Fantastic Voyage :: Chapter Two :: Burkina Faso

'And this was really the way that my whole road experience began, and the things that were to come are too fantastic not to tell.'

– Jack "Oh Dear" Kerouac, On the Road

Well.

That was interesting.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin...

My plan was to be at Brent Cross by 7am. Sadly, for the simple reason that I am a gargantuan oaf and spent most of the wee hours of Sunday night thinking love-thoughts about an Audrey Tautou lookalike, I didn't make it till gone noon. Well, OK, if you want the absolute truth it was probably nearer 3pm when I finally arrived at the North Circular at Staples Corner. The business end of the M1. I took out my sign.




That’s where my gran lives, you see. Sunderland. Not Drearsby or Blighton or Cockchester or any of that other nonsense, but Sunderland. That’s right – the time for playing games is over.

Well, almost.

I actually made two signs. One super-positive and packed with good vibes – the one you see above – the other less so…



I knew I’d made the right choice to go with the upbeat one, however, when after only around ten minutes, my first lift hissed to a halt thirty seconds up the road. And when I climbed into the passenger seat, although I was very grateful that I’d got off to a good start, part of me was also a tad disappointed. Vic looked nothing like Audrey Tautou.

Vic was a trucker. Long-haired, stoat-nosed, unshaven, three pairs of knickers hanging from his rear-view mirror.

He was very friendly. Very chatty. He told me, quite without shame – rather, au contraire, he told me with a great deal of ostensible pride – that when he was in his 20s, it became his ambition to have a T-shirt printed which bore the slogan, ‘I fucked the world before the world fucked me’. He would only permit himself to get this T-shirt printed, however, once he'd actually had sexual relations (penetrative) with at least one woman from every country on the planet.

‘I did pretty well an’ all, if I do say so myself,’ he said, himself, all ruddy cheeks and beaver teeth. ‘Go on, test me.’

I didn’t understand. I don’t really think I wanted to understand.

‘Name a country,’ he said. ‘And I’ll tell you if I've been there or not. If you know what I mean.’

‘Alright, then,’ I said. ‘Lichtenstein.’

‘That’s not a country!’ he cried. Either he knew that in my head I had spelt it incorrectly, or else he was just feeble-minded.

‘Ask me a proper one.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘England.’

‘Check,’ he said. ‘Many, many times. I live there in fact.’

‘Wales,’ I said.

‘Check,’ he said. ‘Many times.’

‘Croatia,’ I said.

‘Check,’ he said. ‘Mirna. It means “peace”. She was a piece an' all. Eh? Eh?' He winked at me. 'Ask me another.’



This went on for some time. When I grew tired, Vic explained that the only reason he had failed to complete his task was that he’d got one of his sample pregnant and decided to do the decent thing.

‘Congratulations,’ I said.

‘Thanks,’ he said.

Vic did a funny thing. When he referred to his wife, he did so using the expression ‘ball and chain’. I really didn’t think people did that in real life.

I asked him if that meant that he’d been faithful since he was married.

‘Define “faithful”,’ he said.

‘I have my answer,’ I said.

‘Nah, nah, nah,’ he insisted.

He went on to explain that although he hadn’t had penetrative intercourse with anyone but his wife since he entered, perhaps only faux grudgingly, into the bondage of matrimony, he had paid for the occasional hand-job. ‘And every now and then,' he added, 'I treat myself to a tit-roll. Twenty quid for a tit-roll. Not bad, that.’

Interestingly, Vic still maintained, apparently perfectly seriously, that he didn’t actually cheat on his wife. He respected her too much for that. In fact, the only time he would ever grant himself a pass would be if the opportunity arose to sleep with a woman from Burkina Faso. ‘It’s in Africa,’ he said.

‘So I believe,’ I said.

Turns out Burkina Faso was like the holy grail back in his ‘fuck the world’ days.

I asked him how long he’d been married.

‘Five months,’ he said.

