A jazz journey through the remarkable life of American novelist, poet, boddhisattva and bebop saint Jack Kerouac.

This is the text, with loads of pictures, from my massive recent post on Google Earth, which you can pick up here if you’ve got the application and want to take the orbital tour. It’s also posted at Google Hacks, where I’m happy to see all my hard work is getting way more attention than at Google Earth, where most of the members are crowded onto the far side of the good ship Keyhole looking at a plane. A plane. Just a plane. I’ll save that rant for another time. Here’s the post …

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On the Road with Jack Kerouac

With a movie version of “On the Road” apparently, finally, ready to go into production – some say starring Billy Crudup and Brad Pitt and directed by Francis Ford Coppola*, no less – it’s an apt time to take a look at the world through Kerouac’s eyes. And indeed we’ll soon be awash in Kerouac, with his estate at last becoming public, via the New York Public Library and its commissioned biography by David Brinkley. True fans of Jack, though, will likely be cringing in the parking lots as they watch the road they shared with him become a superhighway.

Before the hip-hop and the grunge and the hippies and the yippies and the mods and the rockers, there were the beats (and don’t call them beatniks). Jack Kerouac was abruptly anointed “the King of the Beats” when three of his novels came out within a single year, and one of them, “On the Road”, eclipsed all the other prose and poems that he and his young buddies produced in those halcyon late ’50s.

It was a crown he disliked because it invited press and parody, as well as jealousy, and he liked it even less when the hippies arrived in the ’60s and regarded him as an icon. Their anti-war protests and disdain for the establishment had nothing in common with Jack’s patriotic conservatism, and when Neal Cassady, the “mad Ahab at the wheel” who’d chauffeured his wanderings and been immortalised in “On the Road”, drove Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters to New York to meet him in 1964 and someone draped the American flag over his shoulders, Kerouac quietly took it off, folded it neatly and laid it on the back of his chair.

“I read ‘On the Road’ in maybe 1959,” Bob Dylan said. “It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s.” But as most people know, the novel floundered in oblivion for six years before Viking finally decided in ’57 its time had come.

“As early as 1952,” British novelist Geoff Dyer wrote in his 2000 review of Ann Charters’ “Selected Letters” in The Guardian, “in response to an editor who had called it a ‘thoroughly incoherent mess’, [Jack] predicted what would happen: ‘ “On the Road” will be published by someone else, with a few changes and omissions and additions, and it will gain its due recognition, in time, as the first or one of the first modern prose books in America’. What he failed to anticipate was the sodden collapse of writer and man that would come in the wake of this prophecy’s being fulfilled.”

We begin our travels in Lowell, Massachusetts, Kerouac’s hometown, and the place where his storied road ultimately returned.

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1: 9 Lupine Road
Jack’s birthplace on March 12, 1922

“It was in Centralville I was born … Across the wide basin to the hill – on Lupine Road, March 1922, at five o’clock in the afternoon of a red-all-over suppertime, as drowsily beers were tapped on Moody and Lakeview saloons and the river rushed with her cargoes of ice over reddened slick rocks, and on the shore the reeds swayed among mattresses and cast-off boots of Time, and lazily pieces of snow dropped plunk from bagging branches of black thorny oily pine in their thaw, and beneath the wet snows of the hillside receiving the sun’s lost rays the melts of winter mixed with roars of Merrimac was born.”

Thus Kerouac described his arrival (in the same year that Joyce published “Ulysses”, for whom more brave tales Jack would one day produce). His family, of French Canadian descent, came from New Hampshire to this milling town of 100,000 residents and lived in a succession of homes in three districts dominated by fellow French Canadians – Pawtucketville, Centralville and Little Canada – as his father tried in fits and starts to keep a printing business going.

Paul Marion, author of the poetry collection “What Is the City?” and editor of “Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings by Jack Kerouac”, recalled Jack saying of this era: “I spent most of my time after school in my father’s printing shop and editorial offices, dashing off publications of my own on the antique typewriter.”

Jack had two older siblings, Gerard and Caroline, who was called Nin. Throughout his life he clung to his mother – whom he called Memere – keeping a promise to his father that he would always take care of her, though it was she who buried him, here in Lowell, 47 years later.

2: 35 Burnaby Street

The Kerouac family moved here in 1925, when Jack was three. His father Leo had a print shop called Spotlight downtown on Market Street. Jack, who was known to his family as Ti Jean (Little Jack), spoke French exclusively until he was seven.

3: 34 Beaulieu Street

The Kerouacs were here in 1926 when tragedy struck: elder son Gerard died at age nine. Jack, though only four at the time, never shook off the blow, repeatedly returning to it as a writing theme, most definitively in “Visions of Gerard”.

4: The Grotto

The elegant house built in 1875 at the corner of Pawtucket and School streets for the industrialist Frederic Ayer became the Franco-American Orphanage in 1908. Behind it the Oblate Fathers, a Canadian religious order, built a replica of the Grotto of Lourdes, which terrified Jack when he saw it as a child. “Everything there was to remind of Death,” he wrote in “Dr Sax”, “and nothing in praise of Life.”

5: 320 Hildreth Street

The Kerouac family home in 1927. Jack was five. Two years later they shifted a few doors down to 240 Hildreth. It’s little wonder that Kerouac for the rest of his life never settled in one place for long.

6: 66 West Street

The family residence in 1930, when Jack was eight and just beginning to speak English. He used to play in the scrub brush along the nearby Merrimack River, and if no pals were around, he had the Dr Sax of his imagination, who alternated between affectionate buddy and Grim Reaper. That’s Jack’s childhood drawing of Dr Sax at right.

7: Pollard Memorial Library

Jack and his sister Nin (below right) could often be found here in their youth, and Kerouac returned to it often when he came back to live in Lowell in 1967. In his novel “Dr Sax” he expressed his appreciation for the library’s collection of books.

8: Textile Avenue

It was along this street, and specifically at the Lowell Textile Institute which used to be here, that Jack discovered his talent for running, which later helped get him a scholarship to Columbia University.

9: 16 Phebe Avenue

The Kerouacs lived here in 1932, in the neighbourhood called Pawtucketville.

10: St Louis Parochial School

Jack’s first school, at 79 Boisvert Street. He later attended the Oblate School, run by priests of that Canadian order, over on Merrimack Street.

11: Sarah Avenue

The Kerouac family moved here in 1935. Jack was becoming a jock, in his imagination forming a “summer league” of baseball and playing sand lot football. He scored nine touchdowns when his Dracut Tigers football team defeated the Rosemont Tigers 60-0.

12: 118 University Avenue

Formerly an extension of Moody Street, this is where Jack lived as a teenager, on the fourth floor above Astro’s Sub and Pizza. From a young age, he was driven to create stories, first inspired by the radio show “The Shadow”. During the Depression his father managed the Pawtucketville Social Club a few doors up, which catered to the city’s French Canadian immigrants, and Jack and his buddies learned to shoot pool there.

13: Bartlett Junior High School

Jack skipped sixth grade at the Oblate Fathers’ school on Merrimack Street and entered middle school here at 79 Wannalancit Street. He began carrying a spiral notebook to record his musings, and In the writing club composed a story called “The Cop and the Beat”.

14: Lowell High School

Kerouac was a star halfback on the football team here on Kirk Street and won some miraculous victories, securing himself a scholarship to Columbia University. He was also serious about his writing, influenced by Thoreau, Whitman, Saroyan and Thomas Wolfe – it was on Wolfe he initially modelled his own adult writing style. He later wrote about his senior year at Lowell High, and his girlfriend Mary Carney (right), in “Maggie Cassidy”. He graduated on June 28, 1929.

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15: Horace Mann Prep School, NYC

Jack’s sporting ability got him a year at Horace Mann Prep school starting in September 1939 and the Lowell Sun was soon reporting his achievements on the football field there, where he also published two short stories in the Horace Mann Quarterly.

Though staying at the home his mother’s step-sister in Brooklyn, he managed to hit the Harlem clubs across town with classmate Henry Cru and fell in love with jazz, and not only tried marijuana for the first time, he lost his virginity with a Manhattan prostitute. But it was his Lowell sweetheart Mary Carney who he took to the Horace Mann prom the following April.

16: Columbia University, NYC

Jack, who was just starting to read Thomas Wolfe on the advice of Lowell friend Sammy Sampas, entered Columbia in September 1940 after his year at the Horace Mann preparatory school, rolling in on a football scholarship, but he broke his leg during a game the following month. He was in the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity and elected vice-president of his sophomore class. By the start of his second year, though, things turned sour. Jack fought with the football coach for not letting him play, and meanwhile his father lost his printing business and sank into alcoholic despair, so Jack dropped out in a funk of disillusion, adding to the family’s string of setbacks and disappointments. He made a brief reappearance at the university in October 1942, but decided it was “just a great big bunch of horseshit where they don’t let you prove yourself”.

17: The Pentagon
In mid-1941, after quitting Columbia, Jack spent two months as a sports reporter at the Lowell Sun, then, among other jobs, joined the huge construction force building the Pentagon.

18: Halifax, Canada

In July of 1942, Jack joined the Coast Guard in New York, but they didn’t get him into uniform quick enough, so he got drunk, then went to the National Maritime Union Hall and signed up with the Merchant Marine and aboard the SS Dorchester, which was sailing that afternoon for Greenland. En route there was a stopover here during which Jack briefly went AWOL and “climbed a mountain”, although details are sketchy.

19: Greenland

Jack’s “exotic” first destination aboard the SS Dorchester with the Merchant Marine in July 1942. The ship was sunk by a U-Boat torpedo the following February, losing a third of its crew, but Jack had been discharged in October.

20: Bethesda Naval Medical Hospital, Maryland

Jack jumped from the Merchant Marine to the Navy in late 1942, but spent most of his six-month posting to Newport in hospital in Bethesda under observation due to behaviour that the doctors ultimately attributed to dementia. Kerouac said the harsh appraisal (which was later softened) came after he complained of headaches and asked for aspirin. Instead, “they diagnosed me Dementia Praecox!”

21: Liverpool, England

Jack was discharged from the Navy in September 1943, and sailed once more with the Merchant Marine immediately after, this time to Liverpool on the SS George Weems. He was writing all the time he was on board.

