Kerouac

"These roads don't move, you're the one that moves."

I wrote a novel once, back when I was young and still believed in everything. It was the true story of a cross-country journey I took in a Volkswagen bus with my old buddy Ray. The stated purpose of the journey was to track down another old buddy who'd gone off the radar -- or so we believed. The true purpose of the journey came to reveal itself in other ways, such as the writing of the novel.

The true purpose of the journey may continue to reveal itself, as I continue to retrace the seemingly disconnected routes of my past.

One thing I do know -- there was another Presence riding along with us in that old VW. An unseen Guide, who whispered strange incantations during lonely stretches of endless moonlit highway, and howled with crazy Zen laughter in the mist-laden dawn. His name was Jack Kerouac.

Like everybody else, I first learned about Kerouac from his novel, On The Road. Reading On The Road was like a rite of passage, an initiation into the counterculture, the Boy Scout Manual for Bohemians. On The Road was the beginning of a journey that wound its way through the mythological landscape of the American soul, with a Charlie Parker soundtrack playing on the dashboard radio and the ghosts of forgotten poets towering above the distant horizon. It was a call to action, a prayer for deliverance. It made a young man want to move.

So, one crisp spring morning, I set out from Middletown, Connecticut, with my thumb stuck out over Route 9, headed south. I hitched my way down to North Carolina where I met up with Ray, on his way east from Illinois. We had little money and nothing to eat. We slept on the cold ground and wandered under the hot sun. We visited some girls we knew from high school, hoping they would fall in love with us.

But they didn't.

We hitched our way west to Nashville and stayed with another old buddy named Gary. Got drunk and slept it off. Then hitched north, back home to Louisville. All along the way, we met crazy characters and saw wondrous visions. We talked about Life and Love and Music and Truth. We lived in the moment. And we kept moving.

We were on the road.

About a year later, it was time to move again. Winter this time, and I had a vehicle. A blue and white Volkswagen bus with the middle seat taken out. Just a simple caravan, a Conestoga wagon for crossing the Great Plains. We had different reasons for making the trip -- to go to California, to find a lost friend, to continue on our journey. But once we got going, we knew why we were there. The wheels rolling under us, the road spooling out endlessly ahead. The past disappearing in the rear-view. The future just beyond the windshield.

I kept a journal of our voyage -- it seemed like things were unfolding in important and historic ways that had to be recorded. Life had become a novel. Fiction was reality. We were characters, living chapter to chapter. We didn't know what was coming until it happened. Each day was written fresh and then the page was turned.

We got a small apartment in Oakland near Lake Merritt. We got jobs. We worked and slept, ate and drank. Went to movies and concerts. We found our errant friend and failed to lure him home. We argued, commiserated, dreamed and planned. Pages turned. Chapters were written.

A couple of years later, when I actually began the task of transforming my road-journal into a full fledged road-novel, I read Ann Charters' biography of Kerouac, and learned a bit about his unconventional writing methods -- some of which I adopted. As I wrote, carving out chapters from the various scattered episodes and stringing them together in a structure that felt logical, I began to see some sense in what had happened. Or perhaps I imposed some sense onto what had happened. Either way, I was creating order from chaos and finding meaning in the void. I was being a writer.

My one unbending principle was that everything I wrote had to be absolutely true. I believed that telling the truth would give my story a noble authority that would elevate it beyond the reach of my meager talents. I have since discovered that what is true is not always worth telling -- and what's worth telling is not always true. But back then, in the spirit of Kerouac, I wrote exactly what happened, exactly the way it happened.

Of course, the names were changed to protect the (not so) innocent.

After that fabled journey, there were many others. Three more times across the country -- once using the same auto-driveaway service that Kerouac used. Several hitchhiking adventures, including a wild ride through Pennsylvania in a van full of hippies. And one late-night, high-speed run through Alabama that ended up with me leaning against the hood of an Oldsmobile while a State Trooper pointed a shotgun at my head. I even went on the road in Europe, driving from Paris through the Swiss Alps into Italy and then by ferry to Corsica and back into France. That trip felt a little more like Hemingway than Kerouac.

But all of that, as they say, was long ago. I stopped driving, for the most part, when I moved to New York City. My old Plymouth Valiant, which I had operated for years without the benefit of license or registration, sat in my sister's driveway, having become a combination mouse condo and canoe rack. I took the train or the bus instead of driving. Most of my wanderings consisted of long walks on the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Here in LA, one spends quite a bit of time behind the wheel, and I often found it a relief to park the car on Friday night and not see it again until Monday morning. But I did enjoy a very memorable drive down the coast one summer with my nephew. We started in San Francisco, where we visited the City Lights Bookstore and Jack Kerouac Alley, then headed south along the Pacific Coast Highway. We stopped for the night in Big Sur, where Kerouac lived one summer in a tiny cabin beneath the Bixby Canyon Bridge.

