Apart from writing and hitch-hiking, the only thing Jack Kerouac and I have in common is facing paternity suits when we were 26 years old and living in LA.
Downtown.
By skid row.
On the corner of Sixth and Main.
And we both reacted the same way: immediately moving to San Francisco and staying with friends, quickly wearing out our welcomes and then hightailing it south of the border to write. He took busses down to Mexico City to shoot dope and write poetry for a month, and I drove a ’69 VW van down to Nicaragua to try to become a journalist.
I only discovered this fairly recently, and it’s funny because I’d spent most of my life purposefully avoiding having anything to do with Jack Kerouac. I used to hitchhike a lot when I was young and since I wanted to be a writer, people always assumed I’d been inspired by Kerouac when actually I’d never read anything by him. Because he was constantly getting brought up, I made it a point to never read anything by him until some thirty years later when I was in grad school and finally broke down and took a Kerouac class. Apart from On the Road and The Subterraneans his writing didn’t really grab me. His biography on the other hand, was fascinating, as what first appeared to be fairly broad parallels became uncannily, even disturbingly, specific. Starting with our both being 26 when we were facing paternity and that we both lived in downtown LA, then both going to San Francisco to stay with friends, getting kicked out (as we reluctant fathers-to-be tend to be a somewhat whiny and self-indulgent lot…) before heading south of the border.
The final, most bizarre detail, that we were both living at Sixth and Main, I found by cross-checking timelines of his writing and his daughter’s birth. An autobiographical short story from the time called Piers of the Homeless Night mentioned returning to a hotel room on Main Street, and poring through a few more biographies, I finally found one that confirmed he’d been living in a hotel on Main Street, at Sixth (!) at the time and that while there his preferred drink had been bourbon and lemonade. Granted, Sixth and Main has four corners, and I mixed my bourbon with Coca-Cola, but still… weird, eh?
Sixth and Main in downtown LA is a hell of a place to contemplate fatherhood, and it came as no surprise to me that the first thing he did was get out. When I lived there in ’87 it was populated by mostly older and generally more insane alcoholics, and when Jack was there a quarter-century before I doubt it was much better. LA’s skid row has always been a living graveyard, and whether they’re still able or bothering to stand, or just lying on the sidewalks burbling and pissing themselves, there are broken men all around you 24/7. Being constantly reminded of alcohol and madness is one thing when you’re just slumming for adventure or looking to add an edge to your poetry, but when you’re trying to drink your way through real problems that shit gets old pretty quick. One thing about being surrounded by drunks and lunatics is that they never shut up - you can hear them shouting and crying throughout the day, and moaning and howling all night long - and it doesn’t take too long or too many drinks before all you can hear are the cries of absent fathers and abandoned sons.
While Jack was being sued by the wife he’d left in New York, I was being sued by my girlfriend’s brand-new very-best-friend-in-the-whole-wide-world, and with the benefit of hindsight, probably her occasional lover as well. Her interest in me was friendly but casual, with our intimacy restricted to a single weekend when she suddenly and inexplicably (at the time) found me utterly irresistible. To cut a long and fairly tacky story short, 1) Her relationship with my girlfriend was much more complex than I thought, 2) just because someone says they’re they’re on the pill doesn’t necessarily mean they are, and 3) if you really want to piss someone off, having a child with their significant other definitely works, although it turns out to be a very long-term solution to a relatively short-term problem. Anyway, however toxic or dysfunctional the relationship was behind Kerouac’s paternity, I assure you it couldn’t hold a candle up to the twenty-something psycho-sexual soap opera behind mine. I guess some of us are just lucky that way.
They say you can’t run away from your problems, but don’t believe them. Whenever I see one of those “Man Kills Wife and Kids” headlines I always think how much smarter it would’ve been for the guy to just hop on a bus or a plane instead. That way everyone stays alive and he’s on a beach somewhere instead of on this way to prison. While running away may not actually solve anything, it can definitely let you catch your breath and help put things into perspective. And sometimes if you run far enough, you can find yourself in a place so distant and strange that your problems don’t seem so important anymore, and what was overwhelming to the person who left may well be practically meaningless to the one that comes back.