22: Royal Albert Hall, London

Jack was sitting here in mid-1943 watching an orchestral concert – the classics for a change, not jazz – when there was an air raid. As was typical at the time, no one budged. Kerouac was on leave from the SS Weems, then docked in Liverpool, and among other London sights had a gawk at Trafalgar Square.

23: Norfolk, Virginia

Jack arrived here for a brief stay aboard the SS Robert Treat Paine from New York in October ‘44. It was one of his several voyages with the Merchant Marine.

24: 421 West 118th Street, NYC

Joan Vollmer and Edie Parker shared an apartment here in 1944, and Kerouac – who would later marry Parker – hung out after his ‘43 Atlantic crossings, soon meeting Lucien Carr, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. In December of ‘44 the girls moved to a communal apartment building at 419 West 115th that quickly had Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs as tenants as well, and a frequent visitor was Herbert Huncke (Elmer Hassel in “On the Road”), who introduced the term “beat” to the group.

John Clellon Holmes, whose novel “Go” was the first beat book to be published, claimed it was Kerouac who coined the term “beat” in 1948, but in fact it was Huncke who put the word in Jack’s ear, in May 1948. Jack, however, did coin the term “beat generation”, in the fall of ‘49. To its loose meaning of being beat up by life to the point where a different reality emerges, Jack and Ginsberg later added the variation “beatific”. “The point of beat,” Allen once said, “is that you get beat down to a certain nakedness where you actually are able to see the world in a visionary way.”

Left, Hal Chase, Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs. Below, Herbert Huncke.

25: Burroughs on Bedford Street, NYC

This was the apartment building where William Burroughs lived in late 1944. He met Jack about that time at the home of Jack’s girlfriend Edie Parker on 118th Street, and Kerouac became a regular visitor here in Greenwich Village.

A scion of the wealthy Burroughs Adding Machine (eventually Unisys) family in St Louis, Missouri, Burroughs had already graduated from Harvard in 1936 and done time in Bellevue mental hospital for acting like a nut. He became a heroin addict in 1946, moved with his common-law wife Joan Vollmer and fellow junkie Herbert Huncke to New Waverly, Texas, and grew marijuana, shifting to New Orleans in 1948, then to to Mexico City to flee a possession charge. There, on September 6, 1951, he drunkenly attempted to shoot a highball glass off Joan’s head in a William Tell act, but killed her.

From 1954 to ‘58 he lived in Tangier, kicking his habit and writing “Naked Lunch”, then lived in Paris alongside Ginsberg, in London in ‘60 and back in Tangier in ‘61, where Timothy Leary failed to impress the experienced tripper (Burroughs documented the South American hallucinogen yage) with magic mushrooms. He returned to New York in 1974, finally moving to Lawrence, Kansas, where he died on August 2, 1997, at age 83.

26: Meeting Neal

It was somewhere here in East Harlem, in late ’46, that the destiny-laden first meeting of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady took place. Neal had met and quickly married Luanne Henderson in Denver the previous spring and they zipped off to Nebraska before reaching New York City in late December. Neal and Luanne remained in town for a few months, leaving for Denver the first week of May 1947 – on a Greyhound, and not behind the wheel. By then he’d fired Jack’s ambition to see the open road and the wild west.

“I went to the cold-water flat with the boys,” Jack wrote in “On the Road”, “and Dean [Neal] came to the door in shorts … My first impression was of a young Gene Autry – trim, thin-hipped, blue-eyed, with a real Oklahoma accent – a sideburned hero of the snowy West.”

27: New York City Hall

On August 13, 1944, Lucien Carr killed a man in self-defence, and the police arrested Jack and Burroughs as material witnesses, either for failing to report the crime or for helping Carr dispose of evidence, depending on your source (they later collaborated on a novel based on the event, “And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks”, that has never been published).

Far left, Jack and Lucien Carr. Above, Edie Parker.

On the 22nd Jack married Edie Parkerat New York City Hall after Edie said her parents would stake his bail money. They parted in October and the marriage was annulled in 1946. Lucien did two years in prison for manslaughter.

28: Grosse Pointe, Michigan
After marrying Edie Parker to get out of his scrape with the law over Lucien Carr’s manslaughter case, Jack came here to meet Edie’s parents and worked briefly to raise the money to pay them back for bailing him out of jail. In September ‘45, Edie filed for an annulment in a Grosse Pointe court, and it was granted two months later.

29: Burroughs on Riverside Drive
Another Burroughs abode, this one not only frequented by Jack but his temporary home after he left Edie behind in Grosse Pointe.

30: Ozone Park
When Jack moved to New York to attend Columbia in 1940, his parents moved from Lowell to be closer to him, resettling in the Ozone Park neighbourhood of Queens after a short stay in New Haven. They lived here at 133-01 Cross Bay Boulevard for about six years.

It was here that Jack began writing his first novel, “The Town and the City”, conceived as an expression of his difficulty in reconciling his wild city life with his old-world family values. He started writing it, deeply under the influence of Wolfe’s “You Can’t Go Home Again”, in May ’46 and finished it in May ’48. The following March Harcourt and Brace accepted it for publication and started advancing him $1,000 in monthly payments. It came out in March 1950, earning him respect and some recognition, but it didn’t make him famous.

