So in American when the sun goes down...

During dinner last night my sister-in-law mentioned that her son was traveling into town on a bus and that the trip was taking forever because of all the stops. She read a text message from him referring to the fact that he was seated next a 400 pound Russian woman. It brought to mind that first bus trip from On the Road—“It was an ordinary bus trip with crying babies and hot sun, and country folk getting on at one Penn town after another…”

I read On the Road by Jack Kerouac for the first time this past year. My 2008 reading list looks like a log of books that most people read in high school and college. I’m not sure what I was doing when I was supposed to have read some of those books, but I didn’t read them. Books like The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, or Dubliners by James Joyce and Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. In 2008, I did read some of the new stuff too, including The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski.

So my interest in Kerouac is consistent with my desire to make up for lost time and read things that I probably should have already read before now. However, that interest was accelerated by an August trip I took to San Francisco with my wife, who was attending a convention for romance writers. The following is an excerpt from my journal on the day I walked around North Beach.

I went walking because I didn’t want to sit in the hotel room. That hotel room is hot, I’ll tell you. It’s cool and breezy outside but stuffy hot in that room. Even with the window up its unbearable, I’ll tell you. So I’m not hanging out there. No way.

There’s a part of town called North Beach. That name is funny because North Beach is nowhere near a beach. But it’s where these famous poets got famous back in the fifties and sixties. To be honest with you, I never really read any poetry from these guys before—Kerouac, Ginsberg—never read anything by them in fact. I really never got into any sort of poetry until Billy Collins and he’s not exactly a beat poet, right. But I like bohemian things. I don’t know how I wound up being a republican accountant. I was supposed to be a bohemian, hanging around in bars drinking and smoking cigarettes after all sorts of wild parties and poetry readings.

Right now, I’m in this bar called Vesuvio’s and it’s on Jack Kerouac Boulevard. They have a drink named after Kerouac. I thought about getting it, but it’s got tequila, rum, and orange/cranberry juice. I thought about getting it but thought “Who am I kidding?” I never even read the first thing by Jack Kerouac and the last thing I need to do is get wasted mixing rum and tequila, which is exactly what would happen. So I ordered a Jack Daniels.

* * * * *

I’m wearing this stupid Hard Rock Café shirt. I feel like an idiot. Why couldn’t I have worn my Robert Earl Keen “Crack of Noon” shirt to be out in North Beach with these weird bohemian people. There is nothing bohemian about the Hard Rock Café.

I ordered a slice of pizza from this place that was on the map. They have these two guys playing music—its Italian music I guess. I don’t know any of the songs. Once I thought they were playing Red River Valley but that wasn’t right. I was stupid to think that. All these places have a million pictures on the wall of people who must be someone special. I don’t recognize any of them. In this place opera is a big thing. There’s a picture up there signed by Pavaratti. Then there’s Bill Cosby. That’s it though. I don’t’ know anybody else. Supposedly this place is another favorite spot of the beats.

I’m such a phony. I don’t know anything really about the beats or the opera and yet here I am sitting with my Hard Rock Café shirt on soaking up the beat poet thing and these two guys playing Italian music. Get a load of that.

While I encouraged my sister-in-law to tell her son to enjoy the bus ride, I did so recognizing my hypocrisy. As much as I enjoyed On the Road, I found myself challenged to think of what I would have done in many of Sal’s situations. Would I have found Dean Moriarty to be “the holy con-man with the shining mind”, or “the Holy Goof”—found him a hero and friend, or thought him noisy, overly complicated, and bothersome? Would I have hitched rides and spent all my money on bus fair to Chicago, or just have stayed home?

I fear that instead of talking to the 400 pound Russian woman, I would have turned the volume up on my iPod. But who knows—I’m working on it.