Big Sur

In the early 1950s, the nation recognized in its midst

a social movement called the Beat Generation.

A novel titled "On the Road" became a best seller,

and its author, Jack Kerouac, became a celebrity,

partly because he'd written a powerful and successful book,

but partly because he, uh, seemed to be

the embodiment of this new generation.

So here he is, Jack Kerouac.

3,000 miles from Long Island.

It's the first trip I've taken away from my mother's house

since the publication of "Road" three years ago.

All over America, high school and college kids

thinking Jack Kerouac is 26 years old

and on the road all the time hitchhiking,

while there I am almost 40 years old, bored and jaded.

The book that made me famous

and, in fact, so much so,

I've been driven mad for three years

by endless telegrams, phone calls, requests,

mail, visitors, reporters, snoopers.

I was surrounded and outnumbered...

and had to get away to solitude again or die.

So Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote and said,

"Come to my cabin in Big Sur.

No one'll know."

Although Lawrence and I exchanged huge letters

outlining how I would sneak in quietly into the West Coast,

I'd ruined my secret return to San Francisco by getting silly drunk

and marching forth into North Beach to see everybody.

Everyone recognized me.

I'm telling you.

Hey, everybody,

the bloody king of the beatniks is back in town.

Two days of that,

including Sunday,

the day Lawrence Ferlinghetti

is supposed to pick me up at my secret skid row hotel

and drive me to Big Sur woods.

One fast move,

or I'm gone.

You say I'm alone,

and the cabin is suddenly home

only because you made one meal

and washed your first meal dishes.

Then nightfall.

The flies retreat

like polite Emily Dickenson flies,

and when it's dark, they're all asleep in the trees.

Maybe the bees got a message to come and see me,

all 2,000 of 'em,

which seems to happen like a big party once a week.

No booze, no drugs, no binges,

no bouts with beatniks and drunks

and junkies and everybody.

...forehead.

No better.

What I do now next? Chop wood?

Long nights simply thinking

about the usefulness of that little wire scour,

those little yellow copper things

you buy in supermarkets for 10 cents,

all to me infinitely more interesting

than the stupid and senseless

"Steppenwolf" novel in the shack,

which I read with a shrug,

this old fart reflecting on conformity of today,

and all the while, he thought he was a big Nietzsche.

Because on the fourth day, I began to get bored

and noted it in my diary with amazement,

"Already bored?"

Even though the handsome words of Emerson

would shake me out of that,

where he says in one of those little red leather books

and is relieved and gay

when he has put his heart into his work

and done his best.

Yet I went crazy inside three weeks.

In me and in everyone,

I felt completely nude of all poor protective devices,

like thoughts about life or meditations under trees

and the ultimate and all that shit.

In fact, the other pitiful devices of making supper

or saying, "What I do now next? Chop wood?"

I see myself as just doomed,

an awful realization that I have been fooling myself all my life

thinking there was a next thing to do to keep the show going,

and actually I'm just a sick clown,

not even really any kind of common sense,

animate effort to ease the soul

in this horrible, sinister condition of mortal hopelessness.

I hate to write.

All my tricks laid bare, even the realization

that they're laid bare itself laid bare is a lot of bunk.

The sea seems to yell to me,

"Go to your desire. Don't hang around here.

"Why not live for fun and joy and love

"or some sort of girl by a fireside?

Why not go to your desire and laugh?"

But I ran away from that seashore

and never came back again

without that secret knowledge that it didn't want me there,

that I was a fool to sit there in the first place.

The sea has its waves.

The man has his fireside, period.

It's time to leave.

I'm so scared by that iodine blast by the sea

and by the boredom of the cabin.

I'm tired of my food, forgot to bring Jell-O.

You need Jell-O after all that bacon fat and cornmeal in the woods.

Every woodsman needs Jell-O or Cokes or something.

But before I go, I realize this isn't my own cabin.

Here's the second signpost of my madness.

I have no right to hide Ferlinghetti's rat poison

as I'd been doing, feeding the mouse instead,

so like a dutiful guest in another man's cabin,

I take the cover off the rat poison,

but compromise by simply leaving the box on the top shelf.

I go dancing off like a fool from my sweet retreat,

rucksack on back, after only three weeks

and really after only three or four days of boredom

and go hankering back for the city.

I figure I'll get a ride to Monterey real easy

and take the bus there and be in Frisco by nightfall

for a big ball of wino yelling with the gang.

I feel, in fact, Lew Welch ought to be back by now,

or Neal Cassady will be ready for a ball,

and there'll be girls and such and such,

forgetting entirely that only three weeks previous,

I'd been sent fleeing from that city by the horrors.

This is the first time I've hitchhiked in years,

and soon I begin to see that things have changed in America.

You can't get a ride anymore, but, of course,

especially on a strictly tourist road like this

or coast highway with no trucks or business.

But the tourists, bless their hearts,

after all, they couldn't know,

only think I'm having a big, happy hike with my rucksack,

and they drive on.

If you should ever stop using that smile,

how could the world go on?

We were gonna come down to see you this weekend.

You should have waited. Your mom wrote.

She said your cat died.

I'll go get the letter.

My relationship with my cats has always been dotty.

Some kind of psychological identification of the cats

with my dead brother Gerard,

who taught me to love cats when I was three and four

and we used to lie on the floor on our bellies,

then watch them lap up milk.

The death of a cat means little to most men,

but to me, it was exactly... And no lie and sincerely...

Like the death of my little brother.

What the hell?

Why bother grown-up men and poets at that

with your own troubles?

Maybe you should go back to the cabin

for a couple of weeks, huh?

Or are you just gonna get drunk again?

I'm gonna get drunk, yes.

You can go back soon, huh?

Okay, Lorry.

Did you write anything?

We can drink to that.

It's still a cat.

I know he meant a lot to you.

You know that's the way of things.

Hey, so by City Lights bookstore the other day,

there was a workman out in the front, you know,

hammering away with a jackhammer really loud.

"Yahh." Right in the street.

And the psychic above the studio leans out the window,

and he says, "When are you gonna stop

making all that racket down there?"

And the guy looks up, and he says,

"You're the psychic, buddy. You tell me."

Did you write that?

No, I... I read it in the paper.

Herb Caen wrote it.

Here's to Tyke.

I'll go give Lew a call.

Yeah, Lew, this is Phil.

Listen, I'm down with Jack at the bar.

Why don't you come down?

Old Jack!

On the rocks, right?

Hey, buddy. Hey.

Drinking any less?

Unless we're drinking. That we are.

Can I get one of what he's having, please?

Hey, go play a record or something.

Right.

Who's the kid?

Kid I met named Paul Smith.

He's a little scared of you, I think.

He's a little starstruck.

Yeah, apparently.

Janie. Yeah, you know.

Cheers.

Didn't know you were gonna be here.