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Mister Care Wack Dreams About Girls

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New York Bathing Beauties Circa 1960

I am enjoying a collection of the miscellaneous writings by Jack Kerouac during his 63 days atop Desolation Peak in Washington State’s Northern Cascades. I have particularly enjoyed the chapters he wrote for a projected (but never completed) novel called Ozone Park in the “Duluoz Legend” series of slightly fictionalized autobiography. Here is a quote from a deleted chapter from a work that Kerouac (called Mister Care Wack by a hobo friend named Slim) abandoned.

O Kerouac, you poor fool, wandering the streets of night in search of romance in the golden nothingness of existence! Foolish as men are, they’re never more foolish than when they’re 21 years old and actually think that they do exist to be loved somehow either by a personal God who bends over them like a Guardian Angel with those wings of a loving destiny (mayhap I still believe that) or by a woman and women He sends to soul-soothe their sad predestined hugeness of being (“I am Jack Kerouac, there’s something about me that never happened before, she will notice it”) and so they sit at the windows of night smoking Frank Sinatra cigarettes, vain as veritable d’Annunzios, beautiful as the sea, mistaken as lost angels, lovable as God, misunderstood as secret saints, yearny as young girls, masculine as rocks and immovable as self-faith. And this is the reason why they eventually do get loved, but not for the reason they imagine to be foremost, their melancholy which they take to be the penalty is really the reward and is gained. A woman sees a man wrapped in self-torture, and when he smiles there’s already no need for smiles and come-ons.

Thoughts of a lonely young man stuck on a mountaintop.

On Desolation Peak

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The Fire Watch Tower Atop Desolation Peak

In the summer of 1956, when I was 11 years old, Jack Kerouac spent 63 days manning a fire watch tower in Washington’s North Cascades, atop Desolation Peak. On the Road, which was to be the main source of his fame, followed by The Dharma Bums, were not yet published. The recently published Desolation Peak is a collection of Kerouac’s many writing projects—many of them fragmentary—while he scanned the horizon for fires during those 63 days.

Jack was desperately poor having spent all his money to get to Washington from Mill Valley. He began his job as a fire watcher with a total of 2¢.

This year I have become entranced by Kerouac. Like most of the members of my generation, I read On the Road while I was still in high school, and then stopped there. I have become newly fascinated by his work and am resolved to read all his work that I can find. That assumes I will live long enough, as Jack was a busy boy.

Below is a selection of what Kerouac called his “Desolation Pops.” In form, they resemble traditional Japanese haiku, but they do not adhere to the genre strict rules concerning the number of syllables per line. They’re still interesting. After all, English is a very different language than Japanese.

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)

(7)
A stump with sawdust
     —a place
To meditate

(11)
The clouds assume
     as I assume,
Faces of hermits

(24)
There’s nothing there
     because
I don’t care

(36)
Poor gentle flesh—
     there is
No answer

(42)
Wednesday blah
     blah blah—
My mind hurts

(55)
Rig rig rig—
     that’s the rat
On the roof

(59)
I called Hanshan            | A Zen Buddhist recluse
     in the fog—
Silence, it said

(60)
I called—Dipankara        | One of the Buddhas of the past
     instructed me
By saying nothing

(70)
Aurora borealis
     over Mount Hozumeen—
The world is eternal