The Mad Ones.

My new book BEAUTIFUL BOY is coming out some time this year. I'm not sure of the exact release date, but the principal edits are done.

Working on the edits made me start thinking of my writing career. When I was a young man all I wanted to do was write. Almost everything else took a back seat to my desire and need to write. If there were other things to do, the act of creating a short story or a novel took precedence and so that is what I would do instead of anything else.

These days, though, this is not the case. I am an outdoorsman and enjoy kayaking, hiking, camping, and (especially) backpacking. Now when faced with a choice of working on a new novel or plotting a short story, or planning and executing a backpacking trip or a jaunt to go kayaking on a lake, I will choose to be outdoors, out in the sun, or climbing a forested mountain, or taking photos of waterfalls and wildlife.

When I was a kid I would look at the careers of many of the authors I admired in those days. And one thing generally struck me: their careers seemed to end well before they got old and died. I began to wonder if there was a burst of creative energy that lasted only so long and no longer. Yes, there were exceptions--folk who wrote for many decades. But most writers seemed to be active for only ten to fifteen years and then...nothin'.

I haven't, by any means, stopped writing. But I sure as Hell don't write obsessively as I did as a young man. When I do write I take my time and budget the hours and work with all due consideration. I used to think of myself as one of those "mad" folk that Jack Kerouac talked about:

“[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

That's the way I was when I was writing. Mad and burning and obsessed by the world around me and focused on the fantasy of characters and situations whirling around in me ol' brain.

Maybe that fire is burning out. I don't know. All I can say is that often I would much rather be standing on the summit of a mountain that I labored to climb instead of sitting in front of the white screen putting down the words that once drove me crazy with desire to transfer to paper.

I think that I'm still one of the mad ones. But in a different space.

Yeah...I know where I'd rather be.

Literature and Me

My parents always had books around. Tons of them. Even before they became booksellers there was always ample reading material around for me. My initial memories are of comic books.

 Here, then, are the literary influences that stuck in my brain throughout my life. Not necessarily the most important influences for me, but the ones that made initial impressions. Starting from as far back as I can remember.

The first comic that I can recall reading was the Jesse Marsh version of JOHN CARTER OF MARS from Dell Comics. I couldn't have been older than four or so when it was given to me. The next comic that I read was FANTASTIC FOUR #4. Again, I must have been five...it was before I entered first grade.

By the time I was eight I had discovered Hugh Lofting's DR. DOOLITTLE books. My mom watched me consume those and she gave me a copy of Bradbury's THE ILLUSTRATED MAN. Scared the shit out of me, and cemented a life-long love of horror. Then I discovered Ernest Thompson Seton and learned a respect for wild animals and later, I developed a love for our fellow creatures.

My dad gave me a copy of Darwin's VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE when I was nine. That began a love of science and learning and initiated a constant thirst for knowledge and kindled what I can only call a hatred for religion.

After that, of course, it was one discovery after another without any direction from my parents. I was too busy finding my own works to read. And of course it never stops. I'm always searching for the next writer to engage my imagination and to inspire my sense of wonder.

 

Give a Brother a Hand

Recently I read the novel AND THE HIPPOS WERE BOILED IN THEIR TANKS by Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. Everyone by now knows of the Beats, and Kerouac and Burroughs were two of the most important members of this group. The strange thing to most of us was how so many of these close friends from the underside of society managed to become famous artists. It seems uncanny when just examined superficially. How do these blokes who all hung out together as low-life scum end up at the top of the artist heap by the time the late 1950s rolled around?

And of course, the more I read by these fellows, and the more I read about them, the answer became obvious.

