Staggeringly Beat

Arthur Plotnik

Photo by Arthur Plotnik

Early in my junior year at Albany (NY) State Teachers College, I succumbed to an intoxication that would lead to expulsion—a resounding one—and an abrupt turn in my destiny. It wasn’t booze, though I’d been quaffing my share of Albany’s wretched Hedrick brew in the student haunts. Nor were drugs to blame, the occasional all-nighter “benny” or a shared joint being our substance-abuse of the day.
          You might say it had to do with language and literature, since in the fall I’d dropped my math major and entered an English honors program, going woozy on James Joyce’s Ulysses. But the dooming inebriation sprang from another novel, a newly published one that struck me like Balkan vodka and would soon work its spell on an entire generation. I had drunk of On the Road, the demon narrative concocted by one Jack Kerouac and published in 1957.
          Most students at the college—a notably pious “normal school” preparing high school educators—steered clear of moral hazards; only a handful of us sought the dark underbelly of contemporary arts. Among that handful was a Dionysian rogue, who, now in his advanced years and reportedly going blind, needn’t be outed here for the bully and petty criminal he was at his worst. (At his later best, he became a genre novelist with a cult following.) We’ll call him Dion, and at his finest back then he was a reckless, charismatic figure, large and strong-boned, stylish in an Elvis-Presleyan way, with high collar and big pompadour. I viewed him also as Joycean type, a rakish Blazes Boylan; he preferred Hemingway-esque, often quoting that author’s lean passages or honoring Hemingway’s boxing mania by smacking a barroom stranger who looked at him too long. He divided the world into three qualities, “fine,” “foul,” and “so foul it’s fine,” and would issue stentorian-voiced judgments as he went along.
          Dion was nineteen, a sophomore from a scruffy factory town. I was twenty, from a motley suburb of New York City, a conscientious student but out to impress the world as a nonconformist—and wholly impressionable. We’d occupied the same dormitory my sophomore year and had clicked, not only as would-be writers, but because I was drawn to his roguishness and the admiration flattered him.
          A year later I was living in a basement apartment, he in a rented room. We both sported short beards, unlike most of the male undergrads in their white bucks and cardigans. His drinking and general “loutishness,” as he called it, had jeopardized his tenure as a student, whereas I’d become a school-newspaper columnist and literary magazine editor.
          But he owned a car. Even before On the Road had its way with us, Dion had become my enabler in tipsy runs through Albany’s notorious “Gut.” There, in the city’s lower depths near the Hudson River, we mingled with people of the night in jukebox bars and jazz joints, staggering out of them to greet street walkers with knowing (though I knew nothing) winks. This, I believed, was life on the wild side, but it was Jack Kerouac who framed that side for us and gave it a name.
          Driven by such works as Alan Ginsberg’s poem “Howl,” the rebellious, free-spirited cry that would become the Beat movement was already ringing throughout the big-city literary communities. It had been muted on our campus, but Dion and I heard its Siren call the week each of us got hold of the Kerouac novel—I don’t remember just how—and binged through it in about the same brief time. I recall that after finishing my copy in a near delirium, I raced over to Dion’s place channeling Dean Moriarty, the novel’s manic, restless, “overexcited nut.” I wore a tattered, grungy T-shirt and, à la Moriarty, wrapped a handkerchief around a thumb as if it were infected. At the door I issued a Moriarty-ish call, something like, “Open door, man! Hurry, man! Can’t talk! We know time! Open! Open!” And Dion responded, “Open soon, man! Wait! Almost! Making preparations, man!” Words to that effect.
          The door opened and the two book-drunk inebriates—each in T-shirt, jerking a hanky-wrapped thumb skyward, rubbing belly and rocking on heels—observed each other with goofy snorts and thematic cries of “Let’s go!”

