Bruce Wagner - The Empty Chair

Can I talk about my affair with Carolyn Cassady?

I know I’m skating around. Are you sorry you got yourself into this, Bruce? [laughs] I just can’t seem to approach it headlong. I suppose I could get right to it — the full catastrophe — I just don’t want to be rude and take too much of your time. But I promise I’ll get to it. Soon. First, let me tell you about this thing I had with Neal Cassady’s wife. It’s guaranteed to amuse. Then I’ll talk about… all the rest.

So there I was, falling for Kerouac head over heels — mind you, this wasn’t all that long ago! What can I say? I was a late-bloomer. The book that knocked me out, as I was telling you, was Big Sur. That novel’s actually become more of a draw for me to come back — here — than my Camaldolese hermit friends. When I make my pilgrimages, it’s to Jack’s spirit and the book that I come. To the beginner, I’d recommend Big Sur first … On the Road isn’t even on my shortlist! I know that sounds terrible. Did you know there are Madame Bovary haters? Mais oui. They’re of the opinion — people have beaucoup opinions out there! — that Flaubert loathed his own creations, from the Madame on down, and his contempt bleeds through and ruins the text. Corrupts his achievement. Another group considers Gatsby a novel that fails in its prose but triumphs in evoking a world and a time, a kind of ghost book that lingers like a scent made from flowers pressed between the lines , all fairy- and fingerprint dust. I’m in agreement! Oh, those F’d-up similes that fall so trippingly off the tongue! The glibness gets treacly once you’ve had your fill — which for me was around Page 2. Vomitous! I have a fitzsimile of my own, if you please: at his best, which is most often his worst (at least in Gatsby ), Fitzgerald is like a too-congenial whore, wearing too many perfect gossamer gowns. Take that, Mr. Jazz Age! And you heard it here! (I actually believe I’d have made a pretty good critic. I really do think about books all the time and have formed my opinions with great care. Eventually, I may try my hand at an essay or two. Wouldn’t it be marvelous to publish a monograph with the “Vanzen” imprint?) To do what Fitzgerald did is an impossible trick and I’d put On the Road in the same camp. Does it evoke the ineffable? Does it evoke lost youth? Does it evoke the sights and sounds, the promise and magic of a time, an era, a world on the brink, of something mysterious and noble, numinous and new ? Without question! Good Lord. Yes. Is it a wonderful novel? A resounding no! It’s an experience , not a novel. It’s a mess. Gatsby and On the Road are like owner manuals for products that can never be delivered. And yet, how beautiful! The spell they cast is diabolical, untouchable. The genius of it, to create a text, an illuminated text of words that somehow alchemize— atomize —into fragrance and music, that kick up the dust of the future and past, and the present too! Good Lord! Perfect mystery-tumbleweeds emitting the warm odor of nostalgia and the cold ardor of timeless, terrifying Silence… skeletons exposed to weather.

But enough about that.

I was telling you about my affair with the ancient widow of Neal Cassady aka Dean Moriarty, that square-jawed beefcake— Beat cake — bigamist fountainhead, automotive contortionist and cuckolded sex addict, that douche bag writer manqué who was Jack’s woman as well, his muse and creator. Jack’s man… who died on the wrong side of railroad earth’s tracks.

When I reached the end of Big Sur —“Sea: Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur,” the great heretical coda — when I finished reading that end-poem, awash in the Term Term Klerm Kerm Kurn Cow Kow Cash Cluck and Clock of it, oh what a staggering thing it is! — which, by the way, like wine and wafer, is no representation of Jack, but the very blood, body and brain of him, in those stanzas the man truly dug his own deathless, unintelligible, operatic, watery grave — when I got finis with Sur , I went straight to the Internet and found a website for the estate of Neal Cassady. And there it was… a real-time contact for Carolyn! I have no memory of the emotions that compelled me to send what I believed at the time to be a short, sweet, wryly seductive e-note. It was late, and I was actually here —at the hermitage — of course I was, on a star-tossed mercilessly typical Big Sur night. After firing off my communiqué, I went outside and stripped naked, delirious with joy, got my skin tasered by stellar wind while listening to the rapturous offstage massacre of waves being their usual demure, assassin selves — warriors unlike Arjuna, with never a moment of doubt.