They were pulling one another along. If one had success, he allowed the others to ride his coattails. As soon as a member of their club-that-was-not-a-club had a hit, he used whatever influence that gave him to help a brother. And so, they pulled one another along, if not always up. Thus, we saw HOWL, and ON THE ROAD, and JUNKY, and GO, and so on. Ginsberg, especially, always seemed to be working behind the scenes with publishers trying to talk editors into taking on the work of one of his friends. Each seemed to do whatever he could to help the others achieve literary notoriety, if not always financial rewards (but often that, too). There seemed to be almost no jealousy among them when it came to their respective works. And it was because of this weird kind of camaraderie that they did, in fact, reward one another through these shared friendships.

One does not see a lot of this in modern times. I can't think of another such example of it, but it might exist beyond my experience. I've certainly witnessed almost no instances of it in my own career as a writer.

Many of Kerouac's biographers claim that he was confounded by his fame and didn't know how to deal with it and never sought it. This is bullshit. He always sought fame--mentioned the desire to have it in his manuscripts before they were ever published to great acclaim. He ate that shit up and loved being the center of attention. This was a performance piece done with Steve Allen, who was always keen to be hip, especially in those days of the the peak of the Beats fame. Kerouac went with it and this was likely just before he began his big downhill alcoholic slide.

Burroughs, the child-molesting wife-murderer manages to show some brilliant insight on his old friend Kerouac.

The three biggest of The Beats: starting second from left: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs. Lowlife scum who hit it big in the field of poetry and fiction.

Writing...writing...writing...

I've been reading some Jack Kerouac. I've read most of the stuff he left behind, so very little of it is new to me. Just now I was going back over BIG SUR which remains, to me, the most honest of his autobiographic novels. And it's honest in the way that he acknowledges his insanity. That's not something I've ever seen out of any other writer.

Still carving away at the concepts and final words of THE CLAN. I'm a stickler for logic in my novels, even when my novels deal with the impossible and the improbable. If the bits of the puzzle don't fit, I have to craft another piece that does fit.

Alas.

Influences

A lot of fiction heavily influenced my life in general, my life as a reader, and my life as a writer. Since I now make a decent paycheck now and again with my own fiction, that third influence on me is often foremost in my mind.

What books pushed me to write later in life more than others?

At some point I discovered the works of Charles Bukowski. At first it was his short stories that grabbed me, and then I moved to his novels, and then his poetry. Bukowski was an original. He made everything he did seem easy and casual, but that's not the way it was, at all. Underlying everything that he wrote was a humor and a wit that were both as sharp an insightful as any I've encountered. A lot of other writers try to imitate him, but no one succeeds at that. Don't try.

I also found Cormac McCarthy at some point. The first thing of his that I read was BLOOD MERIDIAN. It made quite an impact on me, and I've continued to read just about every novel that he produces. Some others are almost as powerful as that first one, but none of those have influenced me quite so much as that one. His style is another that one should not try to imitate. It's not that it can't be done--Charles Frazier did a passable patch on McCarthy with his COLD MOUNTAIN--but no one else can quite capture the world that McCarthy can conjure. Again, my advice would be to not even try to copy that style...and certainly don't compare yourself to Cormac McCarthy--this is a bit of hubris I've seen out of a few authors. Silly chaps.

I came upon The Beats rather late in life. I was well into my forties before I "discovered" them. It wasn't that I hadn't tried reading the work of that group of creators before I was older--but the fiction never held me for more than a few lines or pages, and so I'd cast that stuff off. Finally, though, I picked up ON THE ROAD for maybe the twelfth time in my life and, for some reason, that time everything fell into place. All the tumblers clicked. I was hooked for over a year on the fiction of Jack Kerouac, and then William S. Burroughs, and the rest of the bunch. I learned quite a lot from reading The Beats, and I almost abandoned genre fiction entirely after feeling that horrors and fantasies could never match the kind of power I was reading within the paragraphs of DESOLATION ANGELS or JUNKY. But eventually I came around and returned to what I knew best.

Somewhere in those past-40 years I found Robert Graves. First it was I, CLAUDIUS and then CLAUDIUS THE GOD AND HIS WIFE MESSILINA. Later I sought out his short fiction and after reading a bit of that I discovered some things about how to write that left me very well educated, indeed. Graves was a bit of a nut in many ways, but he was about as skilled a writer as I have ever encountered and I learned about as much from reading his fiction as from the works of anyone else I could name.

And even later than Graves and Kerouac and Bukowski I finally buckled down to read as much as I could of Hemingway. As with Kerouac, most of my friends had read Ernest Hemingway's work in their youth and been influenced by it as very young men. For whatever reason I found more to admire in the fantasies of Ray Bradbury and H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard and so would give up on the tempered realities of Hemingway. My loss as a young man, but there's nothing to be done for it now. Better that I finally appreciated him late than not at all. As with the others, reading his stories and novels showed me how to write more effectively than just about any of the fantasists with whom I'd been so engrossed from the age of eight through forty-two or so.

Did I waste a lot of my youth chasing dragons and demons and aliens creatures? Not really.

For the writer who influenced me more than any other was the crazed visionary Philip K. Dick. Most people today who know his name at all hear it because of his connection to so many film adaptations of his novels and short stories. He was, for many years, quite prolific and his mind was a vast factory of ideas. Today, he's considered the father of cyberpunk (go look it up). Some of his fiction seems dated--a product of the 1950s and 1960s and showing this in his language and condescending attitudes toward race and sex. But much of his work has stood the test of the decades since his death, and that material is as powerful now as when he first produced it.

My favorite Philip K. Dick novel is THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE. It is set in a world in which it was not the Allies who won World War II, but the Axis. Furthermore, he cast his characters in a North America that has been divided down the Mississippi River basin--the Germans in the East and the Japanese in the West. If he wasn't the first to exploit this concept, he was likely in the first tier of those using that idea effectively.

But Dick goes further. Within the novel is another novel. This novel is called THE GRASSHOPPER LIES HEAVY. The characters hear about it--written by an author who has used the theme that it wasn't the Axis who won WWII, but the Allies. And in MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, walls sometimes break down and the boundaries of reality are changed and altered. The characters within Dick's book are left with the idea that there is another world--one in which they were the victors and not among the oppressed.

This novel affected me on many levels. The night that I finished reading it, I placed it on my bedside table and turned out the light and went to sleep. Some time later--well before dawn--I came awake. Or at least I thought that I was awake. Then I realized that I was dreaming very vividly that I was lying in my bed in my own house. And I dreamed that I had just finished reading a book that I had placed on the bedside table before turning out the light. That book was, I realized, THE GRASSHOPPER LIES HEAVY.

This realization so startled me that I had to get up to turn on the light to look at the book. So I sat up and reached for the light.

And then I woke up. Really woke up. I was already up on one elbow reaching for the lamp, pretty much in my sleep. I knew what I was doing. For a moment, in the dark, I froze. I couldn't recall if the book by my bed was THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE or THE GRASSHOPPER LIES HEAVY. Which one was it?

After a few moments I couldn't take the suspense so I turned on the light and reached for the book. Picking it up, I realized that it was THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE. The bad guys had not won WWII. I was not living in a world dominated by the likes of Joseph Goebbels and Reinhard Heydrich.

That's what writing is all about. That's power. That's talent. It's not something I'm ever likely to equal, but it's something to reach for.

Philip K. Dick may very well have influenced me more than any other author.

At least I think so.

Working the Words

Writing is probably the most inexact art form.

As a writer I have an image in my mind, or an emotion I wish to convey. I go to the keyboard and attempt to translate these images and ideas into the written English word. It's tough work.

Depending on the strength of the subject I can hope for something approximating what's going on in my mind finding any success in the translation. I write pretty much every day, and every time I work on my writing I find that I'm constantly struggling to make these ideas find their translation from thought to the page.

I'm a better writer now than I was at any point in my youth. I'm a better writer now than I was when I was in my twenties. I'm a better writer now than I was yesterday. But that doesn't make it any easier.

