Jack Kerouac ruined my life. I had fantastic grades in high school. I was a hard worker, I went to class, had plenty of what ‘they’ call potential. I was well on my way to being a successful, productive member of capitalist American society. I could’ve been a banker, a businessman, a scientist or something respectable.

Then, I read On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Within two days of reading those final two words — “Dean Moriarty” — I quit the baseball team, bought a guitar and thought about smoking reefer. I started a poetry club at school and began saying things like “dig that, man!” In a word, I became “beat.”

I’ve since grown out of my immature, pseudo-beatnik phase and moved onto a mature, unrealistic-beatific phase (my Zeppelin phase remains the same). I got myself a day job, a cell phone and a 401k. But the profound impact of Kerouac and Moriarty goes on like the road. I still think about smoking reefer, and I occasionally listen to subversive jazz records. That mad, sympathetic desire for the American night still drives through my soul like a lone ‘38 Hudson sneaking up the Jersey Turnpike at 4 AM from parts unknown headed to destinations undetermined. I can’t shake that feeling…and I really don’t want to.

All of this mad-crazy fabulous energy was reawakened from slumber yesterday when I snuck out of work early like a grey dawn ghost and hoofed it down to the New York Public Library on 42nd and 5th. You see, the “scroll” has come home to Manhattan, part of a comprehensive exhibit about the embodiment of “Beat,” Jack Kerouac. For those of you not familiar with the Kerouac mythology, the “scroll” is the original 120 foot run-on-paragraph manuscript of the groundbreaking Beatnik utterance, On the Road. If you believe the legend, Jack speed-typed it out in a three-week insomniac haze of coffee and pea soup in his wife’s NYC apartment in 1951. It’s the original improvisational jam session of the literary world: a soul blown jazz-sax solo of stream-of-consciousness, over a rhythm section of real-world American-road experience.

Read on for more of Neeko’s semi-coherent ramblings and literary erections…

The scroll, laid out in its long glass case like an ancient Catholic relic, is brown and tired, coffee stained, penciled and faded. This is powerful stuff. These are the words, straight from Jack’s brain. Words that inspired Dylan, Garcia, Morrison, Hunter Thompson and countless hordes of creative free-thinkers to get off their asses and create, write and experience their own golden road. Stretched out like a wise, old, ink-tattooed snake, you can feel the tangible significance of raw creativity that is On the Road.

The exhibit includes drawings, paintings, photographs, journal entries, rough drafts, first editions, scorecards for imaginary baseball teams…There’s Kerouac, good, bad, prolific, meticulous, paranoid, inspired…I found myself drawn to the scroll more than anything else in the room. Maybe it’s the romantic notion that in front of my eyes, breathing the same air as me, was the ‘primordial ooze’ of the holy text that permanently changed my perspective on life. Maybe it’s the supernatural synergy of the beat ghosts of Kerouac’s narrative and the beat ghosts of Manhattan’? Maybe it’s because it is in big, shiny, sixty foot glass case in the center of the room?… Whatever it is, I plan on leaving work early a few more times to stir up some more “ripples in the upside-down lake of the void.”

The scroll and the exhibit head back on the road at the end of February. Maybe it’ll find Old Bull Lee in New Orleans or Hassle’s haggard ghost in Detroit? Maybe stop by Denver for a reunion with the spectres of the old gang — Carlo Marx, Dean Moriarty, Roland Major and the Rawlins clan? If you’ve got the means, take a road trip of your own and come see this exhibit at home in NYC. If you can’t hit the road, take the advice of the Great and Knowledgeable Icculus and “READ THE BOOK,” whether it’s your first time, or fifty-first time. I leave you with Jack, his own words in his own voice. Dig it, daddy-oh: