On the Road Like Guys

by Karen Moller

When I mentioned Kerouac’s book On the Road to my girl­friend Suzan in 1960, she quoted several passages with a sly look at boyfriend Robin. “I’d just love to be doing what I want, like guys. You know, answering to no one. Being a guy, that’s real freedom.”

And so, it went until one spring day in the coffee shop, I asked, “Why can’t we be guys?

“Yeah,” she said. “Let’s hitchhike to San Francisco.” Once the idea was voiced, there was no stopping us; the next morn­ing we hit the road. In true Kerouac spirit, we should have driven those one thousand, five hundred miles in an old jalopy, but neither of us had a car or knew how to drive.

I didn’t bother to tell my parents about our trip. Leaving home had been a compromise; I could go to art school, but Dad would not pay. It wasn’t just that he was tight-fisted; he had the money to help me, but for his generation, a woman’s place was not only in the home, but in the wrong. Education for a girl was a risk; I might get above my female station. Com­pared to that, he would probably have thought hitchhiking across countries insignificant. Hitchhiking might sound roman­tic, but the problems started as soon as Suzan and I were dropped off at the nearest US border, two hundred miles south of Calgary. “Hey,” Suzan said as we stood in the street thinking how we were going to get across without a passport. “Maybe they’ll put us in prison.”

“We’ll take a bus,” I said, worried that she was going to quit on me. Like so many schemes hatched out of desperation, it seemed like a good idea; even Suzan was pleased with it. We bought tickets for the nearest US town, but when the bus got to the border, the plan started to unravel. At first, I was puz­zled by the way the customs inspector gave Suzan funny looks, until I took a good look at our fellow passengers. Beatnik clothes would not raise an eyebrow today, but in 1959, our black art school existentialist outfits and black stockings, com­plete with long hair and pale lipstick made us stand out like space aliens taking a holiday on Planet Earth. Oh, God! He probably thinks Suzan’s off to Hollywood to be a Juliette Greco look-a-like; the famous 1950s Saint Germain singer and Exis­tentialist. The inspector was not so interested in me: just a kid, he was probably thinking. Nevertheless, he kicked us both off the bus in the middle of nowhere, with only a kind of shack offering snacks and coffee.

“So much for your ideas,” Suzan said dismissively.

“Listen, I know the next border crossing. It’s near my hometown, two hundred miles west.” She looked very reluc­tant until I asked, “Where is your Kerouac spirit?” No sooner had I spoken than a red station wagon with three unreliable-looking guys in baseball caps stopped nearby. “Are you going anywhere near Kamloops?” I asked hopefully.

“You wanta go there?” asked the driver, a sweaty, florid faced kid with some serious acne scars. “We ain’t doing nothin’. Get in.” As soon as we got in, Suzan started complain­ing and giving them a run-down of our troubles.

“You wanna cross the border?” the driver asked, giving a wink to the others. “Me and the guys will run you across the back hills. C’mon, it’ll be fun.” I was getting scared. Suzan was attracting too much attention from the wrong sort of guys.

“Thanks,” I said, “but my dad’s the chief of police in Kam­loops, so if you’ll just drop us there, I’m sure he’ll take us across.” I saw them glance at one another and back at Suzan. For once, she knew enough to keep her mouth shut.

In Kamloops, we belted down to the Greyhound Bus café, where I dragged Suzan into the ladies’ toilet and rummaged through her bag. “You have got to look like a girl off to visit her aunt across the border.” It wasn’t easy to convince her to change her style. She particularly hated removing her black eye make-up and tying a scarf over her beautiful hair.                              

This time we crossed the border without a problem, but Suzan having bought into her role wholeheartedly she couldn’t stop living it. For an hour in the bus, she gave the man next to her glimpses of her imaginary, strait-laced aunt while I tried not to laugh. “Oh, I’ve never hitchhiked,” she exclaimed as she leaned into the man’s face—her special technique, as she called it, to persuade someone she was telling the absolute whole truth. “Auntie Pru wouldn’t approve!”

On the outskirts of Spokane, Washington, two boys driv­ing down to Portland, Oregon, on the Pacific coast, picked us up. Initially they wanted to take us home to meet their mom, and Suzan, hoping for a free bed for the night, wanted to take them up on it. “No way!” I told her emphatically. The way our luck was going, I suspected we were likely to get more than we bargained for.

Disappointed by my attitude and perhaps to get even, the boys dropped us off near the Portland docks, a seedy, rundown section of town. At a hotdog stand, where we got something to eat, the vendor directed us to a shabby hotel. To cut the expenses Suzan insisted I take a single room while she climbed the fire escape and crept through the window. On that cold, damp night, Suzan, high up on the staircase had the look of a blue angel hovering over the area. This image apparently didn’t detract one wino, who called up from the alley, “Wanna make a quick fiver?” We didn’t know it then, but we had stumbled into the red-light district.