You can (kind of) read about Kerouac’s voyage in the poem Mexico City Blues, and mine in these five diaries:
Part 1 - Mexico
Part 2 - Guatemala
Part 3 - Arms and the Van
Part 4 - Honduras & Nicaragua
Part 5 - Ana-Renee
Hell of a ride, actually: I hope you get a chance to read it, or hopefully see it on Netflix someday. It’d be a buddy film about a guy trying to cope with the death of a parent who meets with a guy trying to cope with the birth of a child, what happens to them on the way to Nicaragua and ends with the two of them helping a fugitive out of Guatemala. A social worker I’d begun an affair with wanted to ride with us to Mexico City, but first thoughtfully let us know that she was with the guerrillas fighting against the government, wanted by the military, and traveling with a forged passport and documents.
While riding with us probably wouldn’t reduce the risk of her getting caught, it would reduce the chances she’d be “disappeared” if she was. Also I had a personal connection to the U.S. Ambassador to Honduras that might make the difference between her life and death if worse came to worst. Of course traveling with a fugitive increased the risks for Peter and me substantially, and although we talked it over as if there was some kind of decision to be made, there really wasn’t: taking her with us was pretty much a foregone conclusion. Certainly I didn’t have any choice in the matter: the rules are crystal clear about that when it comes to sleeping with fugitives. But Peter, who hardly knew her, was a different story. I told him there was no shame in playing it safe and just going by bus, but he seemed to treat that as a non-option as well: the dictates of both chivalry and camaraderie demanded he go with us - one for all and all for one. But it was something more than that too: she was the embodiment of what each of us were pretending to be, the social justice warrior I wanted to be and the revolutionary of Peter’s fantasies. Plus she had us beat to all to hell in the desperado department too. We had to respect that.
Because it was real life and not the movies there were no gunfights, speedboat chases or shocking betrayals, nor at any point did any of us have to shoot down helicopters, disarm time bombs, or barely make it across any chasms just seconds before any ancient, rickety rope bridges failed… We were just three twenty-somethings going through about a half a dozen military checkpoints trying to play it cool while frightened to death. Not much of an action sequence I know, but scary enough at the time, and excruciating once we got to the border. While Peter and I more or less breezed through, it was another half hour before Ana-Renee made it through the Guatemalan side and almost another hour before we were all safely in Mexico and far enough past the last military and customs checkpoints to start breathing again.
The relief of getting across the border and that feeling of collective joy that comes with sharing a victory made for an intense spirit of camaraderie. Safely now in Mexico, rolling through mountains and jungles, drinking rum and Coke… sometimes talking, sometimes not. When we’d talk we’d tell stories from our pasts, probably the usual ones we’d tell other people. And when we didn’t we’d just stare off at the mountains, remembering or fantasizing the usual stories we tell ourselves. When the sun went down Ana-Renee lit a glass votive candle of La Virgen de Guadeloupe that filled the interior with warm, flickering light. Even though we were on bad roads with bad steering and shot brakes, I don’t think I’ve ever been in a vehicle that felt so safe.
I suppose part of the magic of the time was its preciousness - knowing that soon we’d all split up and go on to our separate lives and that this would just be a memory. But it would be a memory of an interlude in our lives where we were all young, brave and beautiful and nothing could touch us. I don’t know exactly what it was, or quite how to put it, but I’ve probably driven close to a million miles since then and nothing’s ever been quite like that drive from the border to Mexico City with Peter and Ana-Renee.
My last few days in Mexico City with Ana were beautiful too, in that soft, doomed way affairs on the road tend to be: all the romance of a love affair that’s just beginning along with the sadness of one that’s just about to end. That sounds good but it’s probably over-romanticizing things a bit. She and I were always much better friends than we were serious lovers, and to be honest most of our time in Mexico City was spent walking the streets or lying in bed comparing notes on our lives, so I’m afraid this is going to be one of those movies where everybody just talks at the end.
