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February 28, 2008 It should not surprise that, as fellow travelers both in literature and meanderings, Jack Kerouac and James Joyce had a few things in common. Joyce's stream of consciousness runs with a river of pugnacious, intellectual wander lust, constant exploration and probing, a fearless stretching of language and perceptions. Catholicism rejected and guilt along with it. There are no boundaries. Kerouac's stream comes with a fist full of speed, a restless, ever-improvised jazz progression, endless beers, pot wrapped in brown paper at a buck a joint and picked up off the toilet floor, and nearly the same eager, boundary leaping fearlessness that spiritually drives the maddest among us. He's one who deliberately thinks and does and feels and learns and get his ass kicked, shakes off the pain, and then goes for more and without a net. Always in another place. In 1912, Joyce left Ireland in a fury about his Irish publisher's betrayal of Dubliners, his collected stories of the people of the city for better or for worse. Joyce would do his time in Paris, move through Europe, finally anchoring in Italy while side-stepping two world wars. He never set foot in Ireland again. Kerouac tore wide eyed and hungry across the humming highways of America and rode those careening, hairpin swerving buses through the mountains of Mexico all the while with his head hanging out the window like a wild dog stoned on the free, surging air shooting up his nose and into his mind and soul. But when, on one front or another, the weather turned cold, Jack went home. Home meant his mother and shelter from the storm. Where the panes rattled with the first winter wind that told Sal Paradise, Jack's road hero, he'd made it just in time.  What's interesting is that Kerouac and Lou Gehrig also had certain commonalities. They were both the product of immigrant parents. Gehrig's progenitors were German and Kerouac's French Canadian. While Lou's people settled in New York and Jack's in the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, both families were working class. Both, while not simultaneously, attended Columbia University in New York, were members of the football squad, and had a contentious relationship with their coaches. Both maintained matriarchal relationships tight enough to be matched only by Elvis, Hamlet, and Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria whose mother made a family tradition of taking him back where he came from. The Iron Horse's creativity tore off a streak of 2,130 straight chapters before his book closed. Kerouac took an enormous roll of telegraph paper, cranked it into his typewriter creating a makeshift word processor, secured a few cases of beer, dropped a handful of 'bennies' down his neck, and, working straight through, didn't hit the pine until On The Road was a reality. Took about three weeks. Decades later Cal Ripkin would create the sequel to Gehrig's work. Kerouac's record remains untouched. He may have unwittingly set a certain standard for pro jocks today. But historically in keeping with more than a few great artists and creators, the process takes what it takes. All that matters is the final creation. And, if records are truly meant to be broken, is there ever really a final score? Certainly, as far as Kerouac goes, there doesn't seem to be a final mileage count. Just open his work and the road winds on forever. Over-elocution aside, Steve Allen was hip enough. On a Sunday night in 1958, On The Road having been published in '57 and now arousing mainstream curiosity, Jack Kerouac was a guest on Allen's NBC. Sunday night network show opposite CBS.' Ed Sullivan, who was presiding over the death of Vaudeville. On this particular evening, Steve gave an American public still in love with Eisenhower an alternative to Alan King. Seated at a piano, scatting chords, Allen flashes a copy of the book and brings out Kerouac. Rather than his usual checked, flannel shirt that got him clumsily tagged "The James Dean of the typewriter," Jack wears an open collared polo shirt under a light sport jacket and seems quietly at his ease. Allen, labeling them as such, asks obvious questions about the roll of telegraph paper, "How long were you on the road?" He gets off a not untypical one liner that gets a reasonable guffaw from the audience while Jack, squinting a bit and restlessly drumming his fingers on the piano top, cocks his head in observation. Finally, picking up the book to read aloud, Kerouac gives America a flash of what was happening among the wayward at places like San Francisco's Cellar Club. Completely himself, loose, open, and honest, he reads from On The Road with the same pure, fresh, wide-open, tires on the highway, surging rhythm he wrote it with. Steve-erino stays right with him on the keys with licks that could have followed that huge hog of a Hudson in which Jack and Neal Cassady jammed from coast to coast.
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