          But how, you might ask, am I able to reconstruct such ancient history at an age when remembering my mobile number is a cause for celebration? My answer lies just ahead, but let me say that only recently were those long-ago, besotted moments stirred up. It happened in mid-2017 when I came face to face with Kerouac’s original typed draft of On the Road.
          I hadn’t owned the book for decades and had barely thought about it over those years. But now an original draft manuscript was on loan to the new American Writers Museum in Chicago, where I live. I’d been meaning to check out the museum and finally, downtown on other business, made my way there. I wandered through the main exhibits in the larger halls, then walked into a darkened, intimate, special-exhibits room. There, enshrined in an illuminated case, was the manuscript that Kerouac had famously typed on a continuous, 120-foot scroll of taped-together sheets—banged out in an unstoppable fever, as the legend went.
          Only a few pages were unfurled, and their passages seemed to lack the knockout punch they might have delivered to a 1950s youth; but the yellowed, tattered paper with its single-spacing, cross-outs and insertions still possessed a talismanic quality, sweeping me back spellbound to its time and churning up the old mojo of Kerouac’s alternating exultation and bluesy anomie. One group of lines described a wild ride through Nebraska on a flatbed truck, young men hooting, drinking, pissing over the side, mixing it up with other riders from far-flung states. . . . we came to a town, slowed down, and Montana Slim said, “Ah, pisscall,” but the Minnesotans didn’t stop and went right on through. . . .
          Seeing the script and the exhibit’s captions got me thinking vaguely of the days just following that first binge, when Dion and I couldn’t stop doing the Moriarty bits. But those days were sixty years ago. What enabled me to peek through the shrouds was this: I had made a record of sorts.
          Over the months of my intoxication, expulsion, and sobering I had shaped the incidents into a draft novel—overblown fiction to be sure, but based on notes, clippings, and real characters and events. Later, as it turned out, that novel would be my ticket to the Iowa Writers Workshop and a lifelong inebriety with words.

          Soon after seeing the museum’s On the Road typescript, I unearthed my own manuscript from its basement tomb and paged through its onionskin sheets. Even as I cringed over the novel’s derivative style, heavy-handed symbolism and juvenile affectations, I found myself recalling events that had inspired certain invented scenes—as much as one can trust “true” memories cued by their fictional variations. Yet I do remember quite clearly—can visualize—our attempt to hit the road à la Kerouac and Moriarty while still liquored-up from that first imbibition.
          In my fiction manuscript (never submitted for publication) I wrote that we stayed up all night, gathered the women we’d been seeing, and set out from Albany before dawn, Dion having decreed that west was the only “fine” direction and that we would drive until reaching the first big city. “Maybe it’s Chicago or Denver or L.A. Let’s go!”
          Part of that narrative rings true to fact. I recall leaving in the darkness of early morning and heading west. Dion did take along the woman he’d been treating horribly—a student who sang jazz and “dug” stuff and was in his thrall—but I remember being in the back seat, not with the troubled girl I was seeing then, but with another one of Dion’s admirers, a nice kid, a guy he’d dubbed Jay Jewish. To lift our spirits along the dull, foggy highway, Dion and I yawped the still-exhilarating mantras of On the Road—pretty much as my novel describes us doing:
          [Aaron (my character)]: “. . . digging scenery—contemplating life—can’t talk.”
          [Dion’s character]: ” Would now tell you about beat . . . feeling the beat, the swinging beat of life. Must keep moving and changing, doing new things, digging new kicks . . . . Must get high on booze and pod. Must dig jazz. Must dig appropriate knowledges, like Zen. . . .”
          [Aaron]: “And must know time, . . . .”
          [Dion]: “Yes . . . knowing that time is now and everything is now and not sweating what is then and when.”
          If you’re squirming to get out of the car, try to remember your own drunken infatuation with an author, a movement, a sudden gust of liberation. But no need; in both the novel and reality the trip ended long before Chicago or L.A.
          After about two-and-a-half hours on the highway, we were losing our enthusiasm, and I, at least, felt the tug of such practical matters as my education. We had traveled 140 miles to the then-dreary city of Binghamton, especially dreary through tired eyes on a dirty gray morning—”oatmeal air,” as I described it.
          In the novel Dion’s character says, “We’ll stop for some coffee and see what’s happening.” But “nothing was happening,” as I wrote. “The streets were deserted. Only dark, uninteresting shops, closed as if forever.” Which is just what I remember, along with stopping for the coffee in a diner and heading back to Albany weary and morose.
          Something ugly happened on that return. As we drove toward Albany, our dejection seemed to thicken like fog. We all clearly felt it, but Dion went into one of his dangerous surly moods. His girlfriend said something under her breath. I can’t remember what; perhaps that the whole trip was a “drag,” a word I remember she loved to throw around. As she muttered this or whatever complaint it was, Dion swung an arm from the steering wheel across the front seat and landed a backhanded smack on her face. Her nose took the brunt of it and began to bleed. All the while Dion kept his gaze straight ahead.
          In the backseat Jay and I sat shocked, silent, neither of us daring a word. In my gentle upbringing I’d never witnessed such violence to a woman, and I believe it was the same with Jay. I stared out the window at farmland stretching to the horizon, a heaviness growing in my throat as if I had been struck myself. I had no idea what I would say or do when we got back. But the trip had truly become “a drag.” The moment felt like a miserable hangover.
          I didn’t realize it then, but this episode was the beginning of the end of my friendship with Dion. It took years more for our relationship to fully unravel–he would pop up now and again in my life like some hobgoblin set on mischief or worse. As for the woman he slapped, the last I heard she’d become the star of a rifle-range sports group in upstate New York, a sharpshooter, one hopes, never to be messed with.