I didn't really know much about Kerouac's life in Bixby Canyon. I'd never read his book, Big Sur, about his attempt to escape the trappings of fame and alcoholism and find some kind of spiritual connection in the rustic tranquility of the California coast. I just knew that he'd lived there and that it was one of the most beautiful places on earth.

A few weeks ago, though, for my birthday, my Mom sent me a documentary called One Fast Move Or I'm Gone, which tells the story of Kerouac's Big Sur retreat. She heard about it on NPR, which my Dad listens to 24 hours a day, and thought I might like it. She was right -- I loved it.

Accompanying the DVD, there is a CD of songs by Ben Gibbard and Jay Farrar using Kerouac's words as lyrics. I've been listening to that CD non-stop since my birthday, and one song in particular has gotten stuck in my head. I hear it when I'm swimming. I find myself singing it when I'm out for a walk. The chorus goes: "These roads don't move, you're the one that moves."

At first I didn't know what that meant. It was just a catchy little phrase I kept repeating to myself. But as I listened more closely to the rest of the song, it started to make more sense. It was like Kerouac, still hovering over my shoulder on that moonlit highway, had one more mysterious message to impart. "These roads don't move..." All this restless wandering isn't taking you anywhere. "You're the one that moves." The transformation happens within.

After all these years, I guess I'm still on the road. I'm just not going anywhere.

Holy Grail

There was a movie theater in Louisville called the Vogue, that used to show different movies every night for just a couple of bucks. The Vogue showed classic movies, foreign movies, art-house movies, independent movies. They ran The Rocky Horror Picture Show every week for 24 consecutive years. It was the last of the old single-screen theaters. Now it is gone. I saw some great movies there back in the 70's: A Clockwork Orange, Walkabout, Easy Rider, Frenzy, Last Tango In Paris, The Wicker Man, Five Easy Pieces, Woodstock, M*A*S*H, Dirty Harry, Murder On The Orient Express, Dr. Zhivago. Many more I can't remember. But of all the amazing movies I saw at the Vogue, I think the one that made the biggest impression on me was Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Prior to seeing the movie, most of what I knew about Monty Python came from their records. I used to hang around with a posse of nerds in high school and one of them, a guy from Texas of all places, had a collection of Monty Python records. As it turns out, the PBS television station in Dallas was the first station to broadcast episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus -- so he had the jump on us in that department. I don't remember ever seeing the show in Louisville. Though I do recall seeing Eric Idle on Saturday Night Live a couple of times. And I have a vague memory of seeing the Nudge Nudge sketch on the Tonight Show.

Nevertheless, when my nerd buddies and I decided to do a comedy remake of A Man For All Seasons for our tenth grade English class (cleverly titled "A Man For All Seasonings") the Python influence was in full force.

In one pivotal scene from our movie, when Sir Thomas Moron is giving his famous "It's not that I believe it, but that I believe it..." line, the Duke of Norfuk breaks character and says "What the hell does that mean?" Moron replies "I don't know, it's in the script." He pulls a copy of the script out and points to the page in question. Norfuk grabs the script and looks at it in disbelief, saying, "it doesn't make any sense!" He then walks off camera, throwing the script down in disgust. Moron looks at the camera and pulls out a box of crackers, saying "and now for some nice Ritz Crackers!" He shoves an handful into his mouth and the scene ends.

We shot much of our movie "on location" i.e., in the woods near a babbling brook, in back of a liquor store, in the middle of a corporate office park. And since my 8mm camera had no sound, we carried a portable GE tape recorder around with us everywhere and recorded all of the dialogue on the spot. This turned out to be a big problem, since there was a lot of fumbling with the tape recorder, not to mention traffic noise, airplanes and the aforementioned babbling brook. So we had to re-record all of the dialogue in real time while watching the edited version of the movie. We gathered at the Texan's house for the recording session and spent most of the afternoon listening to Monty Python records before getting down to business. It was my first-ever looping session and it was a complete success. And I think it was the spirit of the Pythons that carried the day.

In the final scene of "Seasonings", Sir Thomas Moron wonders aloud if he has made the right choice in defying the King. He looks to the heavens and sees a vision of God (played by our bearded biology teacher) giving him a 'thumbs up' sign. The soundtrack swells with the sounds of Beethoven's Ode to Joy and the credits roll.

We considered it a masterpiece at the time -- though I'm not so sure our 10th grade English teacher appreciated it. The line "Neither food nor drink, Norfuk!" which got a big laugh in the classroom, didn't sit too well with her. My nerd crew and I went on to make other movies, including a mega-disaster flick called "Shake n' Bake" about a huge skyscraper that catches fire during an earthquake.