For all his coarse boasting, casual misogyny and bravado, I think Vic was actually a really nice bloke. He was very warm and generous. He shared his sandwiches with me. And he told me stories about how great he was.

Most probably he was just seeking affirmation, validation, love. But then who isn't? Eh? Eh?

Some of us just go about it in a funny way.

Vic dropped me at Leicester Forest East services, where he couldn't resist letting me know that he'd once enjoyed sexual relations (penetrative) with a girl from Nuneaton, just down the road. Apparently it was very nice.

I said my thanks and goodbyes, wished him luck with Burkino Faso and gave a silent prayer that as he drove away, somewhere in Lancashire his wife was in rhapsodies of carnal euphoria, practically suffocating in a veritable tsunami of sausage rolls. If you know what I mean.

...

Tomorrow: Seize the Baguette!

Fantastic Voyage :: Chapter One :: The Fantasy Element

I'm late. I should've been on the road hours ago. Years ago, by God. What have I done with my life? Oy.

I couldn't get to sleep last night. I was tossing and turning. Dramatically. I kept going through increasingly unlikely lift scenarios. It reminded me of when I was 17 and learning to drive. The fantasies I'd have that one day the gnarled fascist who was teaching me to drive (a Conservative councillor who was ridiculously proud of the fact that he'd driven everything from a Sherman tank to a tricycle and insisted on smoking in the car for the simple reason that I didn't have asthma and could therefore bog off), would suddenly be replaced by an exotic and amorous gentlewoman with a short skirt, an intoxicating fragrance and long leather gloves.

God, I haven't changed a bit.

I was still awake at 4am. And terribly sore. Eventually though, I nailed it. The ultimate lift fantasy...

She pulls up just ahead of me in a shiny old orange Beetle with a Porsche engine and no roof. The sun is beating out of the sky like Mike Tyson in a temper.

I jog to the side of her car, looking surprisingly lithe. 'Thanks for stopping,' I say. ‘I really appreciate it. How far are you going?’

‘Would you believe I’m going all the way?’ she replies, eyeing my sign. 'Hop in.'

I gasp a gasp of unadulterated jouissance and hop in. As we pull out into traffic, I strap myself in and for the first time I get a good look at her face. My heart falls open like a broken clock. ‘You,’ I gasp. ‘You know who you look like?’

‘I know, I know,’ she says, rolling her dark eyes. I decide not to push it.

Once we get moving, she asks me my name. I tell her.

‘My name’s Camilla,’ she says.

‘That’s nice,’ I tell her. I ask her what she does. It’s a boring conversation-starter I know, but it’s practical. ‘I used to be a doctor,’ she says. ‘Now I write and illustrate children’s books. Also, although it’s not regular work, I can make a lot of money standing in for Audrey at film premieres and the like.’



I nod my head smiling. I knew it. ‘It is an uncanny likeness,’ I say, coolly. 'One-nil.'

She chuckles coquettishly. ‘Well, I’m a couple of years older than her, so actually I don’t look like Audrey Tautou. Audrey Tautou looks like me.’

‘Fair enough,’ I say. Except I say it in French, with a very sexy accent.

Camilla speaks French fluently. As well as 40 other languages.

She looks over at me as she drives, smiling mischievously. ‘Can I ask you a question?’ she says. ‘It’s a bit cheeky.’

‘Of course!’ I cry. ‘I love a cheeky question.’

‘Well, I was wondering if we could stop somewhere, maybe find a hotel, get a room and just lie on a bed for the rest of our lives, kissing. I’m very attracted to you.’

Before I can close my mouth, she is decelerating, parking on the hard shoulder and moving toward me. ‘What are you doing?’ I ask, alarmed.

‘I can’t wait for a hotel,’ she says. ‘I need to kiss you now.’







And so on. She also has MDMA, she’s really, really funny, and she fucking loves me.

Yes.

I'm sure it's going to be exactly like that.

Right then.

Here I go...

Preparation H

H is for hitching of course. But also – of course – for haemorrhoids.

So it goes.