“But wifey,” he wrote much later in “Vanity of Duluoz”, “I did it all, I wrote the book, I stalked the streets of life, of Manhatten, of Long Island, stalked thru 1,183 pages of my first novel, sold the book, got an advance, whooped, hallelujah’d, went on, did everything you’re supposed to do in life. But nothing ever came of it. No ‘generation’ is ‘new’. There’s ‘nothing new under the sun’. ‘All is vanity’.”

And it was from this address, in July 1947, that Jack Kerouac began his first journey across the USA …

31: Catchin’ the subway
Jack’s first bold venture on the road, in July 1947, began underground, with a ride north up Manhattan on the IRT. He’d spent weeks planning the trip to San Francisco via Denver, and Route 6 all the way from New York to Ely, Nevada, looked like a piece of cake. He had no idea what he was in for.

32: IRT terminus at 242nd Street

The Interborough Rapid Transit would have taken Jack as far as it could that July day in ‘47, to the terminus as 242nd Street. From here his Great American Adventure continued north by trolley car.

33: Yonkers
Jack rode the public trolley up to the northern limits of Yonkers on his 1947 inaugural voyage across the country. From here, he figured, it should be a simple matter of hitchhiking a little further to Bear Mountain Bridge, where Route 6 was waiting to take him west, west, west! If only he’d talked over his plan with Cassady, he would have known it was doomed.

34: Bear Mountain Bridge

It took Jack five different rides to crawl a mere 40 miles from Yonkers to Bear Mountain Bridge on that first attempt at crossing America in July ‘47. Now there were no cars in sight and the day was rapidly waning – and it was pouring with rain. He was no further west than he had been that morning. Quite frankly, he decided, this road business ain’t much fun. He gave up. He’d go back to the city and try another way.

35: Newburgh

It was a tired and disillusioned Jack who finally accepted a ride from a guy heading to Newburgh that 1947 day. From here he could get a bus back to New York – even if it was full of noisy schoolteachers just back from a weekend in the mountains. So much for Route 6. He’d have to take the Holland Tunnel and follow the truckers to Pittsburgh.

36: Times Square

That same goddamned day, July ‘47. After taking a hammering in his first round with the road, Jack dragged his butt to the Greyhound station offTimes Square where he’d seen off Neal a few months before. He had $50 and he didn’t want to blow it on bus fare all the way to Frisco, so he bought a ticket to Chicago and figured he’d hitchhike from there.

37: Chicago Greyhound terminal

After tooling around the wilds of northern Manhattan all day on his first attempt to cross the States, Jack finally made it here by bus. Now, for sure, he could stick out his thumb and see the nation. But no, not yet, not here. There were no rides, so he got back on the bus and crawled a little farther on down that road.

38: Joliet, Illinois

Two days into his first trip west, in July 1947, Jack was finally able to get off the bus and do some honest hitchhiking, and whadya know, he’s really on Route 6.

39: Davenport, Iowa

With about 20 bucks in his pocket it was a good thing Jack found the truckers willing to pick up hitchers on Route 6 as he made his way westward from Joliet in the summer of ‘47.

40: Des Moines, Iowa

Jack got six rides in 24 hours between Joliet and Des Moines on his first trip west in ‘47. It didn’t seem like he’d covered all that much ground, but at least he’d crossed the Mississippi.
He checked into a railway hotel and slept like a log as the trains crashed past. “I was halfway across America,” he wrote in “On the Road”, “at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future.”

41: Adel, Iowa

July ‘47: Jack got a ride out of Des Moines in a “tookshack on wheels”, the driver of which stood up to work it, like a milkman. Then a farmer and his son brought him here and, now free and easy on the road, he loafed under a tree at a gas station talking to another hitchhiker, called Eddie in “On the Road”. They carried on together up the highway.

42: Stuart, Iowa

July ‘47: Jack and his fellow hitcher got only as far as Stuart before luck turned again and they got stuck until 3am outside the railroad office. He considered hopping a freight, but knew nothing about it so he gave it a miss. At dawn he grabbed a bus, paying the fare for “Eddie”, who was broke.

“In Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry,” Kerouac wrote at the end of “On the Road”, “and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is a Pooh Bear? The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old.”

43: Council Bluffs and Omaha

Arriving by bus as the summer of ‘47 wore on, Jack looked around Council Bluffs with immense anticipation. He’d read about the old wagon trains mustering here before hitting the Oregon and Santa Fe trails, but from the window of his bus it all just looked dull and grey.

44: Elm Creek, Nebraska

Maybe it was Elm Creek where Jack – now getting rides with nothing but “cowboys” and “ranchers” on his first trip west in ‘47 – stopped for what was becoming a favourite road meal of cherry pie and ice cream and heard one of the locals laugh so loud and hard that he’d write, “Wham! Listen to that man laugh. That’s the West, here I am in the West.”

But outside, “Eddie”, still wearing the woollen shirt Jack had loaned him when he was cold, jumped onto a rig whose driver said he only had room for one and took off without so much as a “see ya later”.

45: Gothenburg, Nebraska

It was here on Jack’s 1947 trip west that he got what he considered the best ride of his hitchhiking career, on a flatbed truck carrying a half dozen other young men. He was handed a bottle of rotgut and with a slug tasted “the wild, lyrical, drizzling air of Nebraska” as the two Minnesota farmboys taking turns at the wheel flew 70 miles an hour en route to Los Angeles. Jack was tempted to stick with them, but he wanted to get to Denver and brag to Cassady and Ginsberg about what he’d accomplished.

