Chamblee54

One moment in the integration of On The Road into PG’s life in McMansionville GA was the washing machine incident. PG was doing the clothes. When the machine gets to the spin dry cycle, the clothes settle unevenly in the spin basket. The machine starts to rock on its feet, and make machine noise music of Lou Reed proportions. PG will rest his butt against the side of the machine, and read OTR. This helps the machine settle down. Dick hungry PG enjoys the ride.
Meanwhile, OTR is sitting there, patiently waiting on the slack blogger to write yet another chapter. Sal Paradise (Jack Kerouac) is back in Frisco. As soon as Dean (Neal Cassady) gets there, he takes off in search of pussy. … “‘Oh I love, love, love women! I think women are wonderful! I love women!’ He spat out the window; he groaned; he clutched his head. Great beads of sweat fell from his forehead from pure excitement and exhaustion.”… Marylou, the Dean-babe they went cross country with, has run off with some rich people she knows. Sal is broke, starving, and dreaming of food. “There were places where hamburgs sizzled on grills and coffee was just a nickel.” Sal was in the pre-beatnik San Francisco of 1948, 71 years before PG rode the washing machine in summertime Brookhaven. The culture may be internet processed, but the fridge has food, and the clothes are going to be clean in a little while.
Part Two of OTR starts with Sal back in New Jersey. He takes his aunt down to Virginia for a family holiday. Who should show up but Dean Moriarty, first wife Marylou, and Ed Dunkel … “ready to do anything Dean asked him, and at this time Dean was too busy for scruples.” Sal’s aunt has furniture to take back to New Jersey, which Dean winds up taking in his ’49 Hudson. There is an extended New Years Eve party in New York. Before long, Dean needs to get back to Frisco, and he talks Sal into going along. … “… but now the bug as one me again, and the bug’s name was Dean Moriarty and I was off on another spurt around the road.” … They go through Washington as Harry Truman is being sworn in for a full term as POTUS. Around that time, they got a costly speeding ticket in Virginia. They paid that off, leaving them very little money to get to California. (Ed Dunkel, aka Al Hinkle, was the “sole survivor” of the OTR characters. He died December 26, 2018.)
The first stop is New Orleans. Old Bull Lee (William S. Burroughs) is there, along with Galatea, the wife of Ed Dunkel. The cadaverous OBL is leading the opiated life described in Junky. Galatea is one of the more curious side stories of OTR. Ed meets her out west. “These two mindless cads decided to bring the girl along to the east and have her foot the bill … By the time they got to Tucson she was broke. Dean and Ed gave her the slip in a hotel lobby and resumed the voyage alone …”
Galatea made it to New Orleans, and Old Bull Lee. Galatea was reunited with Ed, and began their life together. 46 years later, Galatea … whose real name was Helen … was still with Al Hinkle. Here is the honeymoon story. Better Homes and Gardens chose not to publish this tale.
… the Burroughses weren’t all too happy to have had Helen ‘dumped’ on them. As a matter of fact, when Helen first got there, Bill wasn’t happy and began writing letters to Allen (Ginsberg) in New York telling him to tell me to come and get her out of his house, it’s not a hotel! When we finally got to their house, which was actually in Algiers, LA (across the Mississippi River from New Orleans), Bill and Joan welcomed us. Helen had made herself indispensible in the three weeks she had been there, caring for both the Burroughs children (Joan’s three year old daughter Julie and William Jr., who was an infant at that time); she bathed them, fed them, and generally kept them out of their parents’ way. Bill and Joan actually asked Helen and I if we would stay with them – he had a room all ready to fix up for us! But Helen wanted out – she couldn’t believe how they lived, how little care they took of their children; never mind the house, which was dirty, with lizards running around everywhere.
Helen was appalled by Joan’s use of the Benzedrine inhalers – she would open them up and swallow the cotton. Joan would send Helen to buy an inhaler almost every day. Once Helen mentioned to Joan that the pharmacist told her he would happily sell her ten inhalers at a time because he knew she was not the type to abuse them, to which Joan replied, “So, where are they?” And Helen never figured out that Bill was using heroin – she just thought he was stoned on marijuana all the time (which he was, on top of the heroin). It was all just a little too crazy for Helen, and she was glad when we turned down their offer of a room and found ourselves a room in New Orleans, where we stayed for about six weeks. It was a low-budget adventure, but we did get our honeymoon and we enjoyed it immensely.”
