamn thing to my wife’s one hundred Greek relatives”.

The Sampas family, claiming this letter was a fake, sold the Kerouac legacy to the Berg collection of the New York Public library in 2001 for an undisclosed amount, and plans were made to release it to the public by 2005 or the completion of David Brinkley’s authorised Kerouac biography – whichever came first. A month before the sale, the original “On the Road” scroll manuscript fetched $2.43 million at auction. It’s now touring the US, just as its author had.

153: Water Row Press

Jeffrey Weinberg once sold Johnny Depp one of Jack Kerouac’s old raincoats for $15,000. Weinberg owns Water Row Press, somewhere in this neighbourhood of Sudbury, Massachusetts, a shop that specialises in beat-era materials. It was to Jeffrey whom Kerouac Estate executor John Sampas turned in 2001 to help him sell some of Jack’s stuff.

The St Petersburg (Florida) Times reported in 2002 that Sampas took Weinberg to his Victorian home in Lowell, where Weinberg found “Kerouac clutter everywhere – manuscripts of ‘Mexico City Blues’ and ‘The Subterraneans’, overflowing filing cabinets, the baseball game Kerouac invented on the floor. Weinberg began selling books from Kerouac’s personal library, his paintings, letters, original manuscripts and first editions that the author had inscribed for Stella.”

Weinberg in turn contacted Michael Horowitz, the owner of Flashback Books in San Francisco, who happened to be both Tim Leary’s former archivist and the father of Winona Ryder, who happened to be dating Johnny Depp at the time, and Depp was another major Kerouac fan. “Depp,” the Times said, “came to Lowell and tried on Kerouac’s hats, shoes, raincoats, jackets and paid $15,000 for the raincoat, $5,000 for a suitcase, $3,000 for a rain hat, $10,000 for a tweed coat and $5,000 for a letter Kerouac had written Cassady.”

Sampas, who is apparently the guy who collects the stuff Jack’s fans leaves at his grave, assured the newspaper that most of Jack’s letters, journals and notebooks and all his original manuscripts were still locked up awaiting biographer David Brinkley’s perusal – he’s only sold a few items to pay for an archive catalogue and some office equipment. It was Sampas’ nephew who on May 22, 2001, sold the original “On the Road” scroll to pro football team owner Jim Irsay for $2.43 million at Christies in New York City. Irsay, to his credit, put the scroll back “on the road” – it tours American schools and libraries.

154: A Jersey pub shrine

This is more or less the location of the Shepherd and the Knucklehead Pub at 529 Belmont Avenue in Haledon, New Jersey, which describes itself as “the home shrine of Jack Kerouac, and just down the street from where ‘On the Road’s’ real trip began”. By that the owners of the microbrew pub probably mean Allen Ginsberg’s hometown of Paterson, which is indeed nearby. The bar has an open-mic poetry night every sunday and is crammed with Kerouac memorabilia. “Here,” they brewmeisters say, “we make a virtue out of restlessness.”

155: The Beat Hotel, California

Jack probably would have turned tail and fled, but Steve Lowe is a fan (and a bigger fan of William Burroughs), and says his two-storey, eight-unit inn in Desert Hot Springs, California, is a living museum that caters to writers. The restored 1957 motel has paintings and photographs by Burroughs in each room – and a vintage manual typewriter.

156: The Beat Museum, Monterey, California

The Beat Museum on West Franklin Street in Monterey can be toured online. It’s a treasure trove of information accumulated and extrapolated upon by a couple of Compleat Kerouac Nuts who spend a lot of time on the road themselves. Their Beat Museum on Wheels is an outreach programme that takes the good word(s) of beatdom to communities, high schools and colleges across the USA. The resulting travelogue blog is pretty amusing and has a few lovely surprises.

157: Up, up and away

158: Somewhere in America

“Whee, Sal!” Dean Moriarty exults to the boy next to him in the from seat of a ‘47 Cadillac. “We gotta go and never stop going till we get there.”
“Where we going, man?” Sal Paradise asks.
“I don’t know but we gotta go!”

Jack Kerouac travelled to Mexico, Canada, Morocco and across Europe, but it’s only on the roads of America you’ll truly find his spirit. This placemark sits on the geographic centre of the 48 contiguous United States, a fitting spot for a final word about the book, the man and the myth. “If you read ‘On the Road’,” says David Brinkley, Jack’s most recent biographer, “it’s a valentine to the United States … pure poetry for almost a boy’s love for his country that’s just gushing in its adjectives and descriptions.”

On August 23, 1948, Kerouac wrote to a friend: “I have another novel in mind – ‘On the Road’ – which I keep thinking about: two guys hitchhiking to California in search of something they don’t really find and losing themselves on the road, coming all the way back hopeful of something else.”

He was going to consciously tell the tale with an urgency drawn from not just first-person, rapid-fire, damn-the-editing immediacy but from a notion about the kind of breath control found in improvisational jazz and Eastern meditation. The phrasing, with dashes replacing periods, came out bullet fast and rhythmic, like the staccato doubledy-dutch, double-the-clutch, clickety-clack of a freight train cutting through the night.

By May ‘52 it was almost finished. He sent a copy of the latest revision to Allen Ginsberg, who showed it to his friend Carl Solomon, whose uncle owned Ace Books, which was then considering William Burroughs’ “Junkie”. Kerouac’s book would pass through many, many hands before Viking took the plunge, finally unveiling the finished novel on September 5, 1957. There was a second printing on the 20th and a third soon after, and to date more than three million copies have been sold in about 25 languages, currently at the rate of 60,000 a year.