Over those years I've found that I use less words to convey my thoughts onto the page. At times, it seems that I've been slowly making the transition from short story writer to poet. Save for the fact that I enjoy working in the novel form, I would probably have long ago turned my hand exclusively to poetry. Those guys seem to have achieved what so many novelists can only fail to prove.

Once, I heard James Dickey say that poetry was the highest calling to which Mankind can aspire. At the time, I dismissed that sentiment. But now I think that he was right. To crystallize an emotion into a handful of words is something unique and beautiful. The longer I live the more I find myself admiring the writers who struggle with a few lines to convey the things foremost in their minds.

Kerouac Slept Here

Everywhere I travel in the southeast I encounter old fire towers. These were important structures for decades, used by the parks and various forest services to spot fires by use of triangulation. In the world before satellites and GPS it was the best and most effective way to pinpoint the location of fires.

These days, the Forest Service uses the old eye in the sky. And these tall buildings are mainly being left to decay where they stand. In some cases they've been dismantled, leaving little or no trace that they were ever there. Sometimes when I'm hiking I will encounter the concrete pads that once supported a fire tower. In one case this past year I hiked past a spot where I'd stopped at a fire tower as a teenager not far from the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail. Now, the fire tower is gone and all that remains are some concrete footings.

Abandoned fire tower in Florida.

In the west, some fire towers are being preserved for historical reasons. Additionally, some fire towers can be rented as overnight lodging. Here in the East, for some reason, every fire tower of which I'm aware is being destroyed through neglect. Almost all of them are shuttered up and locked, and the ones that aren't are targets for vandalism and the general decay. It's pretty sad.

I assume that none are being preserved for the simple reason that the budgets won't allow for it. And there's no serious consideration of upfitting them as overnight lodging here as there is in the West. One reason, I assume, is that the design of eastern fire towers was so much different from those in the Rocky Mountain west. Here, the towers had to be made tall enough to see over the tree-shrouded areas and summits on which they were perched. This required small cabs at the tops of very tall towers of wood, or stone, or metal. Western lookouts could be perched on treeless rocks and bare peaks and stair access was minimal. This makes the eastern towers tougher to sell as an overnight lodging to Forest and Park services frightened of lawsuits.

Desolation Peak Lookout, manned for several months by Jack Kerouac. You can see the difference in construction with eastern lookout towers.

I reckon all of our fire towers in the east will soon be gone. They'll preserve a few of them, I guess, as historical curiosities. Just one more thing that you need to get out and see before they're all dust and rust.

Altered fire tower (turned into lookout platform) on Moore's Knob, North Carolina.

Not Like Kerouac.

Sometimes I get the germ of an idea and I don't know what to do with it. There's something in it that makes me want to write about the idea, but not enough to make me want to call it a story or to want to turn it into a novel. So it was with this little bit of fiction. In my mind, I could see six people--strangers to one another--travelers who'd just come together in an otherwise lonely place to share a meal and a little conversation. And in my mind I saw one of them lift up his boot and say, "I reckon there's enough DNA evidence on these soles to convict me of murder."

And that's how this happened.

Not enough for a story, and no nagging call to become a novel. But here, nonetheless.

Not Like Kerouac. Not At All

By

James Robert Smith

We were a bunch of Americans in a Canadian pub just north of the US border. It was a small town, and I was thinking how weird it was that the Americans seem to gather and find one another. But I’d seen it before. We had all been sitting at separate tables nursing beers while we waited for our meals. And somehow we all just gravitated to one big table and had started jawing, talking about where we’d been and where we were headed.

There were six of us, at a table, eating shepherd’s pie, drinking beer. The only Canadian was a girl, one of The People, a Native American, an Indian, if you want to use the old term.

We all sat there together, soaking in familiar American accents: Southern, Midwestern, strictly the Bronx.

I’m a dying breed. A dying breed because my source of income is dying off. I’m a newspaperman; past middle age, approaching old age. Every day I count the blessings I have. Blessings in the form of dollars I somehow managed to accumulate in savings and a 401k that was heavily invested in government bonds. Low yield, but safe and steady.