Sal and OBL went to the racetrack. Sal had a vision about his father, and told OBL to bet on a horse because of it. OBL ignored Sal. The horse won, and paid fifty to one. Soon after that, OBL kicked the bunch out. They headed to Frisco without any money. They stole food and gasoline. They picked up hitchhikers, who promised money from a rich aunt down the road, who sometimes existed. Dean cut off the gas while going downhill and coasted. Sal did not like to drive … “I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.” … took up space and grooved on the goneness of it all. “And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy I had always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move one, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiances shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven.”
After much hunger and grooviness, Dean, Sal, and Marylou made it to Frisco. Dean promptly dumped Marylou to take up with kids-mama Camille. “You see what a bastard he is?… Dean will leave you out in the cold anytime it’s in his interest.” Sal wanders the city dreaming of food, until he gets his GI bill money, and decides to go back to New Jersey. “What I accomplished by going to Frisco I don’t know. Camille wanted me to leave; Dean didn’t care one way or the other. I bought a loaf of bread and meats and made myself ten sandwiches to cross the country with again; they were all going to go rotten on me by the time I got to Dakota. … We were all thinking we’d never see one another again and we didn’t care.”
The first draft of this piece is done. PG gets more coffee, and goes to work on another project. He is producing a sticker picture based on Lizard (No. 56) by M.C. Escher. Today is the day to start cutting out lizards. These pieces are larger, and more complicated, than what PG usually cuts out. The Grateful Dead is goofing on “China Cat Sunflower” in the background. Jerry would have made a lousy headlight on a northbound train.
Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. Balboa Beach Bathing Beauty Parade, 1925 “Notes: J278572 U.S. Copyright Office, Copyright deposit; M. F. Weaver; September 14, 1925, Copyright claimant’s address: L[os] A[ngeles], No. 4100-2. May be a fashion parade. Rights Advisory: No known restrictions on publication. No renewal found in Copyright Office.” Picture #06662 is from “Second International Pageant of Pulchritude and Eighth Annual Bathing Girl Revue, May 21, 22, 23, 1927, Galveston TX.” The chamblee54 On The Road series is complete. part one part two part three part four part five part six part seven

PG has been home a few days. It is time to proceed with this book report of On The Road, the typing exercise of noted dipsomaniac Jack Kerouac. At the end of Road Trip, Sal Paradise (Jack Kerouac) is in a Colorado ghost town. This was chapter 9 of OTR.
There are a couple of changes. The keyboard, connected to PG’s machine, died. It no longer typed o. Further investigation revealed it would not type q or t. Some numbers went missing. It is possible that other keys were not working. PG found a replacement keyboard. Unfortunately, the backspace key … an essential tool for a slack blogger … was just a regular single wide key, instead of the double wide backspace of the old keyboard. When the right pinkie instinctively strokes the backspace, \ is what shows up. This is going to take some lifestyle adjustment.
A book that PG wanted to talk about was in the vehicle. When he looked for the car key, it was not on the desk. The key was not in the pants PG had on, or the pants he had on the last night. The keys were not in the car. When he came back in the house last night, PG put the book down on the dining room table. That was where the car key was.
Back to the changes in the OTR narrative. PG ordered a better copy of OTR from the library. When it arrived, it was a deluxe paperback, printed in 1999, with a sticker price of $16.00. The 1970? edition, that PG was using, retailed for $1.25. PG got the arrival notice from the library June 4. Before he could go to the library, PG took his brother, GP, grocery shopping. While sitting in the Aldi parking lot, PG read page 62. Sal is in *Frisco*. “There were plenty of queers.” When PG put the book down to ponder that, he saw GP leaving Aldi’s.
This is chapter 11. Sal is living in a trailer outside the city. “the only community in America where whites and Negroes lived together voluntarily; and that was so, and so wild and joyous a place I’ve never seen since.” He is staying with Remi Boncoeur, an old friend. Remi argues with his wife, when he is not working as a security guard. Sal starts to work as a guard. Once Sal is called to a trailer. Some men are drinking, and behaving badly. “This is the story of America. Everybody’s doing what they think they’re supposed to do. So what if a bunch of men talk in loud voices and drink the night? But Sledge wanted to prove something.” Sal accepts their offer of a drink. It goes downhill from there. Eventually, some alcohol related nonsense estranges Sal and Remi.