But "Man For All Seasonings" was our undeniable triumph.

So when I finally got the chance to see Holy Grail at the Vogue, I was completely blown away. From the very start, with the title sequence that opens with an ultra-serious look and dramatic classical score then quickly devolves into a mish-mash of mariachi music and llama jokes, I was choking with laughter. It was all there: the absurdism, the inane philosophical prattle, the parody of genre and the self-mocking lunacy. None of these things were necessarily new. Mel Brooks had done it. My nerd pals and I had done it. But Holy Grail managed to elevate this type of irreverence to the level of the sublime. Talk about a masterpiece!

Perhaps the most brilliant aspect for me was the idea of breaking frame. The idea that the movie is constantly referring itself, like the way that Kurt Vonnegut would break out of the anonymous confines of his role as author and address the reader directly, commenting on the novel as it was being written. Holy Grail is imbued with a sense of self-awareness that draws the viewer into the joke and allows us to laugh with the movie as well as at the movie. In the very first scene, we hear the clip-clop of horses hooves and see a helmeted head bobbing up and down, expecting to see the familiar sight of a knight on horseback. Instead, the horse is revealed to be a man clapping together a pair of hollow coconut halves to simulate the sound of hoof-beats. And rather than let that joke simply lie there, more attention is drawn to it when Arthur gets caught up in a discussion of how a coconut may or may not have been carried to the shores of medieval England by a migrating swallow. All played in complete earnest.

Later, when approaching Camelot, one character points out, "it's only a model." And when Arthur and his men finally reach the Bridge of Death, they meet up with "the old man from scene 24." But the best frame-breaking joke of the movie comes when a "Very Famous Historian" is murdered by one of Arthur's knights. The police are called in to investigate and ultimately catch up with Arthur and Bedivere just before they are set to storm the Grail Castle. The knights are arrested and hauled into a police van. Then a police Inspector turns to the camera and says, "All right, put that away sonny." He puts his hand over the lens and the film abruptly ends. It's pure genius.

Of course I couldn't help noticing certain similarities between "A Man For All Seasonings" and Holy Grail. There were the obvious frame-breaking script references, the documentary-style realism, and the inane philosophical arguments. They even used our "God" cameo -- though in their case, God was a Terry Gilliam animation and not a scruffy high-school biology teacher. The fact is, Holy Grail and "Seasonings" were produced at roughly the same point in time. And though the Pythons had a slightly bigger budget and a bit more talent, we shared an attitude with them that gave us the freedom to do and say whatever we wanted in our film, so long as we thought it was funny. There were no rules, only conventions. And conventions were made to be subverted.

I recently watched a six-part documentary about Monty Python called Monty Python Almost the Truth. I was fascinated by all of the behind-the-scenes information, the history of how they all got together and the discussions of where certain sketches came from. But the most interesting segment was the one about Holy Grail. The Pythons revealed how little they knew about making a movie, how little time and money they had, how the camera broke on the first day of shooting, how they got kicked out of their locations and had to shoot most of the various "castle" scenes in the same place. And it all seemed very familiar. And it occurred to me that the lack of resources and experience and equipment contributed to the brilliance of the movie. Because when you are forced into a corner, you often come up with your best work.

I would love to go back and look at "A Man For All Seasonings" again. I'm not sure where it ended up. Or if the film and the soundtrack are even in the same place. Maybe someday I will dig it up and restore it. But the memory of that early attempt is indelible. Just like my memory of watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail at the Vogue theater in Louisville.

Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time!

Albion House

Bridgekeeper: Stop. What... is your name?
Galahad: Sir Galahad of Camelot.
Bridgekeeper: What... is your quest?
Galahad: I seek the Grail.
Bridgekeeper: What... is your favourite colour?
Galahad: Blue. No, yel...

Last month I spent a wonderfully refreshing week at my parent's place in Maine. I did a little running, a little swimming, even some kayaking. I also spent some time up in the loft, plowing through some of the boxes I have stashed up there, looking for evidence of my past accomplishments. In particular I was looking for some videos from my foray into stand-up comedy, including a feature about me that appeared on CNN.

It was my fifteen minutes of fame, even though it only lasted about two minutes.

I actually found more than I was looking for. Besides the CNN tape and some brief bits I did for an early Comedy Central experiment called Stand-Up To Go, I also found some rare video of couple of gigs I played when I was going through my folk-singer phase.

It was fascinating to look back after all these years and see this pale, skinny kid with a full head of hair getting up in front of crowds of people and acting like he actually knew what he was doing. If I didn't know any better, I would think this kid was fearless and confident. But I happen to know that he was, in fact, terrified and filled with doubt. And yet, the amazing thing is, you really can't tell. Regardless of the quality of the performance, the overall effect is that the performer seems to believe in himself.