I wasn’t entirely sure how to prepare myself for going ‘on the road’, as they say. So last night I watched The Hitcher, the original one with Rutger Hauer as the eponymous nutbag. It’s a pretty dumb film on the whole, full of giant silly holes. But it did make me think of a few things not to do on Monday.





Another thing that made me think of things not to do was the story of Randy Kraft. (Thanks a lot, Maria in Oregon.) Randy Kraft. Great name for a porn star. Unfortunately, Randy Kraft is not a porn star. He is a serial killer. If you read about his early life on Wikipedia, however, you might as I did feel a certain sadness for him. You should. He was mentally ill. And it’s your duty as a human being to feel empathy and sympathy, otherwise you're not doing it right.

Another thing that made me think of a few more things not to do was a poem called Hitcher by Simon Armitage. (Thanks a lot, Sophie in Essex). Here, if you simply can’t be bothered to follow the link, is a brief excerpt:

I let him have it
on the top road out of Harrogate -once
with the head, then six times with the krooklok
in the face -and didn't even swerve

You know what?

I’m going to get the train.

No, not really. I joke, I joke. It’ll be fun. And what’ll make it fun is that I’ll be meeting people, and people are full of slips and slurs and twists and turns and grace and care and love and hate and voodoo. And I really, really love them. Really. Even the cunts.

A wise man once said: ‘Being is other people.’ It was me.

So I’ve made a list of Do’s and Don’ts, to help me on my way. (Was there ever a more annoying expression than ‘do’s and don’ts’? No matter how you render it…

do’s and don’ts
dos and don’ts
do’s and don’t’s
douze en danse

...it always looks wrong. But there’s no way around it. Aaaaaah, life.)

No, wait!

DOs & DON’Ts

(Aaaaaah.)

Do make a sign. Otherwise people won’t know where you want to go. Duh. I’ve made two.

Do dress like someone you might want to pick up if you were driving along the motorway and saw yourself there. Oh. Unless that is, you’re an incorrigible sex pest.

Do not dress as a French maid with a giant butt-plug round your neck, no matter what else you’ve been told.

Do smile. Smile like a man who is full of hope and dreams and excitement about his part in the endlessly emotional, eminently fascinating, predominantly enjoyable toboggan ride that is life.

Do not smile like Ted Bundy.



Do take deodorant. Apply roadside in a lull. You don’t want to be honking in someone’s private space. And it’s going to be hot. Damn hot.

Do not cover yourself in excrement before accepting a lift.

Don't smoke by the side of the road, no matter how cool you might think it looks.

Don't drink from a bottle of whiskey by the side of the road. (If there’s anybody looking.)

Don't turn to the person who has picked you up, two minutes into your journey and say, referring to the last guy who picked you up: 'I cut off his legs, and his arms, and his head, and I'm gonna do the same to you', and then start laughing maniacally. It's just rude.

Do be gracious.

Don’t despair.

Don't judge people by their appearance, but if someone looks like a psycho, make a run for it.

Don't get picked up by a serial killer. Or Simon Armitage. Neither are to be trusted.

Do the right thing.

Don’t blame it on the sunshine.

Don't blame it on the moonlight.

Don't blame it on the good times.

Do blame it on the boogie.

Actually, on second thoughts, don't blame it on the boogie. (Don’t even use that word. It’s highly offensive.)

Don’t worry. Be happy.

Do wah diddy.

Alright, I’m done. Done wah diddy.

If you have any to add, I’d be honoured to hear them. If not, wish me luck, and if I do happen to end up on the local news or God forbid, a headline in the Metro: LONDON MAN DISMEMBERED AND EATEN IN GRISLY M1 SEX MURDER – grieve not; dry your instinctive tears with the knowledge that at least a small part of me will have relished the novelty of it all.

Damn you, Maria in Oregon! Look what you’ve made me search out and devour… The Freeway Killers.

They're everywhere!

Pish. Enough of my silliness. See you in the North.


(Eek!)

