Peculiar Crossroads

In archiving these papers, I come to find out I don't have a copy of the final draft of this one. A fact that annoys and pains me a little. I finished it at school, printed it, and saved it on a flash drive. That flash drive bit the dust and the printed copy was turned it. Being the final paper of the semester, it wasn't returned. [insert myriad frowny faces here].

This does mark (ha-ha) however, the first time i tried writing about the hitchhiking days and Yellowstone and Mark Em—I mean Marcus Amory...

Since we'd been writing parodies in Fiction II, I asked if I could make this assignment a parody as well.

(The references to Orwell in this concern Emma Larkin's Finding George Orwell in Burma which we read for this class.)

The comment I remember most from Eric May (the teacher whose class this was for) was that there was no sense of Me in this story. I never had any description of Me-as-a-Character. Eric looked at me and, being a wide-girthed man, noted my height. "There's a low ceiling you talk about in the story, but was it a low ceiling to anyone other than you?"


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CRW: Writers on the Road
4/17/08
Creative Essay: First Draft

PECULIAR CROSSROADS


I first met my Dean Moriarty not long after I came off the road. I'd been hitchhiking again--perhaps my longest single stretch of hitching I'd done then, from the magic sweltering Gulf Coast South out to the splosh splawrsh of the rocky coast in Bolinas California where Marin County sticks out its little finger as if testing the waters of the Pacific and then up the angled coastline through Crescent City and beyond--to Seattle where I turned away from the coast and came back through the flat plains of eastern Oregon where it seems that on a clear enough day you could stand there on that dust bowl prairie and gaze back east all the way to the hills and caves of Utah. After a series of flaming Roman candle adventures that took me through a hospital stay (from a motorcade inconvenience that left me with cracked ribs and a headful of missing time) and the hallowed halls of an odd temple in Salt Lake City where the people smiled entirely too much for my comfort, I sat recovering atop a mountain in Colorado with some mad people just burning to live--to move--to experience what the universe conspired to give them. Then, after a few sunrises from those mountains of madness and delirious delights I took my feet back down to the ribbon of highway and shook my thumb for another ride. A few weeks later I had circled around again and was dropped off on the side of the road outside Three Forks Montana and went east into the hissing steam and glug-glug-glugalling of the mud pots and geyser springs of America's own fantasy nature playground called Yellowstone Park. No stranger place had i ever seen--no more wide-eyed had i ever been than when I first set foot in and feasted my road-weary eyes upon the yellow rock veined with hues of blues and reds and obsidian cliffs and porous rock and the steam whispers of holes in the earth that said pssst, pssst, c'mere and I'll tell you a story you've never heard of before and the bubbling waters of iridescent springs that flaunted their abnatural colors like some prehistoric alien peacock strutting and preening across the basins and valleys between proud and protective mountains. It was here, in this almost unearthly landscape that I first encountered the man who would be my Dean Moriarty. Marcus Amory was his name and it was him who blazed like a candle flame everyone else fluttered around like a frenetic mothswarm. I first saw the brightness of his flame my first night in Yellowstone. I had stepped into the small dark smokey lounge that was the employee pub, a wooden bunk house out behind the grandiose log cabin-style Old Faithful Inn, and let my eyes run slow across the walls laden with an almost indecipherable script hand-written graffiti and simple drawings that amazingly never crossed the border from the absurd and vulgar into crass and disgusting. I sat myself down at a table in the middle of the small room and bobbed my head to the mad jazz riffs blowing from the small speakers in the four corners of the room. I nursed a drink of melting ice and wondered what it was that brought me into this place. That same sense of looking--of seeking--of plaintive searching and never resting, never happy with what I've found because I am never really looking for a particular something, just searching out that indefinable anything. It's the seeking that interests me more than what it is that I find. So I sat in this dim, bopping, smokey room and drained the last of the cold water from the remaining ice in my plastic cup and about to cut out of the word-scrawled pub when this fellow I hadn't seen before slipped himself into the chair across the small squared table from me as if he'd always been sitting there and I just noticed him. A bushy-haired nice-looking guy with long fingers that belonged to a jazz piano player or Renaissance painter. He tipped a beer bottle up to his lips, set it back down on the table with a quiet thunk and let loose a bright smile that was the spark of his candleflame. "Hi, I'm Marcus Amory," he said to me and added a little nod to his shining smile. I nodded back to him and felt right off that I was looking at a mad character who just hopped out of a beat novel and appeared in the chair across from me. I nodded and tipped my cup of water in his direction. Without a pause from him to await any comment I might offer Marcus spoke up again and didn't waste time, as if words for him were an inconvenience in conveying what he wanted to impart. "Saturday around noon we're going to be having some fun at my room." He tilted the beer bottle up to his lips again and his eye glinted with a delirious delight. I sat there and for a moment thought I was the mark of someone coming on a little too strong. Like a single pretty girl hanging out at a party that vibrated with too much testosterone, where all the young dudes swung their dicks around with a little too much ferocity. I wasn't sure I wanted to be a part of something as open an invitation as that. "Oh, yeah?" I raised an eyebrow and held a slight grin to show I took no offense even if the invitation was something a little too personal for my interest, "And what sort of fun would that be?" Marcus Amory tossed his answer right out with such an obviously discreet reply that I would either be hep to what he was saying or miss it by a mile and a half. "I just got back from the Jerry shows in Palo Alto." I already wore a Cheshire grin when I finalized the date: "Noon, you say. I guess I'll be skipping work on Saturday..." Marcus Amory and I burned across the landscapes of Yellowstone, the mountains of Montana, and the soft geographies far beyond the physical realms like two mad cats setting fire to the blue note highways of some past poetic time. And as I sit here now, distant and remote from our days together, I reflect on our trips and conversations and lysergic-soaked eep hours of bright dark nights of our souls that seemed to be poured from the eternal archive of mystic experience and steeped in the tea leaves from a lush and exotic jungle where ideas not yet conceived of grow wild on tangle vines before bearing fruit in our minds. I ask the ghost of this memory that is Marcus Amory about those days and nights we spent seeding precious singular moments so that they might flower and bring the beauty of our ideas into being. Marcus Amory moved through place and thought with a fiery intensity and latched onto me through some cosmological ninth sense that told him I would be a willing and able psychonaut to join him on his acid-fueled ramblings down mountain highway and up cliffside trails. I reflect, conjure, and speak to this memory of my Dean Moriarty and question what rules define telling these stories. What defines truth and fiction? What boundaries were breeched and what limits were kept constrained when Jack Kerouac became Sal Paradise and began committing the stories of his life to paper? Where does the thinly-guised fact become fabricated fiction? If I were to write of Marcus Amory and myself--committed in story as Syd Persona--what would I reveal of the psychedelic intimacies he and I shared. And what of the others were who passed though, went along for a distance with, and stepped back with quiet apprehension from? Would I be transgressing any sort of personal privacy they might have reasonable expectation of if I wrote them into the narrative of this slipstream story of hand-painted mini-vans, stumbling glorious wanton hysterical along the boardwalks of Old Faithful's geyser basin and driving, always driving--? Marcus Amory was the maddest beautiful driver I've ever known, which was only appropriate since I viewed him as my Dean Moriarty around whom I fluttered and flipped and kept up the pace with--driving with one hand one the wheel, one hand pinching a joint, his head nodding and bobbing to the music and his smile fixed bright on his face. I think about those times and those events and those people and find myself, even typing this, going back and deleting certain information, altering some truths until their are partial fictions and considering what might be added to this to make it no longer a recollecting tale with minor factual details excised or metamorphosed into subtle fancy. What choices should I make in recreating certain events on the page?—


What choices did Jack make? What observations in On The Road are Jack's and which ones are Sal's? Like my ghostly memory on paper of Marcus Amory, Dean Moriarty was certainly a more beautiful, wild, be-bop-beat mad cat in many ways than Neal Cassady was. But then Neal Cassady wasn't Dean Moriarty anymore than Emma Larkin found George Orwell in her bumbling down the sweltering river of Burma (which isn't really a country at all anymore, except in the past of people's memories). Neal Cassady was a living breathing beautiful laughing angry asshole. Just like any person is. Dean Moriarty was a character, who really and truly existed only in Jack's mind, on the page, and in the hearts of anyone who opened themselves up to the story in which Dean rambles endlessly forever down some long lost highway of hope until he recedes to becomes but a speck on the distant horizon, and then it's goodbye to all that--at least, until the reader reopens the book and starts the journey all over again.


—I go searching, and try to find the truth in my own fiction, the fiction in my truth. And, in searching the canyons and highways of my memory and past I come upon a Southern crossroads, not farm from the ramshackle shotgun shack of Old Bull Lee and encounter Flannery O'Connor standing on the side of some dusty highway waiting for the Misfit to come back from the forest where he walked in with the Grandmother. Flannery tells me not to linger too long--and I don't. Crossroads aren't meant for lingering anymore than road novels are meant to leave their characters stationary for any span. But before I stick my thumb out again to catch a ride away from here and off to some place out there somewhere, Ms. O'Connor tells me, "The Writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. Their problem is to find that location." And then I know what it is I've been looking for all these years. Where I have sought to be. The peculiar crossroads where I will find my past present and future mingling with every highway road and trail I've even imagined, and the divine moment that lifts itself out from the swampy muck of confusion and obscurity and hangs there, just above the here and now, where it shimmers for a moment and then disappears as I keep going further. It's all a mirage, rising like heat waves on a desert highway. It disappears like a fleeting memory of the past that no one holds in their hearts anymore, no one speaks of, no one remembers. I think of Jack Kerouac, following me all these years since I first encountered him, and Sal Paradise who never quite existed for me even when I hopped in the car with him and drove out to San Francisco--him and Dean, Dean and Jack, Jack and Neal, Neal and me, me and Marcus Amory. Me and Jack. I grapple with my own secrets, my own untold stories, my own hesitations and I think back to Marcus Amory and the headlights showing only a small piece of the long dark night we travelled--only the immediate future of the road just ahead of us--and beyond that light only darkness and the mystery of what will be--what could be. I think of Marcus Amory, I think of Marcus Amory. I think of Marcus Am-or-ry.


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