By trying to follow in his literary hero’s footsteps, Jarad Dewing learned that not all heroes are what they seem.
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A tractor trailer behind me blared its horn, urging me to move. I woke up and shifted my shoddy Audi into drive, inched forward a bit over crunching snow, and shifted back into park. A sudden blizzard had struck Sunday before I left. I had to pee, but I’d have to wait. I was only two hours away from my hometown, it had taken me eight hours to get this far south, and I’d almost died once already.
It was going to be a long night.
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You might’ve seen Mel Gibson in “Braveheart” and imagined yourself for a moment as William Wallace: the honorable and vengeful farmhand trying to protect his clan, his hills, his liberty.
Surely you know of Neo, from “The Matrix”? Loner extraordinaire, launched from obscurity into badass-dom? He knows kung fu because he can download it into his brain without exerting any effort whatsoever. Or maybe Wolverine, all snarling claws and snarky cigar-chewing, burdened by his berserk gift.
Rocky Balboa. Han Solo. James Bond. Tony Stark. Sherlock Holmes. Conan the Barbarian. Harry Potter, even.
Yeah, that guy. That guy we all somehow think we can be, can turn into, could’ve been if things had gone differently, could maybe still be if we got our wish, won the lottery, struck out on our own, had the guts, the nerve, the balls. That guy we grin at on the screen or on the page, gleaming eyes, clenched jaw, little boy dreams stuck in our throats.
These are the versions of us we wish we could be, writ larger than life. They are what we might aspire to, which is not necessarily a terrible goal, except that these men only exist in fiction.
They are a lie.
◊♦◊
Sunday night found my drummer, Chris, and I hunched over the inside of a pizza box, Sharpie in hand, scribbling a childlike map of the United States. A mostly-empty bottle of Jim Beam sat on the coffee table. We sat on the floor, excited and quite drunk, drawing lines between vague geographical points, outlining a rough roadmap.
“See, if we head south first, we can hit all the big cities along the East Coast, and get somewhere warm to last out the winter,” I explained. “Then work our way west across the Gulf, head up into the Rockies or out to Cali, whatever. Dean, this is our chance.”
Lately we’d taken to calling ourselves Dean and Sal, after Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise in Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. If you haven’t read it, these two characters are at the heart of the Beat movement in the 40’s, drenched in bebop jazz, experimental drugs, reckless sex, revolutionary literature, and spiritual introspection. We imagined ourselves as kindred spirits to these two characters, based autobiographically on Kerouac himself and his muse, Neal Cassady.
We wanted to rid ourselves of the obligations we imagined ourselves shackled by. We were restless and lusty and red-blooded, ready for anything. We’d live by our wits, con who we must, drive like the devil, and damn all who damned us.
I never stopped to think that by emulating the path of these fictional rogues, I’d be sharing in their hardships as well as their glories. For some reason, it didn’t occur to me that reality wasn’t concerned with my ideals, shakily formed by a bum in a book.
Chris, to his credit, thought better of it, decided he couldn’t leave everything behind with no answers for his family or friends, and promptly collapsed on the futon in a fog of bourbon breath.
He woke up the next morning to find me standing in his living room, hand outstretched. “Goodbye, Dean, you magnificent bastard. I’ll see you when I see you.” I left him groggy-eyed and dumbfounded.
The next time Chris heard from me, I was trembling on the side of Route 81, cellphone barely held in freezing fingertips, the Audi facing the wrong way on a three-lane highway. I’d just been sideswiped by an eighteen-wheeler hauling ass during a persistent snowstorm, and slid around to slam into the wall of snowplowed snow and ice.
“Try to dig yourself out, man,” he advised before he hung up. There was no offer of rescue. In fact, he sounded pissed off.
◊♦◊
The lone wolf, right? That’s the image we get when we see some of our heroes, forsaking mediocrity or bureaucracy or blatant cowardice and heading off into the unknown, alone and full of purpose.
There aren’t any lone wolves; that’s another fiction, another lie. Wolves are pack animals, like humans, social creatures. The only ones who go off on their own are diseased or ostracized.
Lone wolves tend to die rather quickly.
◊♦◊
Darkness was settling in. The highway was coated in over a foot of snow and then caked in ice. Plows couldn’t get through. Traffic was backed up for dozens of miles. National Guard Humvees blocked the exits. One of my headlights was shattered after my first brush with death.