I have to admit that between chit-chat, I was admiring the lone Canadian girl. But she was with a kid whom I almost had to like for his lean, youthful features. She was clinging to this American fellow. Despite myself, I was writing my impressions of him on an aging Corona typewriter that existed only in my head: Young, late 20s, age and experience just now beginning to line his features. ‘It’s coming, kid. It’ll make leather of your face before too much longer.’

“And what brings you here?” I finally asked the young stranger with the attractive Indian girlfriend.

The kid looked up. Then quickly he looked down at his beer. And suddenly those eyes were flicking up again, as he peered deep into my eyes, and into the faces of each of the other guests sitting at the table. And then he said it.

“I killed a guy,” he told us, having decided not to lie anymore. For a while, everyone was silent. There was shock on the faces of the others. There was horror in the eyes of the girl whose grip seemed to fade on the arm of the golden boy. “On Montana Highway 6. Back in August of 2007.” One year ago, we all thought at once.

“Who was he?” The reporter in me asked first, breaking the spell before anyone else could panic or rise from the table to flee to safer, saner quarters.

“I don’t know. I was into that whole Jack Kerouac scene. I read those silly books of his, and it seemed like a good idea. So I did the whole bit with the backpack and wandering from place to place with nowhere to go and nothing to do but move on.

“One day I was sitting at a crossroads. I needed a ride, but I wasn’t really looking all that hard for one. Walking seemed to be just barely less desirable than having to suffer through another boring conversation with another boring driver. So I was just kind of daydreaming. My pack wasn’t quite out of the road. It was sitting just barely at the curb, and I was lying up in the grass.

“And all of a sudden this big truck appears, coming around a bend in the road, going way too fast. I even rolled back a ways to make sure he wasn’t going to get me. And the driver--this trucker--actually swerved toward me. I thought for sure he was aiming for me. But it wasn’t me. He was gunning for my backpack.”

“He got it?” I asked. I noticed that the others, despite his earlier admission of a capital crime weren’t going anywhere. They were listening to the golden, fair kid.

“Damn right he did. He ran right over it. That was a nice pack. External frame. I like those best. They’re hard to find, these days, with the popularity of the internal frame. I don’t know what it is, but I always liked an aluminum frame.” He blinked, shaking his head, as if to physically rid his mind of the digression.

“So what I did was stand up and shake my fist at the guy. Hell, I wasn’t even sure he could see me. I didn’t even flip him the bird. All I was thinking was that the guy had totally trashed my backpack, and probably everything in it. I had a really nice compact canister stove in there, too. Best one I ever had.”

“What happened then,” I asked him, thinking how I might write down this particular slice of life.

“Well, apparently the guy did see me shake my fist at him. I mean…hell…what a little thing. This guy had just crushed my home and my kitchen and most of my clothes. All I did was shake my fist at him. But he saw it, for damned sure. And he hit those big brakes of his. Tires locked down. Stinking rubber everywhere.”

Everyone at the table was silent, listening. I could see that his girl had released her grip on his strong arm, and her head was no longer resting on that muscled shoulder.

“I was still just standing there, next to my crushed up backpack, and here he comes. Running. Sure as shit. The guy’s coming right at me cursing and screaming and calling me every name in the book. Hopped up on yellowjackets or something, I figure.”

He went silent, then. The others just looked at him, afraid to speak. I was aware of their eyes suddenly on me, forcing me to make the next move for them.

“You fought?”

“Well, yes. In a manner of speaking. I don’t think he expected me to fight back. I mean, hippie kid and all that sort of thing. Probably, he figured he’d scare me or beat me up. Something like that.” He smiled, but the smile did create any warmth.

“But it was nothing like that. I’ve always had a mean streak.” He grinned at us, one and all. It was not pleasant. My impression of him as a golden boy had fled. “Basically, I beat him to death. It didn’t take long.”

