Re: Kerouac's house
john v. omlor (omlor@packet.net)
Fri, 29 May 1998 15:54:41 -0500
Hey all,
I've lived in St. Petersburg (sort of, actually on a small condo-island
just between St. Pete and St. Pete Beach) for the past fifteen years or so
and went to school in Tampa before that. I've known many people that hung
with Kerouac while he was here and just by coincidence have certainly had a
drink or two at several of the bars he used to frequent (his favorite --
The Wild Boar, near the University of South Florida in Tampa -- is no
longer there, but you can still chat with several older female faculty
members at USF who had to constantly rebuff his rather wild *and* boorish
advances). Of course, by the time he settled here to look after his mother
he was heavily into his binge-drinking, guilt-ridden, misanthropic state.
I've even given a reading or two of my own stuff at the Beaux Arts
coffeehouse, where he used to read his stuff with his more famous friends
long before I was around (and where, though realizing this was not quite
the same sort of thrill for me, Jim Morrison apparently read his Junior
College poetry).
In any case, I've always known exactly where Kerouac's house is (I even
have friends that live in a nearby neighborhood) and have made a point of
not bothering to go and see it -- for some of the reasons Tim and others
have mentioned and because of what I know about the history of the house
and the family squabbles over it and how little it has to do, for me, with
his work. This is not the same with all writers of course. I love
Hemingway's house in Key West and have always felt that it was filled with
the spirit of some of those books (besides, hanging there and playing with
the cats is a fun way to kill a Key West afternoon). And I am acquainted
with the lovely woman who has long managed the Keats house in London and
love going there and get much from my visits, as I do from the Freud house
nearby.
Some writer's houses mean more to me than others of course (I'm still
planning my trip to Prague). But Jack's house in a simple and sad
subdivision of my own little town never called to me the way his voice does
in *The Subterraneans* or *Visions of Cody*.
Speaking of such matters: there is a scene at the end of *Wild Man Blues*
(the new documentary about Woody Allen), where Woody has lunch with his
parents and you see how everyone, no matter how accomplished an artist they
are, has to go through the same things. At one point his mother scolds
him for quitting tap lessons as a boy... "You never stick with anything,"
she says... and his ninety-five year old father suggests, seriously, that
maybe he *would* have been better off becoming a druggist... that he might
have done better than he has "as an actor." Woody later calls it "the
lunch from Hell".
Even the most apparently extraordinary lives are, in so many ways, so normal.
Just a thought,
--John