Off The Road

I first met Jack Kerouacjob not long after skidding over a guardrail and into a ditch. I had just finished a rest area veggie wrap that I won’t bother to talk about, except to say that it was overly saucy, with a multiplicity of condiments that destroyed any semblance of consistency the food surely once possessed. With the arrival of Jack Kerouacjob ushered in the part of my life you could call my life off the road. Before that, I dreamed of cross-country road trips cataloging every worthwhile sight in the lower 48. Frantically carrying portable gas containers so I wouldn’t ever have to stop. Now I had my drivetrain hanging from a Locust Tree and tires that bore the uncomfortable resemblance to pancakes, totally flattened and covered in grease. 

Jack was literally born off the road, in a hospital with nurses and doctors, a good distance from the clanging of traffic signals and car horns of the street. He showed up there as the hood was still smoking. Me, I’d quit years before. The blessing was that I ran off the road amid lots of traffic. So it wasn’t as if I was going anywhere anytime soon. Might as well walk or sit. The ditch was more of a gulch with a sewage smelling stream bubbling through the tall grass. 

I first discovered Jack in a relentless shower of text messages from Chad Queen. Jack wanted Chad to teach him about all these intellectual things, like how to retweet, how to quote-tweet and what made Jeff Lynne a genius. I always wondered if I’d ever meet Jack Kerouacjob. I’d met plenty of Kerouacjobs before, mostly at sanitariums during office hours, asylums during open houses or labor camps during seasonal shindigs. They were a wild clan, that’s for sure. Prone to rambling run-on sentences and narcotics. When Jack was writing to Chad, he was doing it from a New Mexico Deform School. He was too good when he started and barely good enough when he graduated. Jack was different then. He was lusting after a carburetor named Felipe. I never asked why Felipe. Maybe Felipe Alou, who’d made a name for himself by then as a good ballplayer and a better brother.

Jack Kerouacjob was committed. To what? To a mental institution. After hours talking about traffic patterns and describing each piston in excruciating detail, I had to put a stop to it. At some point, I was forced to either call my insurance or call the authorities. I choose to buy a straight jacket sewn together from old canvas O'Reilly Auto Parts jumpsuits.  There was no escaping it. Throw in a few bungee cords and it worked like a lucky charm, keeping Jack at bay. He was now a medicating to center himself. But once a Kerouacjob, always a Kerouacjob.