46: Cheyenne, Wyoming

Jack was here on July 24, 1947, wondering what would come next on his journey into the American heartland. In no time he’d finally be in Denver, home of Neal Cassady.

47: Denver

The distance Jack covered from Joliet to Denver in July 1947 was the farthest he ever hitchhiked. From then on he took the bus for long hauls or got Neal or someone else to drive him. But now here he was on the 28th looking for “Dean Moriarty”. “A western kinsman of the sun, Dean,” he wrote of Neal Cassady at a the beginning of “On the Road.

Though the “muscular” rush of Neal’s benzedrine-driven letters hugely influenced Jack, Cassady isn’t known as a writer, but fans of the Kerouac saga know “The First Third and Other Writings”, a book City Lights published in 1971. Cassady (right) was raised in a condemned flophouse and by his early 20s he had stolen more than 500 cars, been arrested 10 times and spent 15 months in juvenile detention. He used the prison library, though, and after his release the Denver Public Library, which enabled him to keep up with literary types like Kerouac, Burroughs and Ginsberg. Burroughs was the first to make use of his soon-to-be-legendary driving skills, when he hired Cassady to drive his marijuana crop from Texas to New York in 1947.

Jack stayed in Denver about two weeks, seeing little, as it turned out, of Neal, who was busy bouncing between his wife Luanne, his new girlfriend (and wife-to-be) Carolyn, a lunchroom waitress and Allen Ginsberg, as well as joyriding in hot cars. Jack stayed with Hal Chase and Ed White and only occasionally saw Neal and Allen, who were working at the May Company near the capitol. They planned to get together in Frisco, but Allen and Neal went to see Burroughs in Texas instead, and then Allen shipped off to Dakar, Africa, with the Merchant Marine.

Kerouac came back the next summer, with Neal. They ran around for a few days, outraging the neighbours and drinking beer at a hillbilly roadhouse. After Jack sold “The Town and the City”, he was in Denver again in late May 1950 to attend an autograph session set up by Neal’s old mentor, Justin Briarly. Afterward there was a party for Jack that carried over to the Windsor Hotel, where Neal got uncharacteristically drunk. On this visit Jack stayed again with Ed White while Neal rambled elsewhere, but in June they drove off together to Mexico to see Burroughs.

48: Laramie, Wyoming

Jack left Denver behind in the summer of ‘47 and carried on to San Francisco by bus through Laramie, Salt Lake City and Reno. From “On the Road”: “The sun came out, and Tim Gray [Ed White] rode a trolley with me to the bus station. I bought my ticket to San Fran, spendiong half the fifty, and got on at two o’clock in the afternoon. Tim Gray waved goodbye. The bus rolled out of the storied, eager Denver streets. ‘By God, I gotta come back and see what else will happen!’ I promised. In a last-minute phone call Dean said he and Carlo might join me on the Coast; I pondered this, and realized I hadn’t talked to Dean for more than five minutes the whole time.”

49: Mill Valley, California

Jack finally reunited with his old Horace Mann classmate Henry Cru (Remi Boncoeur in “On the Road”) at the end of his first road trip in 1947 only to discover that neither he nor Cru had a ship to ship out on. So he did what Cru was doing in the meantime, working as a night watchman in Mill Valley (complete with a badge and a gun), with Mount Tamalpais glowering in the background. Kerouac and Cru and Cru’s girlfriend shared a one-room shack in Mill Valley and went over to Frisco to eat at restaurants in Chinatown. Jack soon got sacked, though, and later wrote, “Here I was at the end of America – no more land – and now there was nowhere to go but back.” He started homeward.

Jack was back here in the spring of 1956, having hitched and rode the bus and the train from the east coast with the express purpose of pursuing peace of mind in the woods and mountains of northern California. His last dollar bought him a bus ride to Gary Snyder’s shack here on the slope of Mount Tamalpais.

50: Oakland, California

Though he’d sent most of his earnings from the summer ‘47 watchman’s job home to his mother, Jack took in a little more of California, hitchhiking to Oakland and Bakersfield.

51: Bakersfield Greyhound terminal

Jack was stuck for rides hitching around for a last look at California in autumn ‘47 and went to the bus station to get mobile again, thinking he’d do some Hollywood sightseeing. A young woman at the depot caught his eye: “All of a sudden I saw the cutest little Mexican girl in slacks come cutting across my sights.” He got on her bus and climbed into the seat next to “Terry”, as she’s called in “On the Road”. They stayed together for 15 days.

52: LA Greyhound terminal

Jack and “Terry” (whose “breasts stuck out straight and true”) continued the romance they’d begun in Bakersfield that mid-autumn of ‘47 with a few days at a cheap hotel near the downtown LA bus station. Jack was now out of cash once more, so they moved on.

53: Selma, California

October 1947. Jack and his new love “Terry” hitchhiked and rode the bus from LA to Selma in the Central Valley, where her family lived in a tent outside the town, picking cotton to earn $1.50 a day to pay for their food and lodging. It was a blissful two weeks for Kerouac, who “forgot all about the East and all about Dean and Carlo [Ginsberg] and the bloody road”. But in no time he was restless again, feeling like an interloper on the family, and learned that his mother had wired him bus fare home.