Classic Road Trips, Part One :: Whitstable '94

I have hitched before, but a long, long time ago, and it wasn't enormously momentous. I was with NotKeith. I think we were 17 at the time, but we may have been a little older.

Keith’s dad dropped us off on the other side of the M25 out of Dartford. It was early. Slightly too early. I’d overslept, keelhauled into consciousness with a shrill summons from the kerb. I hadn’t even had time to perform my morning purification ritual (poo). So much so that no sooner had Keith’s dad wished us luck and rejoined the traffic, I realised I really had to go.

The junction we were at backed onto woods which rose steeply from the hard shoulder on the other side of a shallow dry trench, if I remember correctly. I jumped over the trench and scrambled up and away into half-arsed thickets. As soon as I was hidden from traffic, I pulled down my trousers and pants. I crouched. I felt like Stig of the Dump.

I don’t know if you’ve ever done a poo in a bit of woodland down the side of a motorway, but if you have, you’ll know it’s not something you'll ever want to recount in ghastly, practically palpable detail, particularly if at the time you'd neglected to avail yourself of anything with which to wipe the horrified walnut shell of your bleeding, freakishly distended rectum which sobbed and throbbed from exertion so that it was almost breathing, its odious breath a heady cocktail of rotting dog, ammonia and chips; its lips aghast, gaping, like a messy eater who’s just seen a ghost.

I shouted down to Keith. ‘Keith!’ I shouted. ‘Have you got any toilet roll?’ He didn’t have any.

Reader, I had no choice. Foul as it was, I grabbed dead leaves from the cold earth and tore the living from the branches of my bowel-friendly bower, pushing them against my poor dirty bottom, old before its time, and rubbed away the leftovers.

With the terrible tools at my disposal, I did the best I could and, apart from a slither of stool beneath a couple of fingernails, I think I pretty much got away with it.

So I did myself up, scrambled out of the thicket, down the bank, over the trench and joined Keith at the roadside. I remember thinking he looked rather silly standing there with his thumb out. I was just about to tell him what a terrible time I’d just had when a car pulled up ahead of us. Our faces lit up. We grabbed our bags and ran.

‘Where you going, lads?’

We didn’t have a sign. That was stupid.

‘Whitstable!’ we replied in unison.

‘I can take you as far as Rochester,’ said the driver.

We hopped in.

Keith got in the back before I could, so I got in the passenger seat. The driver was a middle-aged man with a moustache. He was on his way to work. I don’t think he said what he did but his car suggested it was something manual. He was perfectly nice and everything but he didn’t seem to want to talk. After a bare minimum, a mere smattering of superficials, he switched on Radio One and we became silent.

Which was when I noticed the smell of excrement.

At first it was more like the mere threat of a smell, or maybe just a memory. I assumed it was my fingernails and surreptitiously hid them away in the folds of my coat.

Then it became stronger, and I realised that when he had turned on the radio, the driver had also fiddled with his heater, flicking the switch that made hot air come through the footwell. This in turn led me to the realisation that when I had left the thicket, I must have inadvertently trodden in my own poo.

God knows what the driver thought had happened. He probably assumed that I’d shat myself and was too polite to say anything. Or else he had no sense of smell.

The rest of the trip passed without incident, unless you count the stench, which persisted.

And that, for better or for worse, is pretty much all I can remember of the classic Dartford-Whitstable road trip of the spring of ’94. We did make it to Whitstable as I recall. And we had a bag of cockles each and caught the train home.

I know. It’s not the greatest story in the history of hitching. There was no poetry, no jazz. I didn't even find myself on the road, for God's sake! Hopefully that'll happen next week.

In the meantime, have you ever hitched? Yes, you. Was it any good? Did you find yourself? Did you get where you were going to? Did you like the things that life was showing you? Tell me your tales. Go on, inspire me. Or frighten me if you must...

How the Car-Crash of Jack Kerouac's Spontaneous Prose Inspired Me To Get My Thumb Out of My Bottom and Hit the Road

Truman Capote famously trashed Jack Kerouac’s On the Road with the words: ‘That’s not writing. That’s typing.’ All I can say is, Capote must have been in an uncharacteristically charitable mood that day, because it’s not typing. It’s projectile vomiting.