Within an hour, I received a reply.

From her…

I was stunned out of my skin. Gob-smacked , as Carolyn would say, for she’d written back from England, where she made her home. ’Twas mid-morningtide in Blighty.

Now please keep in mind I had just finished that wonder of a book in which Carolyn is portrayed as “Evelyn” and I had a bit of a — no, I had a massive crush on the gal I came to know as the fag hag Iron Lady. So, I write back and she writes me and before you know it we are corresponding. Her emails sounded young, Bruce, young, smart and with it , and suddenly I get paranoid. As if maybe I’m unwittingly participating in some kind of Web thing someone wrote code for, you know, being duped by a promotional goof the publishers use to hawk new editions of The First Third or Off the Road (fag hag Iron Lady’s memoir) — half of me thinks I might be playing the fool for one of these newfangled interactive artificial intelligence ad campaigns getting written up in Wired. Remember too that in the initial throes of it, I was most likely drunk and had probably smoked a little, partaken of the chronic as my younger friends would say… plus , I’d just finished this glorious, glorious book and was so full of the Beats I was practically the fifth Beatle ! I was horny for them, and lo and behold there I am having a sudden chat-fest, basically flirting with Neal Cassady’s wife ! In my mind she’s not even his widow , all of them are still alive , and it’s all happening now —like something out of Philip K. Dick! But I’m still paranoidly thinking, you know, uhm, okay, if this isn’t some slick viral campaign then maybe someone hacked into the website, it’s a rogue program merely drone-responding to the pathetic battalion of geeks that have Roman candle crushes on “Carolyn Cassady”— who’s long dead. Of course! She’s dead! What was I thinking! I was swooning so hard, I hadn’t even bothered to check if she was still alive… all I had was a “contact” proving otherwise. I’d been “corresponding” with a rudimentary A.I. program that held up its end of the conversation with sad, schmucky groupies before eventually diarrhea-ing the humiliating contents all over the Web. Because how could it be possible that the real Carolyn Cassady, a wizened old woman, got it up for emailing— immediately responding —to strangers?

This went on for a month or so. (The Internet informed that Mrs. Cassady was alive and well.) I didn’t mean to imply there was anything sexual about it, of course there wasn’t, not that I didn’t feel sexual, Lord, I had a hard-on whenever I wrote her! Nope, nothing remotely immodest, in terms of content. I’m sure she sent the same incisive, vivacious emails to other fans but no one could take away from me what I considered to be fact: I was now, by definition — mine! — having a ménage à quatre with Neal, Carolyn and Jack. I’d have been the Ginsberg in the group. See, the miracle of Jack is that, from everything I know, from everything I intuit , he was a mess, and a not too friendly one. Kerouac was drawn to women but was so awkward around them, so deeply uncomfortable, so needy and nasty that he was a faggot by default. He was really kind of an alien, an extraterrestrial. The way he treated his poor daughter Jan! Shitting on her when she came to visit that first time — that only time? — she was just a kid! — disowning her to the end, can you imagine the pain of that young girl? Jesus, it’d have been more merciful if he’d killed her with his own hands. Both those boys — Jack Sundance and the Cassady Kid — had serious mommy issues. Ti Jean ’s trouble was that he always felt like he was cheating on his mother. Gabrielle was his enduring love, his true wife. And Neal, well, the minute he got a gal pregnant, the minute she became a mom , he’d have to marry her on the spot, even if he was already married to someone else! Gotta do right by Mom! R-e-s-p-e-c-t. (Find out what it means to me.) Neal liked pimping his women — wives — Moms! — to Jack (to an extent). And the only real way Jack got off was sleeping with women who were “taken.” That was the pathology. You don’t need to be a therapist to figure that one out. Incest ruled the day. I’ve always thought of Carolyn as the Mother Superior of the Beats… Mother Superior — that says it all, don’t it?