On the bus to LA, Sal meets a Mexican lady named Terry. “I saw her poor belly where there was a Caesarean scar; her hips were so narrow she couldn’t bear a child without getting gashed open… I made love to her in the sweetness of the weary morning. Then, like two tired angels of some kind, hung-up forlornly in an L.A. shelf, having found the closest and most delicious thing in life together, we fell asleep and slept till late afternoon.” Money becomes an issue, and Sal/Terry go out to the San Joaquin Valley. Some friend of Terry’s brother has a business selling manure to farmers. Mostly gets drunk, with Sal’s eager assistance. Finally, Sal gets his aunt to send money, buys a bus ticket to New York, and leaves a heartbroken Terry in California.
At the end of chapter 14, Sal is in New York, broke, and trying to get to his aunt’s house in New Jersey. This is the end of part one. OTR is divided into five parts, each divided into a collection of short chapters. The rest of this series will deal with the parts, one at a time, along with whatever stories from 2019 are entertaining enough to include.
“I was going home in October. everybody goes home in October.” PG likes to compare his life to the story of Sal. PG has had a comparatively tame existence. The only time he ever came home in October was when he was at a faerie-do in Tennessee. In 1989, PG got home to hear about an earthquake in San Francisco. A week later, PG got through fixing a flat tire, and went up to his apartment to see the light flashing on the message machine. “Michael Mason died last night.”
A quote by Truman Capote comes up, when Jack Kerouac is mentioned. “Thats not writing, thats typing.” PG did a google search of the phrase in 2011. “Kerouac survives because he (allegedly) wrote great works; the insufferable logorrhea the Beats inspired biodegrades in niche bookstores because, sensibly, nobody reads it.” Google also found a book review of “Going Rogue,” by Sarah Palin … That’s not writing, that’s someone else typing.
Whenever PG hears a quote these days, he goes into fact checker mode. Did Mr. Capote really say TNWTT? Quote Investigator comes to the rescue. The phrase first came up in Paris Review: Truman Capote, The Art of Fiction No. 17. “The topic was writing style, and Capote responded by passing judgment … “But yes, there is such an animal as a nonstylist. Only they’re not writers. They’re typists. Sweaty typists blacking up pounds of Bond with formless, eyeless, earless messages.” Mr. Kerouac was not mentioned by name.
The next appearance of TNWTT was on the David Susskind show. The guests were Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Dorothy Parker … who paid the bar tab when that was over? “Truman Capote agreed to appear on David Susskind’s “Open End” show, with Norman Mailer — who kept praising the Beat-Generation writers. Capote thought their product worthless. “It’s nothing,” he said. “That’s not writing; that’s just typewriting.” Again, this appears to be about the beats in generally, and not specifically about Mr. Kerouac. The quote lives on, long after Mr. Capote and Mr. Kerouac moved on to the cocktail party in the sky.
Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. The chamblee54 On The Road series is complete. part one part two part three part four part five part six part seven

Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi was at the Chamblee library, and PG took it home. The book begins in 1979, when John was making The Blues Brothers. People were already worried about the amount of cocaine John was doing. The white powder drama gets deeper and deeper, for 405 pages, until John dies March 5, 1982.
Wired has the feel of a endurance contest. The drugs, and the bad behavior, pile up and up. Wired reminds PG of Ladies and gentlemen – Lenny Bruce!! The first chapter of that book is a 60 page look at one junkie day. The geezing gets so tiresome that the climactic OD comes as a relief.
Bob Woodward is the copyright holder of Wired. He is better known for political writing, most notably about Watergate. Mr. Woodward is frequently criticized. The one comment that keeps coming up is by Joan Didion. In a paywall hidden New York Review of Books essay, she says that “measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent” from Woodward’s books.
Wired is reasonably easy to read, in spite of the squareness of Mr. Woodward. He feels obligated to explain things. The Police were “an English new wave music group.” The book feels like it is written for people who think drug use is simultaneously terrible, and fascinating.
This attitude is seen in a Washington Post story about the book. “The strongest criticism of the book by those who knew Belushi–who played the chief fraternity prankster in “Animal House” and who was often featured as a huge, overstuffed bee on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live”–was that Woodward concentrated on the dark side of Belushi’s life, providing exacting details of the drugs, alcohol and tantrums that characterized his final days in Hollywood.” If you read the book, you will know that Mr. Belushi hated the bee character.