54: Prescott, Arizona

Jack rode the bus all the way from Fresno to Pittsbugh in the fall of ‘47 with a bag of salami sandwiches in his sailor’s sack. It was a non-stop ride with little diversion, although there was a little …

55: Albuquerque, New Mexico

Jack’s pounding his way homeward on his first trip across the country in mid-October 1947. The bus is not going to stop anytime soon.

56: Kansas City

Back across the Big Muddy on his way home in late fall 1947, Jack is not at all happy about all that’s transpired, but his journal is packed with notes and there’s a great story waiting to be told.

57: St Louis

Not the first image that springs to mind today when people think of “On the Road”, but the fact of the matter is that fully half of Jack’s initial trip in 1947 was spent trying to rub phlebitis aches out of his legs squashed into a seat on a Greyhound, homeward bound after a lacklustre run with Neal and the gang.

58: Indianapolis, Indiana

The sole diversion Jack had on his return bus trip in late 1947 was a willing fellow passenger who did more than help him finish off his salami sandwiches. As biographer Ann Charters put it, he was “sexually strung out after necking with a girl all the way from Indianapolis to Columbus, Ohio”.

59: Columbus, Ohio
But what a ride from Indie!

60: Pittsburgh

In the home stretch after his first trip across America in 1947, Jack got off the bus and stretched his legs with a five-mile walk out of downtown Pittsburgh, then stuck out his thumb again.

61: Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

The hitching was pretty lame on the last leg of Jack’s inaugural cross-country run, two rides getting him only from Pittsburgh to Harrisburg. He had 365 miles to go before New York and a dime in his pocket. It was raining as the late October night fell but it was warm, so he walked outside of town along the Susquehanna River, linking up with an old man heading for “Canady” whose rambling into the highway lanes worried him. He felt lost in a nightmare of his own making as they rain came down harder, and finally Jack gave up and begged a ride from a car driver heading in the opposite direction. He slept at the Harrisburg railway station and when he was thrown out at dawn, managed to snag one ride that rook him all the way home.

62: Ginsberg’s place

Jack spent a lot of time at Allen Ginsberg’s apartment here at 1401 York Avenue near 7th Avenue in the summer of 1948. He was soon to begin writing “On the Road”.

Allen Ginsberg, who died in 1997 at age 70, is remembered for much more than “Howl” and Kerouac. He was involved in Ken Kesey’s San Francisco Acid Tests and played a supporting role to Hunter Thompson in helping Kesey break the ice between the hippies and the Hell’s Angels. With a group poetry reading at the Royal Albert Hall he helped launch London’s artistic underground scene, based at the UFO Club, from which bands like Pink Floyd and Soft Machine emerged. Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Michael McClure led the crowd in chanting “Om” at the San Fransisco Be-In in 1967. Ginsberg, Burroughs, Jean Genet and Terry Southern were key figures at the Chicago Democratic Convention anti-war protests in 1968. And he collaborated with Bob Dylan on the 1965 music video for “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and on the 1977 film “Renaldo and Clara” made during Dylan’s Rolling Thunder tour, as part of which Ginsberg and Dylan visited Kerouac’s grave.

63: Rocky Mount, North Carolina

This was the hometown of Jack’s sister Nin and her husband Paul Blake through the late 1940s and early ’50s. Jack and his mother often holidayed here (and Jack wrote large parks of “Pic” and “Visions of Gerard” here) and were doing just that at Christmas 1949 when Neal Cassady pulled up outside the house in a new Hudson, with his first wife Luanne and fellow railroad brakeman Ed Hinkle.

Neal had left his second wife Carolyn and their new baby in Frisco, telling her he was going to sell the car in New York for better price, and driven cross-country at 90 miles an hour. The visitors convinced Jack to come back to San Francisco with them and join Neal working on the railroad in Arizona, but first Neal agreed to drive to Ozone Park to pick up the furniture for Jack’s mother and bring it back – she was moving in with Nin. With Jack at his side, Neal made the 900-mile round trip in a day and a half. In New York, Ginsberg asked Cassady the purpose of his racing across the USA, and for once Neal was speechless. “There was nothing to talk about anymore,” Jack wrote later.

“The only thing to do was go.”

It was the beginning of his second cross-country trip, the leg that would be incorporated into his second draft of “On the Road” – the first draft he’d finished the previous November. There were many more adventures still to be packed in.

In December 1955, after his howler of a night at Ginsberg’s Six Gallery reading and his ascent of the Matterhorn in the Sierras, Jack again used Nin’s home as a refuge, this time working on “Visions of Gerard”, about the brother who’d died so young. He stayed this time until March ‘56 – in the surrounding woods nurturing his budding Buddhist spirituality, wandering to the rill he named Buddha Creek and a natural shrine he called Twin Tree Grove – when he hitchhiked to Washington state to be a forest ranger.

64: Algiers, Louisiana

Burroughs had moved to the Algiers district of New Orleans in 1948, and at the end of the following January Jack pulled up in a car with Neal and his girlfriend Luanne and Ed Hinkle. Ed’s wife was already there waiting for them. The pals stayed several days, but weren’t exactly welcome, Burroughs dismissing Neal’s back-and-forth driving act “sheer compulsive pointlessness”.