‘Spontaneous prose’ Kerouac called it. Pretentiously.

Apparently…

'Kerouac typed rapidly on a continuous scroll of telegraph-paper to avoid having to break his chain of thought at the end of each sheet of paper. Kerouac's dictum was that "the first thought is the best thought", and he insisted that you should never revise a text after it is written.'

Wow. That's some seriously misguided egomania right there.

Now there were two things, it seems, that we can blame for spontaneous prose. The first was jazz. Not good jazz, however, but the interminably cacophonous crazy jazz that’s basically an improvised orgy of musical masturbation that you always have to turn down when it comes on the radio because you can’t hear yourself think. Kerouac loved jazz. (And he loved the spirited Negroes that made it!).

The second thing was Kerouac’s friend, Neal Cassady, portrayed in On the Road as Dean Moriarty.

Dean Moriarty is the driving force in On the Road, and the subject of the besotted narrator’s haphazard hagiography.

An odd character to idolise, Moriarty is, amongst other things, a thief, a woman-beater, a practising paedophile, an inveterate bullshitter and a ghastly, unreliable drunk. Worse than all of that, however, at least from the point of view of the beleaguered reader, Dean Moriarty is a monumental bore, obsessed with his own intellect and labouring under the embarrassing misapprehension that each and every one of his rather mundane thoughts and observations is intrinsically interesting.

What really fascinates and arouses Kerouac’s alter ego, Sal Paradise – barf – is Moriarty’s spirit. You see, Dean Moriarty is free. Like the Negroes and the Mexicans and the crippled boys and beggars, like the raw-living big-laughing yokels uncorrupted by affluence, Moriarty has soul and spirit and he lives pure and fast and beyond conventional morality. He does what he pleases. And he doesn’t stop talking and he doesn’t stop moving. He never stops. He is the patron saint of ego-propelled perpetual motion.

I get the impression that in 1957, this was all very interesting.

But I can’t really imagine it. I mean, I can't imagine what it must have been like to have been shocked by the ground-breaking innovation of this book. I suppose too much time has passed. Or else I don't have enough imagination. However, the book is not without its shocking aspects. The paucity of plot, for example, is horrifying. As is the piss-poor characterisation, the leadenness of the imagery, the humour bypass and the more general, all-pervasive joylessness.

They blather on, Kerouac's deadbeats, about their fascination with life, yet they seem utterly incapable of really enjoying it. And why do they have to be so earnest and pretentious and unassailably self-important? I think I’ve met people like Kerouac before. They’re the same people who refer to themselves as ‘artists’ far too readily and rarely, if ever, have the heart to laugh at themselves.

But maybe I’m missing the point. Maybe the book was important because, as Kenneth Rexroth suggested at the time, Kerouac demonstrated to the world – perhaps even unwittingly – that his generation of self-obsessed delinquents were in fact a pack of worthless hypocritical vermin. That’s not a quote. This is a quote:

‘These innocents dash madly back and forth across the country, but they aren’t even very good at hitchhiking … Their values are those of the most conformist members of the middle class they despise, but enormously hypertrophied. They are demoralized and unsuccessful little Babbitts. This novel should demonstrate once and for all that the hipster is the furious square.’

Rexroth also wrote, of Kerouac’s follow-up novel The Subterraneans:

‘The story is all about jazz and Negroes. Now there are two things Jack knows nothing about – jazz and Negroes. His idea of jazz is that it is savage drums and screaming horns around the jungle fire while the missionary soup comes to boil … As a natural concomitant, Kerouac’s attitude toward Negroes is what, in jazz circles, we call Crow-Jimism, racism in reverse.’