As I suspected, she was there to meet with her handlers, and was putting it off for as long as she could. Staying in Guatemala was getting to be too much and she didn’t want to do it anymore, which wasn’t hard to understand. Having practically shit myself just driving her to the border, I couldn’t even begin to imagine what it would be like to live like that every day.
The other thing was the revolution itself - that she no longer believed in it and had known for years they couldn’t possibly win. She still believed in their goals and forgave them their methods. She knew they’d taken advantage of her naiveté as a teenager but pointed out there wasn’t an army in the world that didn’t do that. But the sticking point was recruiting, which she could no longer bring herself to do. She’d begun to wonder if ultimately the real struggle wasn’t between the rich and the poor so much as between the old and the young - and that the world was run by people who’d long ago given up on their own dreams cultivating and profiting off the dreams of the ones who hadn’t. As an example she asked “When they publish your article - if they do - how much money will your magazine pay you?” The answer was about a hundred dollars, maybe a hundred and fifty, and that she did have a point.
The papers she was using, the proofs of property ownership, employment etc. were enough to get her a visa into Canada where she knew she could easily be granted asylum. The main thing that held her back was her mother, who she felt would be lost without her. She described her as a “simple person,” unlike her father who’d died about five years before. She said he was a hopeless drunk, but not the ugly, violent kind. She called him “a beautiful drinker,” who got drunk every night on aguardiente and wrote poetry and songs. Sometimes he was happy, sometimes not, but he never hurt them, and that in all her life she’d never heard of him hitting anyone or even raising a fist. I expected her to say he’d been killed by the army or the police since it seemed that people like that always are. But no - he’d just come home one night drunk, fell and hit his head on the doorstep, had a heart attack and died. She said she thought the heart attack came from simply not wanting to live anymore: not out of despair so much as never really belonging here to begin with. I understood what she meant but told her to never to say it around Peter, whose father’s suicide by shotgun was far less theoretical or poetic.
Like I said, we were mostly friends, and I must’ve suspected that to at least some extent sleeping with me had been a strategic decision on her part, but if she loved me at all I think it was because I was also a beautiful drinker: someone living out their fantasy before the walls closed in. When I walked her to the subway she still hadn’t decided what to do and I couldn’t help wondering if Marxist guerrilla was the kind of gig where quitting was even an option.
We kissed goodbye and I stood and watched her disappear into the underground, trying to memorize every detail the way you do when you know you’re never going to see someone again.
* * *
The thing about paternity is that it’s all-or-nothing: you’re either 100% the father or you’re 100% not. It’s a simple question, and the results are rarely if ever ambiguous. The problem, at least back then, was that it takes almost two years for those results to arrive, which is a long time to spend in the waiting room. So like a lot of expectant fathers, I drank to take the edge off.
When the results finally came back saying I was the father I wasn’t really surprised. I think I’d known it ever since the night I watched the stars slowly wheeling and glaring down at me - hell, I think I even knew it when it happened. The main rule of reluctant fatherhood is that you don’t become a part of your child’s life unless you know you’re going to be in it for the long haul. Much like being a caretaker for a parent, it’s one of those jobs where once you sign on you don’t get to quit. Once I reached that point I started visiting and became a father to my son. Maybe not the best father in the world, but not a bad one either: I was there, and I loved him. I even grew to love his mother over time.
Although he denied it, I’m sure Kerouac knew he was the father too, but he never owned up to it. And so long as you know you’ve got a kid out there growing up without you, the stars will always be angry, and you’ll always have a reason to drink. He saw his daughter once when she was 12, and drank himself to death at 49.
Peter and I have remained friends for the last thirty years. Ana Renee eventually made it to Toronto and became a Canadian citizen. The last I heard from her was a letter about 25 years ago.
The Sun made my article the front page feature and didn’t change a word in it except for the title, which they changed from “Roadblocks in Guatemala” to “On the Road in Guatemala.”
Naturally.