. Spinning .

There’s something to be said about Kerouac’s prose, it’s concise and sparse but when he allows it to happen, it’s nice stuff:

In the empty Huston streets of four o’clock in the morning a motorcycle kid suddenly roared through, all bespangled and bedecked with glittering buttons, visor, slick black jacket, a Texas poet of the night, girl gripped on his back like a papoose, hair flying, onward-going, singing, "Houston, Austin, Fort Worth, Dallas–and sometimes Kansas City–and sometimes old Antone, ah-haaaaa!"  (p. 150)

Lost in the blips of little escapades here there and everywhere, there is a theme developing (finally) of the narrator really looking for something within himself by observing the friends he spends time with, the people he meets along his adventure.  There’s change, and one that isn’t real good:

In Old Opelousas I went into a grocery store to buy bread and cheese while Dean saw to gas and oil.  It was just a shack; I could hear the family eating supper in the back.  I waited a minute; they went on talking.  I took bread and cheese and slipped out the door.  We  had barely enough money to make Frisco.  Meanwhile Dean took a carton of cigarettes from the gas station and we were stocked for the voyage–gas, oil, cigarettes and food.  Crooks don’t know.  He pointed the car straight down the road.  (p. 149)

So that’s the freedom of the road?  Taking what you need from others so you can ride the highway–note the order in which Kerouac lists the supplies.  Anti-establishment, anti-big business always pisses off the populace.  The middle-aged and elderly complain but accept; youth finds a way around it, justifying their actions by pointing to the corruption at the top.  But two wrongs never made a right, and as youth matures, they mellow.  And the next generation finds a new way around it.

I’m not overwhelmed by the prose, and what Kerouac is journaling (I understand it’s based upon his own experiences) about really may have lost some of its impact through the decades of change that apparently this novel helped get started.

One of the rather incredible points in this book and the idea of reading it now is the narrator’s ability to get through a week or two on ten dollars.  Of course some things don’t change, and "I get by with a little help from my friends" (song lyrics) was one of the driving forces of the times and of this book.  Also, a few penny postcards to his aunt back east cloaked requests for funds.

Maybe it offends the conservative in me who holds self-sufficiency as the ideal, who does with less or without as times demand.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been saved a few times by the generousity of friends but luckily I never needed to ask.  Although it wasn’t hard to notice clothes hanging on my normally 90-lb. frame when a few pounds lost were all the fat I carried.

Since the colorful phrases are fairly far between, let me backtrack to this one:

I spun around till I was dizzy; I thought I’d fall down as in a dream, clear off the precipice.  Oh where is the girl I love?  I thought, and looked everywhere, as I had looked everywhere in the little world below.  And before me was the great raw bulge and bulk of my American continent; somewhere far across, gloomy, crazy New York was throwing up its cloud of dust and brown steam.  There is something brown and holy about the East; and California is white like washlines and emptyheaded–at least that’s what I thought then. (p. 76)

Sal is standing atop the great cliffs of California, the length of America away from his native New York and Jersey.  The dirty, busy streets of New York are also described as "brown and holy," and I take this as being established, revered, solid as earth.  In New York the sky is often a streak of blue edged by brownstone, a mirror image of the street below that it follows.  California, especially the cities and the areas within them that Sal has seen is no less crowded and dirty, but the sky opens up wider and the coastline gives a view of the ocean from a height that exhilerates, rather than one crowded with a skyline of buildings, freighters, and the imagined blue water of ocean proves to be just a muddy green foam lapping at the docks.