Yes! That is so true. In your face, Kerouac! Rexroth is a great writer. You know just from reading a couple of his sentences that he didn't stick with the first thing that came into his head. To be fair, however – if I must – Rexroth also wrote this in his review of On the Road:

‘This is a book you should read. You are humane. You read good novels. This is the price in dehumanization society pays for your humanity. Kenneth Patchen has told people this in many books for many years, Henry Miller, too, Céline and Allen Ginsberg, whom the San Francisco police don’t like. Hosea said it long ago, and all the other prophets in the Bible. Things weren’t so bad then. They’ve got a lot worse. A lot worse. Still nobody pays any attention.’

So there you go. It was the American Psycho of its day.

But fifty years is a long time. Today, historical curiosity aside, On the Road is not a good book. In fact, it really is a car crash.

Having said all that, reading On the Road did inspire me. I confess. Because I’m convinced that it takes a special kind of negative energy to turn a subject as readily compelling as hitchhiking into something as painfully mundane as On the Road, I’m going to put my money where my mouth is and go on the road myself. And by God, if I don’t find something more interesting than Dean Moriarty on the way, I’ll cut off my own thumb and apologise.

So, next week when I begin the first of two weeks’ holiday, I’m going to celebrate by hitching up north to see how my gran’s getting on. I know that 250 miles up the sagging spine of Englandshire doesn’t really compare with Kerouac’s mammoth mythical treks back and forth across the United States, but, you know, size isn’t everything. And if William Blake could see the world in a grain of sand, I'm sure I can see something halfway interesting in the whole of the M1. Well, we shall see....

Fabulous Jim Sweeney

Last night I found myself weeping upstairs on a bus to New Cross.

Because of this. It’s a post from Jim Sweeney, about living with MS.

Here's a tiny excerpt:

'I have no advice on how to live life. Except this: (a) grab life by the ears every day and French kiss it to the ground and (b) don't get to old age clutching a list headed, "I wish I'd......"'

Do read the whole thing. It's very moving. And very funny. And the 'song' at the end is lovely.

And I only hope that when I get MS – or whatever it is that gets under my skin and drags me away to nowhere – that I can handle it with such divine sparkle.

Have a nice weekend and if it's any way a physical possibility, live it.

Bring Me The Sunset In A Cup, Or Something...

I should have been a pair of ragged claws. Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. But I’m not. I’m a fucking sub-editor. Scuttling across scores of tiresome screeds and wasting vast swathes of my all-too-brief time on this planet poring over deeply dull, stultifyingly self-important crud.

I don’t want to be a bore about it – I know almost all of us have to endure the gluttonous teeth of the toad work squatting on our glazed faces and sucking out all that is good and vital about life – but today it was particularly irksome. Today, because I had to stay late to finish some especially egregious crud, I missed out on an opportunity to see something I really wanted to see. Something that I suspect might have moved me, and reminded me of the good stuff.

To wit, a recital, with the words of Pablo Neruda read by Charles Dance and set to the music of Astor Piazzola. When Astor Met Pablo it’s called, and it’s happening now. For one night only. My flatmate Imogen got me a ticket. All I had to do was be in Farnham for 8 o’clock. But because the toad was particularly poisonous today, I couldn’t make it.

So I came home, furious, and opened a bottle of wine. Night-coloured wine. Wine with purple feet.

I knew next to nothing about Pablo Neruda until yesterday when I watched Il Postino, and then, still weeping from the film, I found some of his poetry online and quickly realised that he’s awfully, awfully good.

I read a poem of his called Don't Go Far Off, Not Even For A Day and I found myself yearning to be in love, even in unrequited love (although preferably not), and I thought ah, yes… poetry.

I’ve always found poetry a little difficult and I’ve rarely read it for my own pleasure. In fact, I could probably only name half a dozen poets of whom I’ve read more than just a few lines. Probably very predictable stuff too. Let’s see… Philip Larkin, Emily Dickinson, TS Eliot, ee cummings… um… I’m running out. Roger McGough. And aaaaah, Baudelaire. But only one poem. Oh, and a little bit of Keats.