After several false starts, Jack decided to write up his cross-country trips exactly as they’d happened, without pausing to edit, fictionalise or even think, dosing himself with benzedrine and listening to the bebop in his head to keep going until it was done. There were some revisions, deletions and additions before it was published, but Jack kept the famous scroll of the original version – taped-together 12-foot-long sheets of teletype paper crammed with a book in a single paragraph, whacked out between April 2 and 22, 1951.

The scroll was sold in 2001 to Indianapolis Colts football team owner Jim Irsay, who came up with the high bid of $2.43 million, and promptly put on a road of its own, to museums and libraries and colleges.

Kerouac, his pal Ginsberg said long after he was gone, “was the first one to make a new crack in the consciousness.” Yet Allen knew better than almost anyone the price that Jack had to pay for being the first to reach the new frontier of literature.

The fame that swept over him like an avalanche ultimately proved lethal. He loved to party, yet when he eventually needed a break his fans wouldn’t allow it. They expected a non-stop Dean Moriarty rush from the guy who was, after all, just the storyteller, just the passenger, just Sal Paradise. And if it took another bottle of whisky to bring out the stories then so be it. He tried to hide; they always found him, and he ended up yet again “drinking and talking with hundreds and hundreds of my acquaintances day and night in shifts”.

“Free to do anything I want,” he wrote a friend in 1962, “I’ve deliberately imprisoned myself, like a hair shirt, I dunno why.” Kerouac, the British novelist Geoff Dwyer wrote, “sank into a swamp of paranoia and buffoonish alcoholism”. Jack described himself late in life as “a big glooby blob of sad blufush”.

Maudlin and often mean in the end, Jack had forgotten the beatitude and was now merely beat. The man who had spent the early ’50s writing one unpublished novel after another, carrying them around in a rucksack as he roamed back and forth across the country, was ultimately helpless to turn a phrase, befuddled by his own curmudgeonly disillusion. It was left to future generations who never saw the babbling idiot on the TV talk shows to rediscover the original method in Jack Kerouac’s original madness.

Remember, Jack? “The mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and evrybody goes ‘Awww!’”

In late 1957, his fame still cresting, Jack wrote a letter to Marlon Brando imploring him to play Dean in the “On the Road” movie – opposite Jack as Sal. The letter turned up at a June 2005 auction of Brando’s stuff. “I’m praying that you’ll buy ON THE ROAD and make a movie of it,” Kerouac wrote, admitting he hoped to rake in enough money to “establish myself and my mother a trust fund for life, so I can really go roaming round the world” and “be free to write what comes out of my head & free to feed my buddies when they’re hungry & not worry about my mother.”

Brando never replied, but the notion of him playing Neal Cassady (at least back in the ’50s) still tantalises, as have the suggestions over the years of the role going to Paul Newman or Johnny Depp or Brad Pitt – anyone, the current consensus seems to be, but Tom Cruise. Brando and Kerouac did meet once, in 1960, when Jack enrolled in the Actor’s Studio. (He didn’t hang around. After 15 minutes he asked, “Don’t they give you any drinks in this place?” He invited Marlon to go out to a bar with him but, once again, Brando refused.)

Also in 2005, excerpts from Jack’s unpublished 1957 play “Beat Generation” were published to considerable fanfare in the men’s lifestyle magazine Best Life. The play, which had just been unearthed in a New Jersey warehouse, recounts a day in the life of hard-drinking, drug-fuelled Jack Duluoz, Kerouac’s alter-ego. “Kerouac wrote the play in one night when he returned to his home in Florida after the publication of ‘On The Road’,” said Kerouac biographer (”Memory Babe”) Gerald Nicosia.

“He was getting a lot of attention, being put on TV talk shows after On the Road, and an off-Broadway theatre producer named Leo Gavin said he wanted a play from him.” Although the play was never published or performed, the third act became the basis for the wacky film “Pull My Daisy”, starring Allen Ginsberg. Several producers turned it down, presumably Gavin too, and Jack got no reply when he sent it to Marlon Brando.

People stopped answering, stopped calling, stopped paying attention. His decline was too painful to watch. And in the end even Jack’s own famous memory faltered. The brash madness of his youth was muddled in middle age, the past defeated by a future he couldn’t survive.

It is fortunate, to say the least, that his stories did survive, and within a few short years of his passing a new generation of dreamers began replying to his message in time with the beat of the flapping landscape and the beatitudes of just staying on the road.

NOTES:
(1) Comments, corrections and suggestions are welcome – Click “Get in touch” at the top of the menu.

(2) * Re “On the Road” the movie: According to IMDb.com, Brazilian Walter Salles, who helmed “The Motorcycle Diaries”, is to direct “On the Road” for release in 2007, from a script by “Full Metal Jacket” screenwriter and co-producer Michael Herr. Casting is scheduled for next year, the website says. Francis Coppola, who has owned the film rights since 1979, will presumably produce.

(3) The material used on the tour comes from a wide variety of sources. If you poke at certain spots on the Web, torrents of fascinating stuff about Kerouac and the other beats come gushing out. Here are some outstanding sites:

The official homepage
A host of characters and info, and the fight over the estate
A loving, living, educational shrine on wheels
A beat tour of Denver (opens on this page)
The 2002 C-Span programme on Kerouac
Special thanks to the Cosmic Baseball Association for the detailed chronology
More great stuff on the Denver beat scene
Jack’s medical record at SmokingGun.com