This is a fragment of a book manuscript on which I am working that reconsiders Jack Kerouac’s On The Road from the vantage point of 40 years of reading the novel. The goal is to consider it within my life and within the culture. Stay tuned. I plan to post additional selections for paid subscribers.
There was a song he’d sing, a line, really, repeatedly, gravel voice somehow capturing the melody, a song from the ether, his own imagination. “I’m goin’ fishin’ in the mornin’,” he’d warble, over and over. Not the Taj Mahal song, not some old country blues, just a line, nothing else. “Goin fishin in the mornin.” Over and over, scat mixed in, and his ceaseless patter of nicknames and random details. Betty the Bag. The guy who’d sell him weed. Fragments of tales of zoot suits in his Manhattan youth. He’d puff on a Pall Mall, tobacco staining his fingers, sing that gravel-pocked line.
King Edward Horan. Easy Ed. He gave us the full name at some point, with King in front like ancient Irish royalty. And who’s to say he wasn’t. He carried himself with an air of disregard, as if the world around him could spin off its axis and he’d continue puttering. Singing. This was his truth, his world, a small fragment of peace after years in the whirlwind, the alcoholic haze that landed him in his car in Highland Park. Somehow, he cleaned himself up. Somehow, he survived, gave up the booze, settled into a weary beatitude and a cloud of marijuana smoke. Found himself living in a house behind the Mexican restaurant where he worked.
Where we worked the year we were 20. Ed occupied one side of the house, a few of the rooms, named a couple — the brown room and the green room — where he would sit and smoke tightly rolled joints and Pall Malls, sometimes with us, sometimes with the occasional bedraggled freak that would wander into the house.
The restaurant, a beat-up Tex-Mex joint, was on Route 1. Needed more than a coat of paint. The house was behind it, in the woods. A ramshackle structure that probably had never seen better days, its carpets worn thin, window frames corroded and bent. The pipes would freeze in the winter because they were just inches below the surface. We lived there a year, with Ed, with a dog that shit on the carpet, with a tarantula, two cats, a pet mouse, and an endless parade of friends, acquaintances, random guests.
This was our Beat period, and Ed — Easy Ed — was our perfect guide. Ed was probably 56, born less than two weeks after Annie’s dad. Was from Manhattan. Would tell us stories of his exploits, splashy suits, fights, the racial reckonings that would occur at the margins of neighborhoods. Puerto Ricans, Blacks, though his language was less forgiving, nasty, offered mater-of-factly as he’d sit at the corner table in the Burrito Royale, the one by the entrance festooned with burn marks and carvings.
The Burrito was a place where a 19-year-old could earn a meager paycheck as he figured out what was next. We were part of a parade of the lost, playing at freedom or adulthood, or some other romantic notion of a hipster ideal. I shouldn’t speak for anyone but myself. I was reading and rereading Kerouac. Listening to jazz, punk, and the music of sixties rebellion, romanticizing revolution and smoking myself into a stupor. I was in my first apartment, living with my closest friends — people who are still my closest friends — and imagining that we were, in Kerouac’s words, “the mad ones.” Responsibilities were both real and somewhat illusory. I paid rent, but had a safety net. There were few real risks on tap, and the imagined descent into hipdom and Beatdom was really just so much romantic preening.
My room had seven-foot ceilings and I planned to paint it black or red. I had a mattress on the floor, a stereo and dozens of LPs, books and notebooks, a guitar, harmonica, and a leather jacket. The jacket would eventually be stolen, along with the cash proceeds of pot sales and a large amount of pot. We were selling weed from the house at one point to maintain our head stash, but that just drew in an array of shady characters we never should have trusted, especially in a house with broken windows and easy access. We were 20. Stupid. Stoned.
One night, after drinking a bottle of tequila, after everyone else had gone to bed, Bob and I spent the night in conversation, ending it with a trip to Asbury Park. We raced down Route 18 or Route 33 (frayed memory) in my 1974 Dodge Dart Sport, the one with the hole in the floor boards, rambling incoherently, riffing odd connections — a moment in time when Bob and I reached a kind of singular mind. We arrived in the Park, Springsteen and Kerouac merging with the pot smoke as the dawn grew from the darkness, but never left the car. We hit a drive-thru McDonalds, ordered breakfast and, realizing we were broke, sped off without the food. Asbury was were we tripped on acid earlier in the year, wandering its deserted broken streets. It was where we went with our girlfriends (40 years later and Annie and I are still together) to drink wine on the jetties. Where the year before we’d bailed on seeing Ellen Foley at the FastLane after driving down, bought a six pack and, because we had no bottle opener, cracked our bottles on the curb, wasting a couple of beers on the shore town street.
Years later, I wrote a poem about or tequila-inspired trip, called it “Joyride”:
Rushing 70 miles per hour
New Brunswick to
Asbury Park in
one minute
54 seconds
a screeching jag of
rushing whirl -
early morning
after a night of drinking
and talk
throwing word games
associations:
Theodore Dreiser and
Theodore Roethke and
Theodore Bikel and
Theodore Herzl
and Herschel Walker and
Walker Cooper and
so on
exploring our trivial wordiness
in short declarative burst:
Steve Sax (following Dr. Sax and
John Coltrane) -
60 seconds in a minute
minute man
minute maid -
Anita Bryant?
getting to the small city by the sea
where we watched the
night go light
and morning come up
over the Atlantic
eat McMuffins in a
McDonalds parking lot
overlooking commuter traffic on
Route 35
then heading home
two kindred souls
on a youthful joyride.
The poem is a relic. Badly flawed. Flabby. An artifact of two different moments in my writing life, an attempt to capture the thrill of youth, the synapse-popping of mind as pure energy at a particular moment of comradeship, and the last gasps of my wannabe-beatness. I was closing in on 30 when I wrote this, already working as a newsman, my style in flux, and my life planting necessary roots, in a way that Kerouac never could, that Ed failed to do, that was always a central part of my character. My Beatness was always a guise, a necessary one applied with a pen and notebook, for pen and notebook, and not one that could be sustained or that should have been.
Ed was a standing lesson in this. Ed and his zoot-suit, hipster stories, his colorful explanations of life lived at the margins, off the grid. The smallness of this life suited him, protected him. He had not seen his daughters in years, made efforts to avoid any entrapments, including from a woman he called Betty the Bag, who lived in the trailer part near the restaurant and who he said had designs on him. Ed had his routine, which served him well in a monk-like way, but it came about only through a life of alcoholism, of finding himself cut off from his life, living in a car in Highland Park. Came about through suffering, I was going to write, but I don’t know that he suffered in the traditional sense, that the life the rest of us eventually sought out and made for ourselves would have made sense for him.
We lasted a year in the house, but returned often at first, visiting with Ed, bringing him holiday dinners, sitting with him in the Burrito and listening to the same stories over and over, stories that would shift in tone and sometimes detail, stories that seemed more and more the stuff of legend than reality.
Years later, as the family that owned the restaurant attempted to normalize it, as Jimmy the son — a good guy, a friend who would die at a relatively young age — tried to impose order on what had always been a stoner’s paradise and likely tax write off, to try and make it profitable (it was always popular), he would clash with Ed, who was stubborn and quick to anger, a ball of resentments kept in check by the routine, but that would bubble up when challenged.
Ed managed to survive into his 70s, still in the house, working at Burrito. Jimmy found him in the house after realizing he had not been seen in several days. Bill and I attended the small service held in his honor. There was snow and the ground was frozen. Ed could not be buried for several months, but we stood in the snow, by what would eventually be his grave site, and said our good byes. I hadn’t visited him in years. He was from a different moment in my life.