Kerouaciana

 I don't think I finished reading Big Sur when I was an angst-ridden teenager. At least I didn't remember anything in the book after the beginning of the Shakespearean Mad Scene and I probably stopped reading at that point because it was too powerful, honest and painful, and I wondered what it would be like for someone performing it on stage which a powerful angst-ridden pre-alchy actor could do like James Dean or someone, but he was already long dead so what would it be like with Martin Sheen, say? Oh, I don't know and didn't think about it too much.

What was evoked as I read through to the Sea poem this time -- I stopped there to savor it for later -- was watching my lanky teenage self lying propped up on the bed in my room reading Big Sur by Jack Kerouac, the light on the four-drawer maple dresser by my bed glowing yellow, seeing myself reflected in the black back window at night and watching myself from the outside like a voyeur peeping tom looking in, and thinking, "I could slip out the window and go walking the rest of the night and no one would know." 

And I did if not that night then one summer night when the seabreeze kicked in and it was cool enough in the black heavy night to go walking for a while. Removing the screen and cranking the window open, slipping back to the dresser to turn off the light and to the door to make sure it was shut and the breeze couldn't blow it open, I shinnied out the crankopen window and plopped down into the ragged bushes below my blacknight window and staggered out and wended around the house to the sidegate opened quietly, the dog on the backdeck muffed as I passed, and down the walk to the suburban street of plenty of ticky-tacky houses by the freeway to Paradise.

I could hear the trucksandcars whooshing on the freeway past the ruins of the Jap assembly camp where the wretched Japanese American families from the rich cities and up and down the farmvalley were herded before being railroaded off to the tules and sand-mountains and tarpaper bedrooms the Army hadn't even set up for them yet. 

I walked the night toward what? I didn't know where I was going, I wasn't going anywhere in particular, but soon enough, I found myself on the pedestrian bridge over the freeway, the one I trod to 1959 highschool when I walked which wasn't that often, but I did it sometimes just because I wanted to. It was five miles on the pedometer, from the crisscross glass of the front door of the house where I lived in the suburbs to the back door of the school or the swimming pool I'm not sure which. There wasn't a backdoor -- newer schools in California didn't have them or any doors except those to the classrooms and gyms and offices and such everything open to the wind and rain and awful summer heat.

I didn't go to the highschool this time but wandered off the main road into the sharp-edged military suburban housing tract where so many of those I went to school with lived. 

Way too easy to get lost in the maze of arcing streets late at night. And I did. Thinking about Big Sur and Raton Canyon and the cruel Pacific and the fog-beaches and rock-heads and gulls swooping. 

Madness wouldn't come till later.