And that really is half the battle.

After a few days in Maine, my folks and I went down to Connecticut to attend my niece's wedding -- which was awesome. We stayed around my sister's house for a while, bulking up on leftover wedding food, before driving to my parent's condo in Florida. I went along as a kind of 'go-to' driver, to take the wheel whenever my Mom needed a break. She did a heck of a lot of driving, though. My Dad doesn't really drive anymore, but he's probably logged more miles than any of us, commuting to work for forty years or so. He spent much of the trip chilling out in the back seat listening to NPR downloads on his iPod.

When we got to Florida, I had a few days to relax before flying home to LA. I did some more swimming, went on a few walks with my Dad, and one particularly hot day, I climbed up into the attic to plow through several more boxes of my so-called archives. This time, however the object was not to find items of interest, but to get rid of as much as possible. And I did manage to drag down a couple boxes of books which my Mom can donate to the local library. But I also found a few more treasures from my long lost past, including two novels, a pile of short stories, a ton of song lyrics and a whole box filled with photographs.

Most of the photos were from the mid to late eighties when I lived in Washington DC -- a period of my life I have been attempting to suppress for many years. A lot of good things happened during this time, but they were all pretty much overshadowed by the disastrous ending of a major relationship. So, when I ignominiously left DC for good, I crammed all of the mementos from that time into a bunch of banker boxes and stashed them at my parent's house in Connecticut. And when my parents moved to Florida, my boxes moved with them. The next time my parents move, they are hoping they won't have to haul a bunch of my boxes with them. Hence the sweaty day spent in the attic, trying to decide what to keep and what to trash.

Surprisingly, instead of ignoring the box of photos, I found myself looking through it, and occasionally even smiling. There were some photos of my old rock band The Charismatics, some pics of family get-togethers, shots of my old housemates from DC, and of course many pictures of me with my girlfriend, Sue, who later became my ex-girlfriend, Sue, and eventually "She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named." There were pictures of the two if us in DC, hiking in Virginia, travelling in Europe and Egypt, at the beach, with my family, and even a few from a trip we took to Northern California when I was working as a paralegal on a big case in San Francisco.

I was spending several weeks at a time at a temporary trial office in San Francisco, so Sue decided to fly out and join me for my birthday. We took off one Friday afternoon and drove up north to see the redwood groves in Humboldt County. We spent all day Saturday hiking through the incredible Redwoods State Park, marvelling at the majestic trees and drinking in the beauty of the unspoiled groves. On the way back, the night before my birthday, we found a cozy little seaside inn with rustic cabins overlooking the Pacific. The cabins had little more than a bed, a bathroom and a wood stove. No electricity. No phone. Just the fire and the ocean and the two of us.

It was pretty romantic.

The next morning, on my birthday, Sue snapped a photo of me standing in the doorway of our cabin, named "Albion House." And when I looked at that photo in my parent's attic, so many years later, I was amazed. Amazed at how happy I was. Amazed at how young I was. But especially, amazed at how good it made me feel. Instead of making me even more depressed about all that has been lost, all I did wrong, all I wish had been, and all I wish had never been, it felt good to remember that morning, that beautiful perfect morning by the sea, on my birthday, deeply in love, with all of life and nature in harmony.


In one of the Grail legends, young Percival finds the Grail Castle, meets the Fisher King and actually sees the Grail. But, failing to ask the magical question that would heal the ailing King, Percival finds himself back on the outside, with no castle in sight and only a dim memory of the glory he once beheld. He vows to find the Castle again, and in his later years, he does accompany Galahad to finally complete the mission.

When I look at the picture of me in the doorway of the Albion House, named for the very British Isles where the Grail quest took place, I see a young Percival -- about to cross the threshold out of the Grail Castle, without a clue that he has failed to accomplish his task and will not be able to return to the Grail Castle for many years, or maybe ever.

But, for that one shining moment, he is in the presence of the divine, filled with the grace of God, and ready to take on the whole world.

I have since tried to find the Albion House, but I'm afraid that, like the Grail Castle, it has vanished -- replaced by upscale luxury seaside cottages complete with hot tubs, cable TV and Wi-Fi. But I will continue my search for the Grail Castle. And maybe I can take a lesson from that pale skinny kid with the full head of hair, who had no idea what he was doing and was filled beyond reason with doubt and terror -- but at least he was out there trying.

And this time, if I find the Grail Castle again, I will know what question to ask. I will heal the Fisher King. I will bring peace and joy back unto the Kingdom. Because, although I am still terrified, now I actually do know what I'm doing.