In the clear light of morning, Skid Row looked even more sinister. Shabby men lounged on street corners, and broken bottles littered the sidewalk. At breakfast, in a small café, a bearded man sat down next to us and began talking to Suzan about Jesus and the second coming and whether or not she was ‘prepared’. Suzan nodded and agreed with his religious rant­ing, only telling me later she’d been counting on him paying for her bacon and eggs. Separating her from her would-be mentor became quite an ordeal as he was convinced that she had been converted to his faith and he wanted to take her off to his church, whatever that might be.

Two trusty policemen put us on the right highway. About six in the morning a couple of days later, we rocketed into San Francisco. The driver, a young boy about our age, refused to let us off in the run-down area of North Beach. He insisted, “It is full of beatniks and far too dangerous.”  Such was the power of a few rebel poets and writers to inspire fear.

The April fog hung in ragged streamers above the Bay area as we walked the final mile to North Beach. The first thing I noticed was how the beatniks were dressed. The original beat­nik look adopted by Kerouac’s generation in the fifties was from the young Marlon Brando, the motorcycle-riding rebel in the film, The Wild One.

Brando wore a tee shirt and jeans, signaling his desire to be affiliated with the working class. His leather bomber jacket connoted the heroic derring-do of the World War II fighter pilot. By 1959, the look had evolved into something more self-consciously ‘artistic’ with beards, French berets, and dark sun­glasses (a nod to the black jazz musicians).

  In Canada, Suzan and I had adopted that art school look: long hair, black stockings, and blackened eyes, not in imitation of the beatniks – we hardly knew what they looked like – but in imitation of the arty French Existentialists that hung out in Sainte-Germain-des-Prés.

We rented a room in a reasonable hotel in North Beach, but when the owner saw us hanging out with those ‘good-for-nothing beatniks’ she decided we were undesirable guests.  There was nothing for us to do but shrug, pack up our posses­sions and leave. “I didn’t like that place anyway,” Suzan said, puffing under the weight of her bag. “You know what that woman’s problem is? She’s mixed up. She thinks, like the straight world, that nonconformity is one bundle: intellectu­als, painters, dropouts, sex perverts and dope fiends.”

I nodded. “Our freedom scares her. Europeans fled to America to be free. Now we’ve got to go to Europe to be free.”

Suzan nodded enthusiastically. “Right, Europeans have seen it all. I bet we could dress like we do, hang out in cafés discussing heavy stuff all day and nobody would blink.”

Now the closest Suzan ever came to Europe was watching old French movies, but she was right; Europeans do tend to accept rebels, loners, and eccentrics as a part of their society.

We sat dejectedly sipping coffee until a young journalist friend mentioned he had a room to rent on the roof of his building. The room, as it turned out, was just big enough to hold a double bed, but the location, perched like a white seagull on the slopes of Telegraph Hill, had spectacular pan­oramic views of the city. The whole building was enveloped in the salty smell of the sea and the sharp tang of sourdough bread floated up from the bakery below our window. We were enchanted and managed to ignore the owner’s too-friendly impromptu visits and his constant suggestion that we take our showers in his apartment.

The San Francisco press was quick to denigrate the Beat movement as a resident phenomenon and treated the Beat writers, poets, and artists as purveyors of childish nonsense. In that percolating area of misfits and rebels, the City Lights bookshop was the epicenter of the Underground, a treasure chest of information, new publications, and small-press releases as well as announcements of poetry readings and jazz concerts. Its treasures mesmerized me, as did the witty and poetic owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the éminence grise of the local Beat scene. Aware of my own impatience for talk, for joy, and hopefully enlightenment, I sat among those shelves of books, in that open, lively atmosphere, listening to the intel­lectual ponderings of visiting authors and poets.

I puzzled my way through the walls of novels and poetry including Ferlinghetti’s own book, Pictures of the Gone Wind, a collection of oddly whimsical and surreal poems, similar to poetic telegrams. Ferlinghetti, a tall, gangling figure, moved about the shop, his rolling walk betraying his nautical years. One day, Ferlinghetti leaned across the counter and focused his eyes in a way that implied his words were meant just for me. In a rich and commanding baritone, he said, “Time carries us for­ward by the momentum of events, which are a sort of annota­tion of our unconscious feeling.” Even if I didn’t know what to think, I was impressed. When he turned his back, I slipped my sketchbook out from my voluminous shoulder bag and care­fully wrote down his words.

