As Kerouac later described it, the letter was “a work of literary genius. Neal, he was just telling me what happened one time in Denver, and he had every detail. It was just like Dostoevsky. And I realized that’s the way to tell a story—just tell it!” That 1950 letter—at least the 5,100-word portion that remains—is included in Cassady’s Collected Letters, 1944-1967 (Penguin), as are more than 200 other letters written to Kerouac, Ginsberg, John Clellon Holmes and others, including a large selection of letters to Cassady’s second wife, Carolyn.
I am in Paris, it’s 7:00 a.m. and I’m getting ready to plunge into the metro, where it is dirty and damp. It is cold, we are in February. The train is filled with lonely figures, a sleeping desert of men and women preoccupied and silent. Where are the beautiful phrases and the beautiful women?
We don’t know why the budgie did it. He must have been unhappy. It can’t have been easy for him—pecking the bell, hanging about on the pole, staring at the free birds outside the window, the robins, the gulls. Then every night the cage covered with a smelly dish towel. We wonder now whether he was lonely for his own kind.
In 1952, Princess Elizabeth and her husband Prince Philip visited Kenya, then a British colony, and stayed for a night at Treetops, a tiny, rustic structure in the branches of a fig tree, where guests could watch the wild animals that came to drink at an adjacent waterhole. During the night, Elizabeth’s father, King George vi, died, so when she clambered down out of the tree in the morning she was the Queen of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (and, of course, Canada).
This story begins with a young woman named Anne Marie, who turned nineteen the day her New York uncle rolled into Kamloops on the Harley-Davidson and pulled up at the espresso joint where Anne Marie and her boyfriend were drinking iced cappuccinos on the patio.
Before I opened for Joyce Carol Oates at her reading at Harbourfront in Toronto, we had dinner: Oates and her husband, Raymond Smith; the organizer, Greg Gatenby; and me. We sat at a table by a west-facing wall of glass in a restaurant on Queen’s Quay. Evening sunlight suffused the room, which had a view (I am trying to remember—this was in May of 2000) of a pier, a swath of water, a very wide parking lot or series of lots and, across that expanse, the building where we would be reading.
In Santa Maria, California, the Best Value Inn on East Main was run by a woman with pink hair named Michelle and her boyfriend, whose name I forget, who always wore a Jack Daniels T-shirt and a baseball cap turned backwards. A cat named Dusty lived in the lobby and often sat on the counter next to the shrivelled apples offered to guests for breakfast. The room smelled like stale smoke.
Ten thousand bombs had fallen and I was waiting for death to come and scoop its daily share from a bowl of limbs and blood. I walked down the street under the falling bombs. The streets were empty. I walked above humans hidden in shelters like colonies of rats beneath the soil. I walked past photos of dead young men posted on wooden electric poles, on entrances of buildings, framed in little shrines.
Emily’s mother had unusually large eyes that bulged slightly and often turned red, and she stared at people in restaurants and stores. Sometimes Emily’s mother commented on these people’s conversations, or laughed at their jokes, as if she were part of their group. When they turned and gave Emily’s mother a look to remind her that she was not part of the group, Emily’s throat would tighten and she would have to pinch her arm hard to keep from hitting her mother.
