Chapter One.
'62 was a transitional year. Norman Rockwell died and his sweet sentimental vision of America died with him. Air operations in Vietnam began. Mick Jagger met Keith Richards, and when the first cosmetic breast implant was inserted, Norman Rockwell rolled over in his grave. I was fifteen years old.
The Beats were no longer snapping their sad approval. They became lazy, lost behind their shades, unable to survive the light of day, so they disappeared in confusion and irrelevance after Ginsberg shocked the world with one of history's most important poems, the profane stream of consciousness epic, "Howl". And Kerouac was laying low at his mother's house in Florida, crazy with hate and bitterness, and Burroughs, the unrepentant smack addict, was living soft while warping the minds of the sons and daughters of sod busters out in Kansas, after murdering his wife in Mexico. And Ferlinghetti was now a bourgeois millionaire after risking jail time for publishing Ginsberg's earth shattering affront on decency, and his City Lights Bookstore, cluttered with stacks of books, and those creaky stairs, and the amateur intellectuals so smug and arguing wildly with holes in their shoes, had become a gold mine and Mecca for Midwestern pilgrims like me. And where was the frenetic Cassady? He'd seen the shadow left by the Beats and Hipsters and went back to bed only to be resurrected in the early 60's by the Hippies, now at the wheel of "Furthur", the psychedelic school bus of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, still delirious with speed, and running his machine gun mouth, and reclaiming the title of Best Insurrectionist Wheelman that ever lived. He drove the Beats to hell "on the road" and now the Hippies, a true transgenational madman for all seasons.
Only the shaggy Beat, Ginsberg, endured, still making appearances reading his poetry, and showing up at performances of the obscenely subversive Fugs, the first underground nihilist rock band, and doing Oms in the courtroom of the Chicago Seven with each outburst of bedlam. I loved that guy. When confronted prowling the streets of the East Village and asked what he'd been doing lately, he told the startled reporter, "Blowing sailors". In fact, the funny and brutally honest Ginsberg put in his will he wanted on his tombstone only, " Alan Ginsberg-A Great Cocksucker" and nothing else. You go, girl ! He was the homo Jew who lovingly buried his demented old friend, Kerouac, who hated Jews and queers. In my life I've only met three men with that aura of transcendent grace and goodness : Duke Ellington, Alan Ginsberg and Secretariat.
Two years after Ginsberg opened the door Jack Kerouac barged in with his masterpiece, "On the Road", written in one roll of teletype paper, and fathered a new mobile generation, restless and curious. Kerouac gave my whole generation "the itch". So we hit the road. The influence of "On the Road" cannot be overestimated. Ginsberg begat Kerouac, and Kerouac begat the hippies. Kerouac defined a new race of youth and gave us permission to look beyond our neighborhoods, and showed us it's possible to just leave and roam without travel brochures. So many writers and composers since have given some credit to Kerouac. Kerouac lit the fuse then turned his back. In '62 there were a zillion kids hitchhiking on the side of the highway and every one had a copy of "On the Road" in their backpack. I wonder what would have happened or not happened without "On the Road" ?
'62 was a lull. The Beats, always running on empty, had finally run out of gas, and the Flower Children were still just that, children, in the basement rec room of their parents, echoing their folks' disgust with the Bohemians, without knowing what was actually happening, before they would wander off in a few years with flowers in their hair and morph into psychedelic weirdos dancing in the streets, whacked out if their sweet little gourds, and slaughtering pregnant movie stars for Manson.
What a trip ! And I would join that tribe of indignant protesters, potheads, revolutionaries, dedicated anarchists, thugs, pacifists and math murdering bombers. My people ! But in '62 even the music was in a lull. We had the hyper sexaholic Elvis, the king of the baffling rockabillies, and Sinatra, the dark alpha rat and his child bride, Rosemary. That's about it.
