Jack Kerouac And Me
By 
This year is the 100th anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s birth. I’ve never liked his books, but he and others provided a spark of light for teenage me in what seemed to be a dull world.
I didn’t fit into the predominant narrative of the 1950s, in which I was to expect a career as a housewife, maybe becoming a teacher or nurse if I was determined to work outside the home. But why do that when home and pleasing a husband was plenty?
One of my ambitions was to grind my own telescope. I lived in the suburbs of New York City, and the American Museum of Natural History offered telescope grinding workshops. It was, though, more expensive than my parents could afford, and the weekly sessions, with the commute, probably more than I had time for.
But New York University offered an alternative, a Junior Astronomy Club. I recall it met once a month, on Friday nights. I took the bus and subway into the city with a friend and stayed overnight at her house, which was more convenient to the bus routes.
New York University is located in Greenwich Village, which was then the center of the Beat movement on the East Coast. Coffee and craft shops abounded. I still have a necklace that I bought there. I saved up my money for a custom-made pair of sandals. We went to the coffee shops after the JAC meetings. It was thrilling, another world that said I didn’t have to be entrapped by a guidance counselor’s lack of vision.
My parents supported my ambitions, but the external world, mainly my high school, had no room for the directions I wanted to go. The Beats were breaking an alternative path – theirs was not mine either, but the fact that it was different gave me breathing room and hope.
I read Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex,” and I intuited that Kerouac and his buddies were not my ideal. But they wrote and spoke of things outside the limits presented to me. I suspect that their travels helped me to say yes to future moves far from home.
This article reminded me of those times. This in particular resonated.
Yet Jack’s original vision was wildly hopeful. With a “vanguard of fed-up Black beboppers,” he could imagine the Beat Generation’s forming a great procession that would lead the world “out from under the shadow of the atomic bomb” into a future of joy and “apocalyptic love,” as he explained in a letter to his skeptical acquaintance Alan Harrington in December 1948.
It gets complicated from there. Kerouac became disillusioned, and I started to wonder why we nonconformists had all settled on wearing black tights as a symbol of our nonconformity. Freed from a future I didn’t want, I began to think about what I did want.
As other young people realized those freedoms, things looked good for a while – the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and what seemed like the kind of opening up of society that the Beats had anticipated. And then it went bad with Vietnam and the hippies.
So happy birthday, Jack! You were part of my journey, and I’ll always appreciate that.