Sunday Whatever:- Skid Row Wine an Essay by Dale Williams Barrigar

Every great writer, if they want to be a great writer, needs to be able to break it all down into the simplest thing.

For Shakespeare, it’s “To be, or…” and one, or a few, of the sonnets, as well as Juliet on her balcony.

For Cervantes, it’s Don Quixote, his horse Rocinante, and the windmill they think is a giant.

For Goethe, it’s Faust making a deal with the Devil.

For Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road (1957), it’s SKID ROW WINE.

The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison, Johnny Cash, Patti Smith, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, David Bowie, Kurt Cobain, and Eddie Vedder all consider/ed JK to be a primary influence not just on their life’s work, but on their lives themselves.

Jerry Garcia repeatedly said that if he’d never read Kerouac, he never would’ve done anything at all. (Jerry was also a massive fan of Kurt Vonnegut, born the same year as Kerouac, 1922.)

Lou Reed was profoundly influenced by Kerouac and later, in a very misunderstanding kind of way, started hurling bombs at him. Sometimes we need to kill our idols to be more like them.

Jack Kerouac retreated from the world because the world is what it is and he was what he was, which was a kind of innocent, a man whose mind was so pure that he was even ignorant, like Dostoevsky’s Idiot, in a million different ways. Ignorant, and a genius. Unhappy fate. And also the happiest fate I can possibly imagine.

The thirty-one-line pome (Jack called his poems “pomes,” after James Joyce) “Skid Row Wine” is Kerouac at his best, as is the Kerouac who appeared on the Steve Allen Show and read aloud from On the Road; see how utterly shy he is and how utterly brilliantly he can read his fiction aloud once he gets going; no one in the modern era can compete with him here, not even Bukowski. (The album Steve Allen and Jack made together is also brilliant.)

There are many negative things that can be said about Jack, such as that he sometimes shared the racial attitudes of his time (like every single other person alive at the time). But he also wrote so beautifully about Charlie Parker that it can be placed next to the Psalms of David without being shot down.

Or we could say that he made too many statements supporting the Viet Nam War; forgetting that he was always very ambivalent about war, that he refused to fight in World War Two because he was a pacifist (throwing down his rifle during basic training and running off the field, literally), and that he was supporting the war later because he thought it was supporting the USA, and freedom, against the likes of the next Stalin or Hitler.

And we can say that Jack never really made much of his fame after he achieved it.

He continued to live with his mother (because she was a best friend, even though they also argued and fought like hell all the time); he continued to watch a lot of TV (almost always with a book or a notebook, or both, in his hands); he continued to drink in the same ordinary bars with the same ordinary people; and he never started churning out new, lame versions of On the Road trying to capitalize, like a capitalist, on the very, very, very modest wealth he’d already achieved.

Instead, he just let it all slide.

And he remained who he already was and what he had already become, all on his own, before the fame and the fanfare.

We can throw stones at him for that.

Or we can learn from it.

Dale Williams Barrigar