Dancing Down the Street Like a Dingledodie

I read Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” 50 years ago. When I saw a copy lying around the house last week, I took it to mean it was time to read it again. 

How that book had fired me up! Me and every other teenager who knew, even if we grew up in a definite somewhere (NYC in my case), that America – The World – Real Life – was elsewhere and we had to seek it, preferably by hitchhiking.

I became a hitchhiking fool. Re-reading “On the Road,” I was surprised to see that on one of my journeys, I out-Kerouacked my hero by 800 miles. Sal Paradise, the author’s presumed alter ego, took buses from New York to Joliet, Illinois, and only started thumbing his way west from there. 

Weenie! I started hitching in New York, got stranded in Joliet, slept in a ditch and returned to my post on Interstate 80’s shoulder at sunrise. Soon, I was roaring down the road in a semi, bursting with transcontinental Keroucian joy at seeing the arrows pointing to St. Louis and Chicago where east-west I-80 met north-south I-55. 

From Joliet, Sal P got a series of lifts that landed him in Gothenburg, Nebraska. There, he and I swapped roles: Now Sal was the hitchhiker and I, on a different trip along the same route, was Colorado-bound with my buddy Michael in the Mustang of a girl named Carol who, like Kerouac’s women, thought Mikey and I were complete madmen. 

Just before the G-burg exit on I-80, Mikey got pulled over for speeding. The trooper said we could slip him 25 bucks and be on our way. That sounded fishy to us.  

The trooper unhappily conceded that we could also stick the dough in an envelope – but that he would need to see us mail it. So I followed him to downtown Gothenburg, where we parked side by side at a USPS collection box. Mikey did the posting. 

“Don’t go yet,” he said when he got back to the car. 

The trooper drove off. 

Mikey retrieved the envelope.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said.

As I drove, hyperconscious of the speed limit, Michael explained: He had put the envelope in the drawer unsealed, with the flap sticking out.  

Driving in Nebraska still makes me nervous.

**

I have lots of stories like that one. I like telling them because they make me sound like a Kerouac character. 

I suppose, since I really did the things I say I did, I actually was an “On the Road” warrior, except I had to force myself to do all that swashbuckly stuff. I force myself still. 

I’m a homebody by nature. I despise the word comfort, yet hate feeling uncomfortable. But writers like Kerouac threw down the gauntlet. A full (and writerly) life was an adventurous life. You had to get out there. So out I went. 

In 2012, before I left for a semester in Ukraine, where I knew exactly one Ukrainian person and maybe two Ukrainian words, a Penn State colleague expressed admiration for my bravery. 

That’s when I realized that bravery isn’t the absence of fear, but the overcoming of fear. This is not a new idea. I probably got it from “I Whistle a Happy Tune” on my parents’ Broadway cast recording of “The King and I”:  

Make believe you’re brave
And the trick will take you far
You may be as brave
As you make believe you are.

Or did you not know that you can learn everything you need to know about life from showtunes? 

**

In two weeks I’m going to Oregon to babysit my granddaughter while my daughter and son-in-law settle into their new home in their new town. Penelope turns 3 this summer. By the end of July she’ll have a baby sister. I’m staying for the birth. 

Getting to that simple-sounding plan induced a perverse nostalgia for the old quarantine days. As trapped as we sometimes felt, the past year offered a respite from the hectic. Now we were back to endlessly comparing flights and fares and Airbnbs and car rentals. Gah! 

Somehow the Kerouacian road trip doesn’t sound nearly as fun as it did 50 years ago. Then too, some of Kerouac’s writing now sounds pedestrian, sexist, eye-roll inducing. Still, you’ve got to love a guy who can spin a sentence like this: 

“But then they danced down the street like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars…”

I wish to be counted, still, among the dingledodies.