I had a half-tank of gas and fifty dollars in my pocket. The back seat held a thin wool blanket, a bag of bagels, a gallon of cranberry juice, and some random knick-knacks I hoped I could pawn along the way. Apparently, I hadn’t expected this leg of the trek to take longer than breakfast. I had hoped to reach Maryland, perhaps Virginia, by this time. I was just outside Hazleton, Pennsylvania, when an exit opened up. I gunned the Audi, fishtailed sideways, and plunged into the suburbs.
Before me, flickering grey in faltering streetlights, lay the most goddamn evil hill I’d ever seen. The ditches were littered with hazard lights. Jackknifed semis hung their backends out like cats in heat. I roared forward. Halfway up, my traction disappeared, and I slid down, down, down in a slow-motion ballet of terror. I wrestled the car under control and maneuvered onto a rural side street. I saw brake lights in front of me.
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Toward the end of On The Road, Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise embark on an epic roadtrip south through Mexico, through the tourist-laden cities, into the dank and overbearing rainforest. Primitive villages, strange dark people and incessant mosquitoes, insufferable heat. They pressed on, ever glorious, ever reaching for the beatific.
Never mind the side-trip to the hospital they’re forced to make when one of their party gets an infected bug bite. Never mind the racial undertones when the white boys come to the whorehouse to party and have all the money in the world to spend. I’d always focused on the samba records and the transcendent sense of otherworldliness. I chose what I wanted to remember because the rest of the story, the details that didn’t fit my interpretation of what Dean and Sal meant as literary characters, was unimportant.
Fictional characters can’t get mad at you for cherry-picking their qualities to suit your needs.
◊♦◊
Following the brakelights, I pushed on. Up a hill, ever so slowly, ever so cautiously, keeping those dim red beacons in my field of vision always, until the snow fell quicker and blanketed everything and I lost sight, and I was alone again. With one headlight, I aimed as best I could for the side of the road, which at this point couldn’t have been more than a gravel path carved along the side of a mountain. When everything is the same color, though, it’s hard to distinguish. I hit the snowbank gently and the car stopped.
And then it slid. Just a soft shift, at first, and I reacted by deliberately trying to hit the snowbank again, just to cease, just to keep from hurtling off the side of wherever the hell I was and I did hit it, hard. My head slammed against the driver’s window. Everything went from white to black.
Headlights in my eyes woke me to a piercing headache. I couldn’t feel my fingers or my face. My feet were numb. I looked at the clock. I’d been out for almost ten minutes. I took a breath and watched the headlights recede as a car that had been approaching made a wiser choice and retraced its steps back down the hill.
I fumbled behind me and found my cranberry juice, took a drink, and stepped out of the car. I’d have to dig it out again. I screamed every curse I could think of, the adrenaline finally kicking in and bringing new pain and new feeling to my limbs. I checked the gas gauge and made a quick decision: if I could make it back down into town, I had just enough money to refill the tank. I could go home.
◊♦◊
Alan Ginsberg wrote in his epic poem, “Howl,”
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the
starry dynamo in the machinery of night…”
He was talking about Kerouac, and Cassady, and Burroughs, Solomon, all the characters renamed but so vividly portrayed in Kerouac’s tome. He was talking about despair in the pursuit of finding one’s self.
Our heroes, our literary versions of masculinity we aspire to, are not real. They are carefully crafted representations of our hopes, longings, and fears. As often as they are inspirational tales, they are also cautionary ones. The “angelheaded hipsters” were, in real life, kind of a hot mess.
Jack Kerouac died of internal bleeding from long-term alcohol abuse. Cassady died walking alone on train tracks in Mexico after ingesting unknown quantities of barbiturates. Bill Burroughs accidentally shot his wife in the head trying to perform a drunken party trick.
Hell, even William Wallace wasn’t avenging the murder of his wife as seen in the movies; that was part of a poem written about him 150 years after the fact, another fiction. Neo gave us unrealistic expectations that any loner can be the Messiah, and any skill can be handed to you, genie-like, with no work required. Conan was a misogynist, Sherlock was a sociopath, and brain-damaged Rocky Balboa lost his wife and son in the pursuit of a goddamn belt.
◊♦◊
You are not going to get adamantium claws, exploding pens, an IQ off the charts, or a magic wand. You are going to live your life and nobody else can write that for you. That’s not to say there aren’t traits we admire, hell, even want from literary characters. But following the path of an imaginary creation means that our footing isn’t grounded in everyday reality. Acting like a knight can mean either living chivalrously to your fellow humans, or clanking around in armor and broadswording anyone who offends your misguided honor.