65: The Tehachapi Pass

Jack, Neal and Neal’s first wife Luanne whizzed through here en route from New Orleans to San Francisco in January 1949. They were virtually broke and stealing food and smokes – and getting thoroughly annoyed with each other. When they got to Frisco Neal dumped his companions on a curb and tore off to reunite with his wife Carolyn. Jack went his own way, but on the eve of his return bus trip east a few days later, Neal took him out to some of the local jazz clubs, including a memorable show by Slim Gallard.

From “On the Road”: “Up ahead we saw the Tehachapi Pass starting up. Dean took the wheel and carried us clear to the top of the world … Then we started down. Dean cut off the gas, threw in the clutch and negotiated every hairpin turn and passed cars and did everything in the books without benefit of accelerator. I held on tight. Sometimes the road went up again briefly; he merely passed cars without a sound, on pure momentum. He knew every rhythm and every kick of a first-class pass … In this way we floated and flapped down to the San Joaquin Valley. It lay spread below, virtually the floor of California, green and wondrous from our aerial shelf. We made 30 miles without using gas.”

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DENVER

66: Colorado State Capitol

It was Denver boy Hal Chase who forged the link between Jack and Neal Cassady, between beat New York and beat Denver. Chase met Neal at the Denver Public Library when he came home from Columbia in the summer of 1945 and told him about Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs. Then when Chase returned to Columbia he roomed with fellow Denverite Ed White, and it was either Chase or White who showed Jack some letters from Neal and showed their letters from Jack to Neal. It was White who, in 1951, suggested that Jack should try “sketching” with words the way painters sketch, which led to Jack’s “discovery” of the “spontaneous prose” that ultimately made “On the Road” so remarkable.

After one of his several visits to Denver that began with his very first road trip in 1947, Jack wrote about watching bats wheel around the dome of the State Capitol, making this a good place to begin a tour of Cassady’s Denver, as the city does in remarkable fashion on its website, from which most of the following local information is gleaned.

Elsewhere on the Web it’s been noted that today, somewhere in Denver, you can find “the Jack Kerouac Lofts”, a bunch of condos advertised circa 2002 as being “designed to appeal to a new generation of buyers”.

67: Colburn Hotel

Because it was Neal Cassady’s hometown, Denver became a key backdrop Kerouac to many of Jack’s novels, from “On the Road” to “Visions of Cody”. He swung through on his very first trip across the country in 1947, and two years later planned to move permanently to Colorado with his mother, though they ended up staying only seven weeks. During that time Jack got a job and had a look around the town, putting scenes to the stories Neal had told him about growing up here.

Carolyn Robinson was a University of Denver student living on the third floor of the Colburn Hotel in ‘47, and by the time Jack made his first trip west she’d fallen for Neal and they were living together here. Allen Ginsberg, another of Neal’s love interests, stayed at the Colburn too before moving to a cheaper basement apartment at 18th Avenue and Grant Streets. It was at the Colburn that Jack watched Neal and Allen do their knee-to-knee, face-to-face, brutally frank communing, described in “On the Road”. Below, Carolyn’s sketch of Kerouac, made a few years later in California.

68: Welton Street ballpark

Jack’s search for the spirit of his “joyful street cowboy” brought him to the Welton Street ballpark one night in the summer of ‘49 when there was a game underway. Neal used to play here, and walked through the park every day on his way to school. “Oh, the sadness of the lights that night!” Kerouac wrote in “On the Road”. “The young pitcher looked just like Dean. A pretty blonde in the seats looked just like Marylou. It was the Denver Night; all I did was die.”

69: Site of Snowdon Apartments
The vacant lot is the former site of the Snowden apartment house where Neal lived as a child. His brothers used to bootleg whiskey in their apartment next door to the Puritan Pie Company across the way, using the pie aroma as a cover. Cassady’s father was a barber and sometimes offered the staff there a haircut in exchange for a pie for his boys. Neal wrote affectionately of the Snowdon in his own autobiography “The First Third”, published in 1971 after he died.

“Though mostly visitors of lusty mind and crooked action, there was too a small normal core of pious parents such as Mother, struggling for their many children, and maybe even a few vicarious old maids or bachelors. And although The Snowden occupants were all poor, or perhaps more so because of it, they rocked the joint night and day, for the place had a noise mania; the air seemed always filled with assorted yelping catcalls, shouted curses, frightened screams and, topping all in my mind, those exciting feminine whoops of laughter.”

70: Larimer Street skid row

Larimer Street between 20th and 22nd is cleaned up from the days of Cassady’s youth when he and his father eked out a living here. In “On the Road” Jack wrote: “Dean was the son of a wino, one of the most tottering bums of Larimer Street, and Dean had in fact been brought up generally on Larimer Street and thereabouts. He used to plead in court at the age of six to have his father set free. He used to beg in front of Larimer alleys and sneak the money back to his father, who waited among the broken bottles with an old buddy.” Further down at 1727 Larimer was the Zaza Theater, next to Cassady Senior’s barbershop, where Neal (and later Kerouac) went to the movies, and at 16th and Larimer is the site of the Manhattan Restaurant, where Neal’s father panhandled.

