Still About Kerouac, Different Shape of Degrees of Separation

About ten years later I was living at the Zen Center in San Francisco. Philip Whalen was teaching a class in writing poetry. For an exercise he asked us to write about something beautiful.

        Michael McClure is beautiful    (I wrote)
        ten years later.
        Slightly grey
        that smile
        and still the handsomest man I've ever seen.

"Kerouac thought so too," said Phil. "Huh?" I said. "He said McClure was the handsomest man he'd ever seen," said Phil.

*****************
I suppose this needs all kinds of footnotes. That in 1977 McClure had just then been at Zen Center for a reading. That in 1967 I served him mashed potatoes, or maybe it was peas, in the serving line at the free Thanksgiving dinner in the basement of All Saint's Episcopal Church on Waller Street (or maybe it was Howard Presbyterian on Oak Street) in the Haight. That in the Instamatic Archive I (still) have a picture I took of McClure and Freewheelin' Frank the Hell's Angel making music behind the stage at the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in 1967.

That Certain Amount of Experience With Scroll Manuscripts

I went back to the Museum this evening and type type typed my story. It goes:

This is the scroll story. It's a little misty as to before and after. In 1968 I was living in a carriage house on the inside of the block bounded by Haight, Belvedere, Waller and Cole in the Haight Ashbury. My downstairs neighbor had a kind of continuous open house which ran on pills for half of every month until he ran out of money. Among the people who came to Tommy's was a poet named John Foret, who evenually connected my friend Jet with Irving Rosenthal, who had just arrived from New York with a printing press and Beat Connections. I think that's how a man named Angel got into my life and my apartment. Angel had also just arrived, from Afghanistan with a leather jacket full of hashish, and so couldn't stay in Irving's commune... anyway, Angel saw the typewriter on my kitchen table and told me that Kerouac had composed On the Road in a continuous scroll on telegraph paper. I went away for a few days and Angel stayed in my apartment. When I came home, Angel was gone and my cat Pickle was lost, and there was a long long scroll typed on yellow paper in the typewriter. I rolled it up and taped it with masking tape, and kept it a long time, but Angel never came back. I've no idea what I did with it in the end, but I can see it plainly in my memory, even now 40 years later. The paper was much heavier than Kerouac's—I was quite startled when I saw how thin the Museum's scroll is. About a year later the cat reappeared for a couple of days. He seemed to remember me, but had turned into a huge wild street cat, and didn't stay.

Not At All Easy To Read

My boss the head of reference thinks that interest in the Kerouac scroll must be a generational thing, since he doesn't care at all. Me, I have history of a sort with manuscripts typed on rolls of teletype paper, and the museum is free on Friday evenings, so I hurried over after work.

The whole west wing of the museum echoes with the clatter of typing. I thought at first it was a recording, but it was way better than that: at the entry to the exhibit there is a room with old Underwood typewriters, and visitors are encouraged to compose either haiku (a bunch of Kerouac haiku are hung on display) or road narratives, and pin them to the wall. Type type type. Type type type. There is a film on continuous loop, apparently a shortened version of "What Happened to Kerouac". There are enormous blowups of the pictures from Life Magazine of an impossibly handsome Kerouac sitting by his typewriter, holding up the scroll as if reading. There are display units with photos and books of other Beats, and a display panel about Kerouac's associates' New Mexico connections. The sound of typing from the anteroom stops, begins again. Type type type. Type type type.

There is a long long case diagonally down the middle of the room, with the first thirty-six feet of the manuscript unfurled. I don't know if it has been opened to different parts of the story in different cities, but we get the beginning. He composed it with the real names. Neal is Neal. The paper is almost transparent, and the grain of the cloth on the floor of the case shows through behind the typing. Even if one weren't bending over sideways trying to read across the lines at an angle without leaning on the case (which might set off an alarm), it would be hard to read. With or without bifocals. As presented, impossible. I went to the foot of the case where I could at least read straight on instead of sideways. It was the part where he is picking cotton for two dollars per hundred pounds. I read until I was practically standing on my head trying to puzzle out the last visible letters as the paper wrapped around the glass dumbbell holding the rest of the novel. Type type type type type type.

The museum rented a billboard, along I-25 northbound from Albuquerque to Santa Fe. The same text as the bumper sticker above. If you didn't know what it was about, you wouldn't know. Good pix in the San Francisco Chronicle.