So, we pick and choose. Keep what works. Abandon what leaves you alone, in the snow, to die. If we stay rooted in ourselves, participating actually and honestly in our everyday lives without getting caught up in daydream tales and overblown expectations, we will never end up as fiction. We will never be a lie.
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Photo-Flickr/-tenebres
Thank you for this. I”m always rather saddened (and somewhat frustrated) when I see hear men of all ages extolling On the Road as some kind of recipe for freedom and adventure like “Hey lets go be like Dean and Sal! It will be cool!”. On the road has always struck me as a book about powerlessness, emptiness, desperation and thoughtless, reckless efforts to create meaning from a barren emotional and physical landscape. Its not a contemplation of freedom or a wild adventure. Meaninglessness and freedom aren’t the same thing. Mindless self destruction and adventures aren’t the same thing. As… Read more »
This was a really great article. We look for inspiration everywhere. Maybe your travels weren’t perfect but it gave you a story to tell; maybe you could have finished your plans but I also understand the need to go home.
You tried. That does have merits.
Not sure how the “lie” came about.. I have read Kerouac’s “On the Road, The Original Scroll” more than once and nowhere in it does he make himself out to be some type of hero or invincible superhuman. He tells of the struggles as much as the triumphs, it is up to the reader to decide what they take from it.
Kerouac will always be a hero in my eyes, mainly for living his life on the paths he chose instead of a cookie cutter box life which isn’t really living.
Good choice of book though!
If you never go, you never know. I get it, but when I’m old and telling my son the stories of my life (geez Dad, not this one again) I won’t be telling him about all the times I played it safe, but about the time I stood on the topsail foot rope of a square rigger trying to furl a flogging sail in 40 knot winds while the mast rotated through a 65% orbit above a freezing sea. You had an adventure, and you faced a challenge. I hope that you take more from it than ‘it was a… Read more »
Oh, man! You’re SOOO right.
That’s why video games are so successful, methinks: they allow us to live like heroes and follow our wild dreams (at least inside our minds), without all the nasty side-effects.
Yes, fiction fills us with unrealistic world views, and this leads to real world problems. For example most Americans believe that torture is acceptable in the “ticking bomb” scenario. We see it a lot in shows like 24 and Homeland. Where a bomb has been planted, the terrorist captured, and the “hero” has to make a “hard choice.” It makes good drama. In the real world this has never happened. Not in all of the world’s wars, or terrorist attacks. The security services either spot them months in advance, and can arrest the terrorists. Or they find out after the… Read more »
Hmmm, interesting points, however your point got lost in your incompetence. It sounds like you just need to learn winter driving. Then, don’t stop taking risks, it keeps you sharp. Come spend a winter in Wyoming.
That being said, I like and agree with your final paragaph: ” Pick and choose. Keep what works. Abandon what leaves you alone, in the snow, to die. If we stay rooted in ourselves, participating actually and honestly in our everyday lives without getting caught up in daydream tales and overblown expectations, we will never end up as fiction.”
Maybe the real point to be taken here has nothing to do with Keroac; you were a poor driver (low snow driving skills) who didn’t have the common sense to just get a motel room to ride the snowstorm through instead of spinning your car off the road several times in a row.
“…ever reaching for the beatific.”
I saw what you did, there…!
As a young woman, I read books and consumed media about tragic young, waify girls with emotional problems. Girl, Interrupted comes to mind. And of course, I idealized the idea of being the beautiful, tormented girl whom everyone loves and says, “But she is so talented and so beautiful…” Like the hot, crazy, troubled girl. I knew SO many girls like this in the early and mid 90s.. Grunge culture didn’t help at all. So much of a “there is no space for the depth of my soul, my complicated being that is so tormented. I am not like you.… Read more »
Yeah, the glorification of angst during the grunge days most certainly paved the way for my later decisions… excellent points, Joanna. But hey – at least we got some good music out of it.
You’re absolutely right, Kevin — and that’s a subtlety that was perhaps lost on me at the time; the monikers we chose for ourselves weren’t appropriately done. When I mucked it all and took to the hills, I became Dean… and then came awfully close to becoming Dean’s father, the drunken wandering neverfound good-for-nothing.
Having just finished On the Road recently, I can totally relate to this—both the desire to partake in that, and realizing why it’s a bad idea. However, the moment you stepped out to embark on your own, I would say you took on the role of Dean. Sal, as I recall, was the hanger-on; Dean was the one who was all gung-ho, balls-to-the-wall, gotta drive, gotta go. Much like how the protagonist is not the narrator in The Great Gatsby, Sal instead told stories of the world around him, a world he was (at times) dragged into, or stumbled into… Read more »