Jack Kerouac Does Not Lie

University of Central Florida STARS Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2004-2019 2006 Jack Kerouac Does Not Lie Kyle Shrader University of Central Florida Part of the Creative Writing Commons Find similar works at: https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd University of Central Florida Libraries http://library.ucf.edu This Masters Thesis (Open Access) is brought to you for free and open access by STARS. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2004-2019 by an authorized administrator of STARS. For more information, please contact [email protected]. STARS Citation Shrader, Kyle, "Jack Kerouac Does Not Lie" (2006). Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2004-2019. 1501. https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd/1501 Jack Kerouac Does Not Lie by Kyle James Shrader B.A. Binghamton University, 2000 A thesis submitted for partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in the Department of English in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Central Florida Orlando, Florida Spring Term 2006 ©2006 Kyle Shrader ii ABSTRACT “Jack Kerouac Does Not Lie” recounts my pilgrimage in the summer of 2000, from southwest Florida to a canyon beach in California where Jack Kerouac—as I had read in his Big Sur—lost his mind forty years earlier. I was heavily influenced. Kerouac’s On the Road showed me what to do with myself. Big Sur showed me where to go. In the twentieth century Americans shifted their notions of the west coast from a means for sustenance to a symbol of post-war freedom. Kerouac seems to embody this momentum; the world and the burning spirit his work describes is a precursor to the sixties. His muse, Neal Cassady, is the common link—appearing as Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s first major work and later as himself in Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. My parents were a part of this westward yearning’s last true surge in the early seventies, when they ventured cross-country and stayed out there for a time. They’d caught the tail end of the wave, and told me a bit about it. I was full of stories, mostly fiction. Sweating in my twenty year old conversion van with a big friend, Ben—whose goals were less “literary”—I sought to recreate the legends I had read, the movies I had seen, and the tales my parents had told me. I was on a mission; I wanted my trip to measure up. Ben was on vacation. Our folly is chronicled within; three weeks and four thousand miles of it. iii Mom, shut your eyes. Dad, look at me now. T, please forgive what I used to be. And most of all to Ben, who must bear the brunt of my incomplete portrayal, thank you. iv “And such things—A whole mess of little joys like that amazing me when I came back in the horror of later to see how they’d all changed and become sinister, even my poor little wood platform and mill race when my eyes and my stomach nauseous and my soul screaming a thousand babbling words, oh—It’s hard to explain and best thing to do is not be false.” -Jack Kerouac Big Sur v TABLE OF CONTENTS ARRIVAL OF MY DEPARTURE..................................................................................... 1 STRAIGHT AND NARROW .......................................................................................... 20 RUNE................................................................................................................................ 28 THE WINNER LOSES..................................................................................................... 53 CONVECTION................................................................................................................. 62 BATTING PRACTICE..................................................................................................... 69 GILA MONSTER............................................................................................................. 80 EQUILIBRIUM ................................................................................................................ 95 FIRE................................................................................................................................ 106 LIGHT............................................................................................................................. 125 HEAT.............................................................................................................................. 137 SILENCE ........................................................................................................................ 154 AND THE END OF THE LINE..................................................................................... 160 DWARVES ON GIANT HEELS ................................................................................... 166 FUCK FRESNO.............................................................................................................. 185 SO CLOSE...................................................................................................................... 188 JACK KEROUAC DOES NOT LIE .............................................................................. 209 vi ARRIVAL OF MY DEPARTURE My big, stupid trip began bright and early in the blare and crunch and dust of rural dirt road driveway and sweat, always sweat. Somewhere up the Caloosahatchee, on Telegraph Creek, water everywhere and in the air as I shuffled outside, squinting to find, in horror, my van’s blunt chest splayed and spilling its grease-smeared guts all over fender mat saddlebags and the mechanic’s rug beneath my father. His dark tee was soaked through and streaked with my van’s darker blood. His massive hands were black, permanently cracked with the grime and grease of many surgeries. The sweat ran lines and collected on hairs above this layer of film. Poor guy, we Shraders sweat. Our laundry room had a dozen or more of his drab, faded, and punctured pocket T-shirts on hangers; his scrubs. Most of them had been dark once. I said something like “Black’s a brutal choice, huh?” with all my smug discontent in there. “So,” I said, we both knowing what it was I wanted to know. His answers were terse from under the van, or leaning over it, or somewhere inside it, prefaced always with my name, his chest puffing and jaw jutting gruffly. “Do you want air conditioning, or not?” he said. “One fast move or I’m gone” Jack writes and repeats as he stumbles, hung-over, to leave Frisco for Monterey and the Big Sur coast. He enters the fog and boom country from the north, at night. I’d be doing the same, in the light, but not for dozens of days and many manic miles. 1 One fast move or I’m gone, I thought, repeated, regurgitated as if I knew what it meant. That morning was out of my control. My dad slowed me down. I might come to know what it means in a few days, in New Orleans, but that first morning—waiting for my dad to put my van back together so I could pick Ben up and get underway—I was a parrot. One fast move or I’m gone. He was doing his son a solid by slaving over the van like that. We’d bought it the summer before on potential alone; he’d swung me by his shop to see it in the rows of heaps and stalks of weeds and warlike fire ants. It was all dust and suffocating heat in her carpeted, wood-paneled belly—faded yellow couch in back and captain’s chairs up front, a removable table with four cup holder corners, four rectangular scenic windows, lined in their sills with brown loop carpet. She had a ladder on the back door and locking spare tire; luggage rack up top, a small plastic vent that did not work. The convex wood- paneled walls made her feel a bit like a plane, a blunt little fuselage. She was a short- wheelbase model like Scooby-Do’s Mystery Machine. I’d brought her up to school after spring break to break her in. I threw my Goodwill bedroom chair behind her front seats, making it a living room or a den, a little pad. She’d been a good ship and when I’d gotten back to Florida in June my dad had pledged to get her prepped. I was not nearly worthy of or gracious enough for the sacrifice he had signed on for; whole days and half nights spent contorting his fifty year-old arthritic and rapidly aging frame to the confines of her tight engine bay, only his latest endeavor on my behalf. 2 Never mind he kind of needed to keep himself busy. Never mind this kinetic energy was the way he’d stayed straight since my childhood—he was fully immersed on my behalf. I just wanted to leave. I just wanted to see a sign welcoming me to some other state, any other state. But the guilt was there. The dormant Catholic in him came out this way. And he was right. He reminded me about Texas. He’d done some driving in his day. “Two days in there, bucko,” he said, “across Texas in August, without air conditioning?” Bucko was his word for me when he meant it. He was right. But on this, the morning I must leave or die, he had most likely bitten off too big a piece. History said it would most likely go much less smoothly—this last-minute operation—than in his mind. I was also right. We were both right, everyone was always right, and we couldn’t even agree on that. He had never really sent me off with a fully road-worthy vehicle, not on schedule. An ’87 Renault with a faulty fuse that randomly stranded me in intersections all over my hometown, my first car, a French car, French cars had Gremlins, my dad would say, I’d backed her into a pole on my first solo drive, freshly licensed and alone, my father trying not to laugh at my face when I moped back into his garage less than a minute after I’d left it in triumph;

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