So I have decided, on finding Neruda, on losing Neruda, that I must read more poetry. I think I might be ready. I think I might need it. And not just because in Il Postino, an ignorant man uses it to snag this heavenly creature…



…but partly.

I have also decided – because I started having premonitions of death and I really don’t want to die now, not now – that I shall stop riding my bike to work for the next three weeks. This means I can read poetry again on my commute. (Ugh, what a ghastly word.)

So I need your advice. Which poets should I seek out? (One good thing about work by the way, is that I can go in early and spank seven shades of sycamore out of the printer, so don’t hold back. And if a thousand trees must die in my quest to have the barnacles ripped from my brain and my emotional moorings stripped and scattered on the shore, so be it. You see? I need help.) What poets do you like? Which ones make you cry? I want to cry. Crying is good. As long as there is laughter involved too.

Oh, and Dylan Thomas! I love Dylan Thomas.

So, poetry please... if you'd be so kind.

Found: Insane Typist Anecdote

Thank you so much to those of you who came to my rescue last night. I'm quite overwhelmed that within a few short hours, someone had typed out the passage, someone had scanned it, and someone had somehow sent me the entire book. I am indebted to all of you, particularly Timid Heathen for typing it out - that shows a special kind of devotion to niceness.

Anyhow, just in case you're interested, here's the anecdote. (Oh, and the Mark in question is Mark Vonnegut, Kurt's son):

I knew Kerouac only at the end of his life, which is to say there was no way for me to know him at all, since he had become a pinwheel. He had settled briefly on Cape Cod, and a mutual friend, the writer Robert Boles, brought him over to my house one night. I doubt that Kerouac knew anything about me or my work, or even where he was. He was crazy. He called Boles, who is black, "a blue-gummed nigger." He said that Jews were the real Nazis, and that Allen Ginsberg had been told by the Communists to befriend Kerouac, in order that they might gain control of American young people, whose leader he was.

This was pathetic. There were clearly thunderstorms in the head of this once charming and just and intelligent man. He wished to play poker, so I dealt some cards. There were four hands, I think—one for Boles, one for Kerouac, one for Jane, one for me. Kerouac picked up the remainder of the deck, and he threw it across the kitchen.

It was then that Mark came in, unexpectedly home for a weekend from Swarthmore College, where he was a religion major. He was also a middleweight wrestler in very good shape. He wore a full beard and a work shirt and blue jeans, and carried a duffel bag. Everything about his costume and even his posture might have been inspired by Kerouac's books.

The moment Kerouac saw him, Kerouac stood and looked him over smolderingly from head to toe. The calm before a fight settled dankly over the room.

"You think you understand me," said Kerouac to Mark.

"You don't understand me at all. You want to fight about it?" Mark said nothing, not knowing who Kerouac was or what he was so mad about.

Kerouac praised himself as a fighter, asked Mark if he really thought he was man enough to take him on.

Mark understood this much, anyway: that he might really have to fight this person. He didn't want to, but then again, he wouldn't have minded fighting him all that much.
But then Kerouac sat back down in his chair heavily, shaking his head and saying over and over again, "Doesn't understand me at all."

Later on that night, after Kerouac and Boles left, Mark and I talked some about Kerouac, who was then completing his seventeenth and last book. He would die very soon.

It turned out that Mark had never read Kerouac.

I don't care for Jack Kerouac – neither his writing nor the man, or at least what I can glean of the man from his writing – but I find this story very sad nonetheless.

Lost: Insane Typist Anecdote

More or less exactly a year ago this month I sold all of my books. It was one of the most difficult and unnatural things I’ve ever done, as the first scene of my one-day-surely-to-fuck award-winning-if-I-ever-finish-it play The Collector clearly testifies.

There were 700 of them and I’d been dragging them around with me, and loving them, adoring them, for years.

Although I said at the time that I felt a certain lightness on letting them go – and no doubt at the time it was true – it’s also true that I’ve missed them, a lot, in the last year. Not all of them, obviously, but some of them, and frequently.