One of the strongest critics of the book was Judy Jacklin Belushi, John’s widow. WaPo had an amazing quote. “The 33-year-old Belushi, who said she cooperated with Woodward for the book published by Simon & Schuster because he was not part of the world of drugs and booze that Belushi thrived on, said that she now believes she made a mistake by allowing someone outside the drug culture to write the book. “He doesn’t tell the story that drugs can be fun,” she said. “John and I both were drug users, and for a while it was fun….”
It is interesting to read Wired in 2019. After Mr. Belushi died, the federal government drug policy evolved. On the one hand, anti drug propaganda ramped up, with drug testing and increased enforcement efforts. On the other hand, the Reagan government was using drug runners to take weapons to terrorists in Central America. The planes were not empty when they came back to America. The story of drugs in America is bizarre.
Books are a way to pass the time, while you are waiting for other things to happen. You might could say the same thing about drugs. Or you could just put both aside, and do something else. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress.

Drop City, by T.C. Boyle, is the latest book PG read. DC is the rip-roaring tale of a 1970 California commune. The existential experiment turns to shit, literally. After a disastrous summer solstice celebration, a decision is made to move. Someone has a cabin in Alaska. Why not move the freak show to the frozen north? What could go wrong?
The story is thoroughly entertaining. Mr. Boyle is a prose craftsmen. The quotable sentences are less important than the story. Never mind that the details don’t always add up. Sess Harder has his dogs killed, while he is busy getting married. Pamela, his mail order bride, drags him to a rescue center in Fairbanks, and Sess reluctantly adopts a dog. Fast forward a couple of months, and suddenly Sess has five dogs, and is training them to go trap furs. Did Amazon the Sears catalog deliver mush dogs, 150 miles north of Fairbanks, in 1970?
Maybe the Amazon one star comments will help. Matthew T. “To find this book enjoyable is to admit a lack of morals.” mokshasha “this book MUST have been written by a committee” Will Szal “My guess is that our author, Boyle, is an atheist in the most pessimistic of ways.” watzizname “even tho I am neither hippie nor Afro-American, I am disgusted and offended.”
The term Afro-American had not been coined in 1970. We don’t know what Lester, and the others, called themselves. They arrive at Drop City, CA. Lester stays in a cabin, and does not contribute to the community. After an ugly incident in the cabin, Lester is asked to leave. There is more trouble, as the decision to move to Alaska is announced. Lester is stopped at the border, going into Canada. You might think this is the last we see of him.
The rest of the circus moves on to Boynton, a two saloon town 150 miles north of Fairbanks, AK. Drop City North is a three hour canoe ride upriver. After a few weeks, Lester shows up. We don’t know how this happened. The last we see of Lester, he is panning for gold in a river.
Lester is a side story. The focus of DC are the hippies, a colorful crew of indeterminate number. They are the frozen people. The hippies find people already living in the bush. Some are friendlier than others. Some will come to regret extending a welcome.
The hippies arrive sometime in July. By October, the temperature is -20, presumably fahrenheit. In that time, the hippies have built a collection of log cabins, and squirrled away supplies for the winter. Meanwhile, Sess, and his bride, have worked like crazy to store up enough food to last the winter. Sess was already there, knew what he was doing, and still had to work like crazy. How did a traveling hippie circus do much more, starting from scratch?
Communal life, and bush country existence, are not glamorous. As the winter approaches, things get ickier all the time. When you read a story like DC, you are happy to be able to put the book down, and move on with your own life.
PG is connected to an *intentional community* in Tennessee. This IC has been in place for forty years, with many ups and downs. The nuts and bolts reality of keeping the water line unclogged is not noticed by many of the people who come to gatherings. When PG first went to the IC, there was no water line. You took a bucket to the spring. Someone had to build that line.
One job PG has taken on is the parking. This is where the muggle world interfaces with the magic kingdom, and sometimes the gears need grease. Every afternoon, more cars come in. The parking lot is two ridges over. No, you cannot leave your car here just for tonight. Whose car is that blocking the driveway? While the fantasy flows at the bottom of the hill, somebody has to find a way to stash all the vehicles. Not to mention building roads, and shipping gasoline.
Drop City is a lot more fun to read than it was to live. Fiction is supposed to provide an escape, before you go back to your life of quiet desperation. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress.