They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!” – Jack Kerouac
It’s a beatnik thing. You might not understand.. Let’s just say On The Road likely not the best choice of reading matter for a ten-year-old country boy. But truth be told, the old man had lived his life just like that. Not always by choice, understand. Life like a leaf floating atop a babbling brook headed somewhere, probably down and to the sea eventually. Or a pin ball just bouncing around and right when you think you’re headed one way – boomp! – you’re headed another way.
This is off topic, but the old man had one of his out one ear in the other ideas. You want to turn the world’s most important job into a reality show. Why not hook those bastards up to a polygraph and put the questioning on television. Be bigger than the Superbowl and intercollegiate water-skiing championships combined. Next thought: we both know Hillary and The Donald can easily beat the lie detector. You could raise money to go to relocating Syrian refugees to any other place than here. Do illegal Mexicans support the Muslim ban, inquiring minds wonder.
Grotesquely time-consuming introspection had caused the old man to point to the beginning of “The Troubles” at around the age of ten. All signs pointed there. Let me back up. We are talking a sweet wonderful disturbingly happy blank slate of a normal little American boy living in a normal little American family in a normal little American town going to a normal little American school with other little people who looked just like him and seemed normal to him at the time. All the time.
That changed. And he never knew why. Still doesn’t. But at age ten, he started to change. Suddenly, he was the second biggest kid in the entire school. Michael Occhipinti was bigger than most of the teachers.
But he was still a kid. And he had a girlfriend who had grown boobs over the summer and he was scared to death of her. He loved her but he was scared. Then she moved away. He had told everybody who asked after her, she was given a choice by her parents, this boy or your horse. She did what any smart young girl would do, she chose the horse.
For the next sixty years, he had remembered her as a blonde version of Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet. Probably on Million Dollar Movie. Liz was smoking hot at age twelve and the old man meant that in a twelve-year-old church boy way.
In an old man way, he looked at a picture from the movie and did not think, spank me with your switch, little girl, because that would be wrong.
Now at about the same time this little boy in the huge body dumped by his girl for a horse and going into junior high, well, whatever, right about then, his life had just become a struggle to stay who he was. A little boy in a huge body. Dumped by his girl for a horse.
And then – Zuck you! Dark Fukerberg!! – they reconnect. After sixty years. Some water under a couple of bridges, I’m telling you. This is so cool. Because she still has a horse. And they can talk, the old man and The First Girlfriend. Everything she says is important because everything she says makes him think about the journey.
His parents back then subscribed to Post and Life and Look magazines. There was the New York Times and The Daily News and the TV had not six, but seven different channels. Seven channels, can you imagine. They lived in the woods but they knew what was going on.
Which is about exactly precisely the same time the old man had become the world’s youngest beatnik. Those photo essays could capture an imagination. Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Gene Krupa, Willie Mays. Neal Cassady and Dean Moriarty. The only hero his mother liked was The Say-Hey Kid, but he had somehow somewhy locked on to Kerouac and Burroughs. Like a puppy, he was imprinted. The whole idea, are you kiddin’ me, you could just say whatever the fuck you wanted and somebody might publish your scribbling and you could become a literary celebrity and bang good-looking babes and get the best drugs for free. Wouldn’t that be sweet.
No wonder he’d been something, more often than not, something of a mess for three score years.
Because after bouncing around for like a half-century, more, it turns out you can’t say whatever the fuck you want whenever you want to say it. Nobody gives a firm shit about your scribbling, especially the good-looking babes. And you end up paying too much for bad fun.
Nothing is free. Not even pain. But then neither is wisdom.