I’m missing one of them now, and because I am a) skint b) short of time, and c) loath to buy any book that I owned for so many years and was then forced by circumstance to get rid of, I really don’t want to have to track down a new copy. And my local library doesn’t have it. So I’m asking you, the internet, for your help.

So, are there any Kurt Vonnegut fans out there? I should bloody well hope so. The man was a god. Anyhow, what I’m looking for is a copy of an anecdote that appears in Vonnegut’s autobiographical hotchpotch Palm Sunday.

I had this copy by the way.



Hardback. I got it secondhand. In Brixton I think.

Oh, bloody hell. I really miss my books. It's weird. In some ways I miss them more than I miss the people I sometimes miss. My books never hurt me. Actually, that's not true, but when they did, and when they made me cry, I loved them all the more. Go figure.

Anyway, the anecdote relates to an evening in which, toward the end of his life, Jack Kerouac comes round to Kurt Vonnegut’s house and, if I recall correctly, talks about Hitler (in an inappropriately positive way) and offers to fight Vonnegut’s son.

I’ve had a root around online, and have managed to find proof that I’m not imagining the whole thing, including this quote from Vonnegut:

‘He [Kerouac] was crazy. There were clearly thunderstorms in the head of this once charming and just and intelligent man.’

But I really need to read the whole episode again. I want to remember. So – do you have a copy of Palm Sunday and would you be prepared to scan or photocopy the Kerouac bit and stick it in an email for me? It’s probably only a page or two at most. I would be ever so ever so grateful. I’ll even buy you a drink if you can come along on June 4th. Hmm? What do you say?

Come on, internet! Do your thing.

Please.

Thanks!

Motion

I’m on the train.



From the north, back to the south. The coastline is really quite breathtaking. I wish I'd taken a photo of that. It's beautiful. It's the polar opposite of the inner cities. The sun is out at the moment and bright as a giant barbecue, making blinding clumps of whatever the heckfire that yellow flowered bush is that litters the hills above the sea. It's lovely.

I have two weeks holiday at the end of this month, beginning of the next. I was going to go away somewhere, on my own. Somewhere foreign, at least for a week of it. But I can’t afford it. I can’t afford anything in fact, for the rest of the year. Golf course! That looks like fun. I've never played golf. Oh, God. Please don't let David Cameron be our next Prime Minister.

What I’ve realised is, what with my tax debt, and my credit card debt, and my grandmother debt, I should be able to pay everything off by the end of this year – just in time for this job to finish. I feel like I’m in jail. I've got six and a half months. No remission. But of course it’s all entirely my own fault. So I should just shut the shit up and get on with it. And that’s what I’m doing. Honest, I am. Apart from the shutting up.

Rabbits! Fields full of 'em. Frolicking, they are. Glorious, glorious rabbits. Someone should write a poem about them. They're so full of life. And so tasty. God, I haven't had rabbit pie for years.



So anyway, I’ve decided – instead of going on holiday at the end of the month – I’m going to come back and see my grandmother again. Bless her. Not for the whole two weeks, but for a while. I think it does me good to see her. It’s been just a couple of days this time, but it’s definitely done me good. It puts things in perspective. Not just the paranoia of the spectre of death, but taking care of, and actually thinking about someone else for a change.

Next time I come up here, however, I’m going to hitch.

That's right.

I’m about 20 pages from the end of On the Road and I’m pretty convinced that no one has ever written a more tedious, self-indulgent or pretentious book. I’m also pretty convinced that I could find better hitching stories to tell on one trip from London to the north east than Jack Kerouac managed to distil from five years or so hitching across the States. And I don’t say that arrogantly. I think just about anyone could come up with better hitching stories in one day.

Anyway, we'll see. For now it's back to work.

I leave you with something my grandmother told me only this morning. She told me: 'Never cast a clout till May's out.'

God knows.

By the way, she was feeling much better this morning. She's still got to go back to the doctor tomorrow and she's got to have blood tests on Wednesday, but I'm not so worried now. So that's good.

Pheasant!