“Never does,” he added. “I just picked up my pack. Couldn’t wear it anymore, but I could still carry it. Kind of like a busted up suitcase. He was lying there on the road. End of his story.”

“Are you sure you killed him?” One of the other diners had asked the question, this time. A forty-ish woman wearing clothes that didn’t suit her, trying to hold on to 30, long past the overdue date.

“Oh, he was dead all right. I bashed his skull in with my boots. These boots,” and he held one foot up. It looked like a regular boot and there was nothing there that anyone of us could see to indicate a murder.

“I reckon there’s enough DNA evidence in my soles to convict me.”

And that was when our tablemates all fled. All four of us. Me, too. I just didn’t feel like asking him any more questions. I didn’t want to know if he was pulling our legs or was on the level. I was tired, thinking of the 401k and the comfortable sum I’d managed to salt away over thirty years of newspaper work. Hell…who cared about one more murder, anyway?

I got up without saying too much more and went to my room, which was in the little hotel about 100 yards down from the diner. The others fled to their cars and vanished into the whole wide world. I never saw any of them again, and likely never will. None of them, apparently, had called the police, for I never saw anyone fitting such a description arriving on the scene to make an arrest. And I did keep an eye on the diner from the vantage point of my room. I peered out through a little space in the heavy curtains on the big plate glass window beside the door.

About two hours later, I saw the girl and the young fellow arguing. They were standing in the gravel parking lot in front of the diner. The young killer was mainly silent and his voice was never raised. But they were obviously at odds. After some time, she used an old-fashioned payphone on the side of the diner building to call someone. It didn’t take long, but another man, I’d guess her father, arrived and took her away. At least, I’ve always liked to think it was her father. He seemed to be an Indian, like her, and far too old to be a boyfriend or a brother.

For a second or two the kid looked almost like he was pleading, but the girl climbed into a pickup truck with the Indian and they drove off, leaving the kid. I watched him for a while. He put a pack on his back—it was an internal frame type, so I suppose he was right about having a hard time finding a good external frame pack. And he wandered off down the road, his thumb out as he disappeared into the distance and the woods closing in around it.

Much later, back in the States, the reporter in me decided to look things up, to check out the boy’s story. Sure enough, a trucker was killed on the stretch of road he mentioned. Timeline was right, too. No, no one was ever convicted of the killing. Could be the boy heard about it and made up the confession to shock people, or to chase off a girl he didn’t want to marry.

Who knows? I like to think he didn't do it.. But I'm betting he was telling the truth. I'm betting that little girl who had been clinging to his arm with such enthusiasm figured the same.

Once Was, No More

Every day I am reminded of how our society thinks of construction. It's merely a process, apparently, and has nothing at all to do with the value of that which has been constructed. In the area where I work I see fine old houses bought up, then leveled so that three or four or five or six homes can be built on the same plot of land that once provided space to a single house. I see rich folk buying perfectly fine homes, and gutting them down to the bare stud walls and starting over. I've seen this done with homes in June, the house sells again in December, and in January the new owners repeat the process. It's bizarre and wasteful almost beyond belief.

When I was a kid the Forest Service was still using fire lookouts to spot fires. Ideally, three towers would take readings and the fire would be located via triangulation when the spotters radioed in the figures. Here in the South, full-time rangers would man the towers, usually on a shift by shift basis. Out west, where towers could be very isolated, the lookouts would sometimes be manned by full-time seasonal employees. Even Jack Kerouac once spent a spring and summer manning a lookout in Washington State.

By the time I was a teenager, these towers were being used less and less. The Forest Service was beginning to rely on spotter planes and, later, satellite imagery to pinpoint fires. Slowly, they stopped using fire towers entirely. And, having no more use for the towers, they began to either remove them, or allowed them to deteriorate.

The Green Knob Fire Tower in Pisgah National Forest is deteriorating.

Generally, I cannot stand to come across a man-made structure on an isolated mountain top. It bothers me to see a building or a house in the wilderness. Sometimes, it makes my blood boil. But I've never been bothered by seeing a fire tower when I get to the top of a mountain. These days the towers are generally locked up tight. No one drives or hikes up to use them anymore. But, to me, they're historical buildings. They're a part of how we managed and maintained our forests in earlier days. Sometimes for the good, and sometimes for the bad. But history they are.

Why does the Forest Service allow them to fall apart?

In the west, many fire lookouts are kept in good order and are offered as overnight lodging destinations for hikers. It would be great if this could be done with lookouts here in the East. However, there doesn't seem to be much of an effort to allow this. Nor does anyone seem interested in preserving most of our remaining fire towers as historical structures. It's a shame. All over the South fire towers are crumbling. Some are definitely not safe to climb, while others are still in relatively good shape.

This past weekend on my way to the top of Frosty Mountain, I found the location of the old fire tower that had once graced that Georgia summit. All that remains are the concrete footings. I haven't been there since I was seventeen years old, but I seem to recall that the fire tower was still there when I was in high school. The Forest Service has all but eradicated all evidence of that old structure.

So it goes.

Some concrete footings are all that remain of the Frosty Mountain Fire Tower.

Qualities I Hadn't Seen

For some reason I cannot name, I never cared for the Beats when I was a young man. My pals and acquaintances would suggest the obvious books to me and I’d take a look at them, quickly grow rather bored with the prose, and put them aside. People kept telling me what a great writer Kerouac was, or what an amazing experience one had in reading William Burroughs, or how gifted a poet was William Ginsberg. It was all dead air to me.

And then, one day, at the age of 44, I picked up my copy of ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac. Why? I’m not sure, but I’d have to assume that it was because I’d exhausted all of the unread books in my house (no mean feat, that), and I just really, really needed something to read. So for the sixth or seventh time in my life (but for the first time since I was in my early 30s), I gave Jack Kerouac one more chance.

And it grabbed me. I mean, that book sank its hooks into me way past the barbs and I was landed. I don’t recall looking up from those printed pages for several hours. I couldn’t get enough of that novel and I could not force myself to stop reading the vast road trips of the fictionalized versions of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. I read the book that day and reread it over the course of the next few days.

After that, it was a mad dash to snag as many of Kerouac’s novels as I could find in the bookstores. I’m pretty sure I’ve now read them all, finding some of them brilliant and a few of them tiresome. THE DHARMA BUMS remains my favorite of the lot, and I keep a copy near at hand most of the time and it’s not unusual for me to take the book with me on my backpacking trips into the wilderness areas I like to explore.

In the years since Kerouac’s work “clicked” with me, I went through explorations of the other Beat writers. Burroughs’ QUEER and JUNKY are two very powerful books, although I just don’t dig his cut-out stuff. I can’t dismiss it out of hand as I would have done in my youth, but for now I can’t find anything in it that makes me want to read past the first bits. I may change my mind at some date…find myself bored and with nothing to read. At such a time I may pick up NAKED LUNCH and find that I quite like it. But for now I find that I much prefer Burroughs’ fictionalized novels and essays to those more experimental works for which he’s so well known.

And, by the time I made my way through collections of Ginsberg’s poetry, I realized that I was as fascinated with these fellows as personalities as I was by the talent they exhibited in their fiction and their essays and in their poems. They lived strange lives to my way of thinking. Bizarre and unusual lifestyles that were not hidden at all in a time and place when such behavior could very well have landed any of them in seriously hot water. These guys had guts.

I think that’s what has always impressed me about Kerouac and his pals. It wasn’t necessarily what they did, but the fact that they did these things and lived their lives in the face of such complete resistance. That took a kind of courage I never had, because I’d never been in a position to test myself that way. It’s not easy to stand counter to the society in which one exists. In fact, I can think of nothing more difficult and nothing more frightening.

I adore much of their work, but I think that I admire the courage of the doing as much as the art exhibited in the telling.