Rather than the usual meaning given to Beat, ‘Beaten down by society’, the writer Herb Caen, coined the word ‘beatnik’, from ‘beatitude’ and ‘beatific’, to describe those bestowing or possessing bliss. From the moment the move­ment received its name it was unstoppable. Full of awe and ide­alism, Suzan and I also felt unstoppable. She was in a phase of trying to be the white Billie Holliday. Billie was a beatnik icon, and her music haunted almost every corner of the neighbor­hood. Often her achingly beautiful voice was the first sound I heard in the Coexistence Bagel Shop, which even empty, as it often was in the morning, had a special magic. One night someone read Howl to jazz accompaniment, improvising freely. Halfway through, we all began to chant the text in uni­son, like a midnight mass. In the absence of the better-known beatnik heroes, (most were in New York and Paris) the small, dark, and shamanic Bob Kaufman was the funneling force in the local beatnik scene. The atmosphere would intensify when­ever he showed up at the Bagel Shop. He could have read the Reader’s Digest and with his wit and funky monologues it probably would have been just as compelling. He seemed to get off on our enthusiasm, as if adrenaline were squirting into his veins, making him higher by the moment.

When he read, he would jump from one wobbly table to the next, teetering above us, as he shouted out the lines between deep breaths, swaying rhythmically and waving his arms. The whole effect created an awesome sense that time was shifting, running away with us. Often, just as he reached some critical passage, a policeman would pop his head around the door. Invariably no one moacved or took a breath until the head disappeared. Then Bob would start up again like a film that had momentarily jammed in the projector. I was very much in awe of Bob, the so-called Rimbaud of San Francisco, who, with his wife and Allen Ginsberg, had founded the review, Beatitude. He impressed me with his creation and madness, in particular by his stated aim that he was looking around in the gutter for soul. He also recited at the Coffee Gal­lery, a fishbowl of glass windows on all sides, open all hours. A resident group of lost souls filled the corners, sometimes for days, as if part of the furniture. Their empty, ghost-like eyes flickering about with vacant stares was enough to put me off drugs for life. Short plays were staged, poetry readings were accompanied by jazz, people danced and at times all those activities took place simultaneously. The creative abandon even extended to the way people spoke; they used words experi­mentally, just to see whether they could create a new meaning and when, as happened occasionally, the words actually did mean something, it thrilled and surprised us all.  

One day, I offered Kaufman a coffee. He hunched over it, cradling it in his hands, and apropos of nothing at all, said, “I’m a fountain of Negro, Jewish, and white mysteries trying to get out of my little blue man.” Then he wandered off, down the streets in his cast-off clothes, trailing a roll of poems that he was in the process of writing. I felt glad there was a place in that community of poets where it was okay to be different, to be rootless, to be a frail beatnik incarnate. I knew being a beat­nik was not just about eating bagels and discussing Nietzsche, but in my innocence, I thought this alternative culture might lead to women being treated with equal regard or at least as individuals, but that wasn’t even on the cards. It was not unusual to hear a beatnik say, “You chicks can’t ever be as clever as us. It’d take you a few hundred years,” or, “You ain’t gonna change the world, baby. It’s just the way things are.” At times they chanted almost like a mantra, “We are anti-con­formists. We have no rules,” yet unwritten rules existed, especially rules dictating the sexual behavior of beatnik chicks. I might have wanted to be free of the burden of remaining a virgin but beatniks trying to shackle women with the rule that they should be common, available property, was as threatening and confining as the sexual constraints of normal society. I often heard beatnik men proclaim their sexual generosity, stat­ing they were more than willing to ‘share their chick with a half-dozen guys’. In the same breath, they might even declare that women were no longer considered property, without the least perception that she might belong to herself. The message was clear. If a woman wanted to be accepted as a beatnik, she had to be willing to be fucked by anyone who wanted her. Whatever she chose, she was clearly fucked over. Worse yet, birth control was hard to come by, and male beatniks, happy to populate the world with replicas of themselves, had no inten­tion of fulfilling the generally accepted role of father.

My disillusion with this rebel society was growing as I slapped away the hands that tried to grope me in bars and cafés, shouting; “I am not your common property!” I refused their pseudo-intellectual pick-up lines: ‘You should flow with life,’ or ‘Get in touch with your sexual being’. I turned a deaf ear when they called me bourgeois, inhibited, or puritanical. It was clear to me that I would never be accepted or fit in with San Francisco’s ragbag of outcasts. I wasn’t joining, but I wasn’t leaving. I was still on my way to Europe, which would require a lot of ‘rabbit’, so I went job hunting. Fisherman’s Wharf seemed like a good place to start. Walt Disney must have inspired the builders as the area had been turned into some sort of comic strip. The kitsch Hawaiian restaurant where I applied for a job fit perfectly. It was dark, almost cave-like, lit by colored lights that sparkled off walls covered with nets and shells, Hawaiian music blared out non-stop and the food, very ethnic, or so I thought, was served with alcoholic fruit punches. In spite of being neither 21 nor a US citizen, I got the job. Each week I fed the boss another excuse as to why my papers had not arrived. Finally, a friend advised me to fake the right to vote. For some reason that right to vote pacified the situation for a few months and, thanks to generous tippers and free meals at the restaurant, I piled away money for my trip to Europe.