          A break in classes came at a good interval for me. I visited my family and hung out a few days with my best hometown friend, Bill A., who was living in Greenwich Village and working there in a hip paperback-book store. Brilliant, restless, he had dropped out of Bard College to find his way. He had done the real Beat trip, driving across the country and checking out the West Coast scene. He was mad for gonzo literature, but his view on the Beat movement had evolved well beyond mine. In the Village he was surrounded by faddish, would-be Kerouacs and Moriartys, yapping the yap, mistreating their “chicks,” conforming to the stereotype already appropriated by Madison Avenue. The very term “Beatnik” was becoming farcical, on a par with “noodnik.” He thought it silly to pin the Beat label on one’s own nonconformity.

          In spite of Bill’s view, once I got back to Albany and my smaller world I still played the Beat card for all it was worth. Our campus, too, was feeling the movement’s ripples, and those who embraced the subculture came off as cool and romantic to some and degenerate to others—and who cared about those squares?
          As the weeks went by I remained under the sway of On the Road—the fantasy of unshackling, going AWOL, searching for myself as even my non-Beat friend Bill had done. But my habits as a high-achiever kept me in place, so that I might well have progressed to my senior year, graduated from the teachers college, become a respected educator in the English arts. But I made a mistake common to amateur tipplers: I tried mixing two potent intoxicants.
          One was Beat rebelliousness, still in my system; the other, the linguistic magic of James Joyce. I’d become re-intoxicated with his genius while writing a paper on Ulysses.
          The result was disastrous. As editor of the school literary magazine I had an opportunity to publish a story of my own and was grubbing for an idea that would display both Joycean brilliance and Beat recklessness. Light bulbs flashed when I read the “Oxen of the Sun” episode of Ulysses, in which scenes surrounding a childbirth were narrated in styles representing a gestation of the English language in chronological order. The learned Joyce tossed off renditions of Latinate, Anglo-Saxon, medieval and Elizabethan prose, parodies of Daniel DeFoe, Addison and Steele, and more. Whereas I scraped the bottom of my “uncreated consciousness” (to borrow a Joycean term) and came up with a rapist’s confession regressing from inflated English to near-gibberish as the narrator degenerates into a pile of turds in a toilet bowl. It was called, appropriately, “Degeneration.” Even the hippest and most Beat of the magazine staff advised me not to publish it. Its greatest champion, as you might guess, was Dion, who decreed it “so foul it’s fine!” His literary enthusiasms still bore weight with me–or at least the weight I needed in this instance—though his days of influence were numbered. Shortly after that judgment he was expelled for stealing a cigarette machine with the help of some oversized cronies from his home town.
          I went ahead and published the story in our Spring 1958 issue. I was suspended a few weeks after it came out and expelled during the summer.
          The details are history, not just as fiction in my novel but documented by the magazine itself (Primer), various records, contemporary notes, and the city newspaper trumpeting my suspension, reinstatement, and ultimate expulsion in a series of articles, editorials, and letters addressing free speech versus community standards. I didn’t come out well. Most of those interviewed or quoted considered my story too sordid to have had anything to do with freedom of expression in a campus setting.
          In one of these articles* I was portrayed (and pictured) as a “thin, pale young man whose round-the-mouth beard and haunted look are reminiscent of D. H. Lawrence.” Earlier I might have taken pleasure in this depiction, but by the time the article appeared I’d been chastened and humiliated. I’d brought shame to my parents. I despised the story I had written, every word of it, couldn’t imagine what had possessed me to write the disgusting thing much less degrade my magazine and myself by publishing it.
          I must have been drunk.

Photo by Charles Denning

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^* “SCT Student Barred; Writing Stirred Row.” (Albany, NY) Knickerbocker News, Sept. 8, 1958.