71: Site of Citizen’s Mission

At 1617 Larimer Street was the Citizen’s Mission, where Neal got breakfasts and dinners as a boy. Jack took it all in, strolling around the city in 1949, the skid rows and the poolhalls on Curtis, the jazz clubs of Five Points and Neal’s old neighbourhood. Jack wrote later about “all those anticipatory dreams of me and him drinking and grabbing at bars in the construction worker night, I came to feel that the alleys, the fences, the streets were the ‘holy Denver streets’ I called them”.

72: Site of Metropolitan Hotel

In Cassady’s youth the Metropolitan Hotel stood at 16th and Market streets, a classic fleabag accommodation where Neal and his father Cassady stayed, paying $1 a week for a small cubicle. Nearby is the Daniel’s and Fisher clock tower, once the tallest structure in Denver, whose 7am chimes got Neal up and off to school.

73: My Brother’s Bar

The oldest bar in Denver still serving alcohol at its original location was where Neal’s brother worked as a bartender, and Neal sometimes occupied a barstool, though unlike Jack he never was much for alcohol. The owner will produce on request a copy of a letter Neal wrote from reformatory asking a friend to pay his bar tab here. Near the restrooms is the original letter, framed along with the famous photograph of Neal and Jack arm in arm.

74: Neal’s “beach”

Not far from My Brother’s Bar is Confluence Park, marking the spot where the Platte River meets Cherry Creek – together they produced a wealth of gold in the 19th century. Neal considered it “my beach” and came by often on his Sunday walks with his father. In “The First Third” he wrote that “it was the banks of the Platte that provided the flexuous corridor for my travels”.

75: A home in the foothills

In March 1949 Jack sold “The Town and the City” and got a $1,000 advance, and quickly arranged a return trip to Denver. Arriving in late May, he bought this house in the Rocky foothills with the idea of moving his mother, sister and brother-in-law to his “homestead”. His family was unused to the west, felt dislocated from their lives and friends back east, and moved back within a month to get their old jobs back. Kerouac admitted to a friend that “I have spent my entire one thousand dollars in this huge madness … I am doing a lot of writing however.” Robert Giroux, his editor at Harcourt Brace, visited him here to go over the proofs of “The Town and the City”. Jack got itchy as usual, though, and was gone by August, heading once more for California.

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76: Liberty Street

Having aborted his plan to spend 1949 quietly writing in Denver, Jack signed on as a passenger in a travel-bureau car, arriving in August on Liberty Street where Neal and Carolyn Cassady lived. He was soon fed up with the domestic scene, though, and with Neal arranged to help a car owner drive to Denver via Nevada and Utah.

Neal and Carolyn were still living here when Jack rolled west in mid-December 1951, followed down the pike by a cheque from Ace Books for $250, an advance on “On the Road”. He stayed with the Cassadys through April (before moving on to Mexico again), and in the meantime had his first psychedelic experience when the poet Philip Lamantia gave him some peyote.

Another stay with Neal, in October ‘55, went pear-shaped when Neal’s new girlfriend, Natalie Jackson, speeding and distraught, was killed fleeing when some cops came round. She either fell or jumped off the roof, having already cut her wrists. “Unidentified blonde leaps to death” was the headline in one of the local papers, and while in later years the press went out of its way to write up the sordid stuff (search “beatnik Babylon” on the Web), this time Neal and Jack were unscathed. Jack quickly moved in with Carolyn in San Jose, but the episode found a small place in “Dharma Bums”.

77: Eastbound in Utah

In the fall of ‘49 Cassady was up to his knees in self-inflicted woman trouble and Jack was anguished at his pal’s relentless planning that came to nought. He took the initiatve, for a change in their relationship, and convinced Neal they had to get back to New York and find a way to Europe.

They started out by helping a stranger drive his car to Denver, barrelling along Highway 80 through Utah and Nevada, swaying in the back seat “to the rhythm and the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank tranced end of all innumerable end of all riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives”.

78: Chicago

Jack and Neal’s most sensational cross-country jaunt, in the autumn of ‘49, took them from Frisco to Denver, where they stayed a couple of days before climbing into a travel agency’s ’47 Cadillac and flying to Chicago, covering 1,180 miles in 17 hours.

“Great Chicago glowed red before our eyes. We were suddenly on Madison Street among hordes of hobos, some of them sprawled out on the street with their feet on the curb, hundreds of others milling in the doorways of saloons and alleys … Screeching trolleys, newsboys, gals cutting by, the smell of fried food and beer in the air, neons winking — ‘We’re in the big town, Sal! Whooee!’” They “headed straight for North Clark Street, after a spin in the Loop, to see the hootchy-kootchy joints and hear the bop. And what a night it was.”

79: Detroit Greyhound station

From Chicago Neal and Jack’s 1949 eastbound road brought them into Detroit by car and bus, and here they picked up another travel-agency car to finish the run to New York. By the time they got there Jack was fed up to the gunnels with “the mad Ahab at the wheel”, and in no mood to pursue any plans of going to Europe together. All the way it had been “Dean, don’t drive so fast in the daytime … ah hell, Dean, I’m going in the back seat, I can’t stand it anymore, I can’ look.” Neal turned around and headed back to Denver.

The road continues here.