I think I was 16 when I bought my copy of Jack Kerouac‘s On the Road. I picked it up in a shopping mall bookstore and read the first 20 pages before I made myself stop reading to go pay for it.
My hometown was small, 2,800 people, and my high school was known more for its football and wrestling teams than it was for its English classes. I hadn’t even heard of On the Road until I read a biography of Jim Morrison, who my friend Travis idolized at the time.
The book blew me away, as it probably did most who read it. By the end, Kerouac was my hero, I wanted to be Sal Paradise, and I couldn’t imagine how people could go their entire lives without reading this book.
When I was 17, I used On the Road to pick up a girl at my high school, leaving it in her locker with instructions to please read it and call me with her thoughts on it. She did, and we dated for four months, breaking up the summer before I left for college. She gave me the book back, though.
I read a bunch of other books in college (despite being a marketing major), discovered Hunter Thompson, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, developed a taste for used Hemingway paperbacks, and I joined a bunch of those book-of-the-month clubs so I could get eight free books right away.
When I moved to Montana when I was 23, I left a bunch of books at home. I never considered abandoning my slightly bruised paperback copy of On the Road. After graduate school, I sold or gave away as much as possible, ditching all my “furniture” and paring my book collection down to the smallest single box I could leave room for in the car. When I left Missoula for Phoenix, I convinced my friend Nick to come with me, and we took the first real road trip I’d ever been on, dirtbagging it down the Pacific coast, flying through eight states in a little over ten days, camping when we could, but spending two uncomfortable nights sleeping in the car.
When Emily and I left Phoenix for Denver, I once again had to chop my pile of books down. On the Road of course made the cut.
This year, I turned 28, and the book is still with me, and at this point, I think I’m a writer. I have heard that Jack Kerouac wrote the entire first draft of On the Road on a giant scroll of butcher paper, in one long stint, maybe ten days? As a person who’s spent some long hours hammering away at a keyboard, I respect Kerouac and admire his tenacity and endurance.
2007 is the 50-year anniversary of the publication of On the Road, and to celebrate that, the Denver Public Library organized a celebration of the Beats, lasting an entire weekend that I elected to spend snowboarding or something like that. But the main attraction was the scroll, on display until March 31. The original,which Kerouac had spent hours sweating over in 1951 so it could almost not get published, but then blow my young mind in 1995.
The library’s 60-foot display of the first half of the scroll (no photographs of the actual scroll are allowed).I stopped by the library today, to take a look at the scroll. It’s 119 feet, 8 inches long, and it’s not butcher paper, but teletype paper, which Lori Swingle, the library clerk, tells me I’m too young to remember. I tell her I know what it is, though. There are no paragraph breaks in Kerouac’s first draft, and it’s a bit yellowed with age. Lori helped roll it out in the glass case and said it’s incredible brittle.
Only half of the manuscript is rolled out right now, with 60 feet left to be unfurled on Feb. 24. It stops now just as everyone is leaving Old Bull Lee‘s house, before Denver.
Standing in the room, looking at 60 feet of Kerouac’s original writing, I think I know a little bit what people feel like when they see Guernica, or the Sistine Chapel, or hell, Yankee Stadium for the first time. The sheets of teletype were taped by Kerouac himself, prior to his 20-day marathon from April 2, 1951, to April 22, 1951, so he wouldn’t have to keep stopping to put in a fresh sheet of paper. Today, that tape is almost 46 years old. Kerouac died when he was 47.
A small part of what I like about living in Denver is that it’s Neal Cassady‘s city. He and Kerouac walked the sidewalks downtown, spent time on the same streets I do, before Denver even had a pro football team, if anyone can imagine that. ( Here’s a link to Thomas J. Noel‘s Beat Poetry Driving Tour of Denver, if you’re interested in seeing some of the old Beat haunts).
In a documentary about Colfax Avenue, I either misheard, or the narrator misstated that Kerouac wrote On The Road in an apartment on Lafayette Street, a few houses off Colfax. If that was true, he would have lived about two blocks from my current apartment, where I eschew my old typewriter for a Gateway PC. I don’t have to stop to put in fresh sheets of paper, either.
However, Kerouac didn’t write the book in an apartment on Lafayette Street. He wrote it in a loft in New York. But he loved Denver, partly or mostly because it was the city that produced his friend Neal Cassady, the inspiration for On the Road‘s Dean Moriarty. I’m too old to hit the road like Cassady and Kerouac, and I’ve gotten past the point where it would be okay to take benzedrine for 20 straight days, or drink jugs of cheap wine for the sake of art. But I live in Neal Cassady’s city now, and I can appreciate a good piece of art when it’s on display.
Here’s the beginning of the book, as typed on the scroll:
I first met Neal not long after my father died…I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about except that it really had something to do with my father’s death and my awful feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Neal there really began for me that part of my life that you could call my life on the road.
And here’s the beginning of the book, as printed in my copy, purchased in 1995 and still with me:
I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road.
The scroll can be viewed through March 31 on the fifth floor of the Denver Public Library’s Central Branch, at 10 W. 14th Avenue Parkway in Denver.
Hours are:
Monday: 10 a.m.-8 p.m.
Tuesday: 10 a.m.-8 p.m.
Wednesday: 10 a.m.-6 p.m.
Thursday: 10 a.m.-6 p.m.
Friday: 10 a.m.-6 p.m.
Saturday: 9 a.m.-5 p.m.
Sunday: 1 p.m.-5 p.m.
The original scroll, all 119 feet, 8 inches of it, was purchased for $2.43 million by Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay in May 2001.
The second half of the scroll will be unfurled on Feb. 24.
A group of SUNY-Potsdam students, under the direction of Dr. Audrey Sprenger, took to the road in early January, reading On The Road as if it were a road map, and visiting San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, New York, and Lowell, Mass. A blog about the project can be seen here, and a North Country Public Radio broadcast about the project can be found here.
