yes, please

Jack Kerouac loves the word "lugubrious." As Sal Paradise, he paints his memoir with an engaging mix of earthy and intellectual thoughts. The man of the earth is the poet. The unwashed bum is a secret genius. But so far, his life "on the road" is anything but exaggeratedly sorrowful. A lugubrious nature is merely observed in others and spun into the frame of a catchy sort of American dream, whereby a man can set out across the country with $50 and a few names to throw around and end up happy living 10 different lives in the span of one summer.

At about page 100, "On the Road" could almost end. Sal has spent an amazing summer adventuring across the country, and now he's headed back to New York. But if that were the case, this book would never have become the beat bible. At this point, you can feel that Sal is just getting started, even though he's done more hitching and busing than most people do in a lifetime. There's so much in his mind that Kerouac has only hinted at, but it lies in that fascinating mix of matter-of-fact storytelling and keen insight. It's as if ignorance and intelligence spent some time "alone and mixing up [their] souls ever more and ever more till it would be terribly hard to say good-by." Alas, that was just the result of stimulating conversation between Sal and his Mexican mistress.

He references a lot of things I have to look up to get. And at the risk of sounding like somebody on Yahoo! Answers, I'll admit even page 2 left me quizzical. But when you type Modigliani into Google, you get a much clearer picture of Marylou. If you want to know what pulling wrists is, you have to weigh arm wrestling against debating, and it's pretty clear which he means, I think. I wonder if people in 1955 sometimes made a point to read next to the encyclopedia shelf? But even if you don't bother to look up hincty or Hassel or fellahin, there's plenty of easy richness to savor: "Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries." California, of course. Not far out of this romantic mood, he first sees his exotic princess, and like any good poet he marks the occasion with the familiar sauce of life: "A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world."

Sal's travels bring new meaning to the idea of living paycheck-to-paycheck. Everywhere he travels, he's looking for work, and he'll go as low as picking cotton to find it. Luckily he's got an extremely loving and understanding aunt back in New Jersey, who sends him cash when he's in a pinch. That's the result of living one of the classic American dreams backwards -- you usually try to leave the small towns to make it big in New York, but Sal left New York to try and make it in Hicksville. But he brings New York with him, carrying it in his pocket to rub when he's lonely: "LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets god-awful cold in the winter but there's a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle." And for as much enjoyment he got out of living in hotel rooms and tents, riding on truck beds and in rail cars, picking grapes and spending his last dollar on whiskey, he lives with the knowledge that life isn't lived in stillness. He keeps moving, even in solitude, even away from his best friends, his new friends, his love whom he knows he'll never see again: "We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time."