On the Road to Grosse Pointe

I was going through the 'archives' the other day, looking for something old to recycle for my once-a-month writing gig (the truth is, I ran dry long ago,) when I came across an old unpublished piece on Jack Kerouac I had written about 25 or 30 years ago.

On second look, it's not half bad. It's been in the bottom of my desk drawer for about a quarter-century but it's top-drawer stuff. If nothing else, it's good enough for a blog so I offer it now.

But first a bit of an introduction. Shortly before the time this was written, I had become acquainted with the first wife of Jack Kerouac - through (of all people,) my mother-in-law. At the time I was a big Kerouac fan, having discovered him a couple of years earlier when we took 'On the Road' in English Literature. Contemporary American. After that I read all his books, even the poetry collections and his biography by Ann Charters.

Anyhoo, at the time, my mother-in-law made her living as a live-in casual-nurse to wealthy old people and was hired by a woman to take care of her elderly father at the family estate in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. After getting the job, the woman went on and on about how her first husband was this famous writer guy my mother-in-law had never heard of. But Sonny studied books at the university, maybe he knew who he was. Of course I did. I even knew the woman's name - Edie Parker.

My mother-in-law didn't last long at that job. She quit about a month in after seeing a ghost in the mansion the old man lived in. But first she set up a meeting for me and me missus to meet Edie in Windsor, where she graciously bought us lunch at an upscale oyster bar downtown and answered as many questions I could ask in an hour. She apparently liked or trusted me enough to invite me to sometime visit her at the family home across the river, ask more questions and have a look at her Kerouac memorabilia from her brief marriage to Kerouac in the days before he became famous.

So I did. The following article is an account of that visit. Spelling and grammer mistakes and all. In retrospect, it's a bit long. Maybe that's why the London Free Press - my only market at the time, never bought it.

... ON THE ROAD TO GROSSE POINTE ... by Sonny Drysdale

It seems that every time you pick up a weekend paper these days, there is a review on a new book about Jack Kerouac. In the 25 years since the publication of 'On the Road,' the man has achieved legend status and despite the repetitious documentation, it becomes harder to separate man from myth.

For this reason, I decided to visit Kerouac's first wife, Edie in Grosse Pointe, Michigan and ask her about the new biography by Gerald Nicosia and about her own book-in-progress on her marriage to Jack.

You have to do these things right and so I chose to hitch-hike down from London to Windsor. My first ride was with what has become of the Kerouac legacy - a couple of former hippies in their late thirties. He was balding and bearded with thinning, shoulder-length hair. She was long-haired and silent. From Toronto, they were out on a Saturday morning sight-seeing tour of the 401 with no destination in mind - a living example of the phrase 'going nowhere fast.' Indeed, they let me off in the middle of nowhere at the exit to Rodney and then headed back towards Toronto.

The next ride, which took me into Windsor was with a businessman who talked constantly about his liquid-waste disposal company. He was a cesspool of information on the repulsing aspects of his job - forgotten landfill sites where chemicals had been buried years ago and had since been growing in the earth and were now actually oozing out of the ground.

He was particularly excited about a mutant bacteria being developed, which when introduced into the earth, would eat only the waste that you wanted eliminated.

This image appealed to me since I had just finished the new 767-page Kerouac biography by Gerald Nicosia and I was hoping this visit to Edie would be a direct way of cutting through the years of myth and gossip and give me a feel for the man who inspired the legend of 'King of the Beats.'

In his 1967 novel 'Vanity of Dulouz,' Kerouac describes Edie as he knew her in the 1940s as having an eagerness of spirit "That endows the lady with the promise that she will look good all her life." When I reach her home in affluent Grosse Pointe, I see that his prophecy has proven true. Today she is a remarkably-young 60-year-old both in spirit and beauty.

Edie Parker met Kerouac in the early '40s while she was an art student in New York and rooming with a woman named Joan Vollmer. Through the girls, Kerouac met a 17-year-old poet named Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, the future author of 'Junkie' and 'Naked Lunch' whom Vollmer eventually married. Soon all of them were living in the same Greenwich Village apartment in what Edie now calls one of the first communes. Thus was born the nucleus of the Beat Generation - although at the time, these three only dreamed of becoming writers.

The circumstances of Jack and Edie's wedding were somewhat bizarre. In 1944, arrested and jailed as a material witness to a murder, Kerouac was released a few days later when Edie's parents agreed to pay his $100 bail - but only on the condition that the two get married. They became man and wife with a plainclothes detective serving as best man and Jack spending his wedding night in jail.

Upon release, he returned with Edie to her parents' home in Grosse Pointe, where he worked in a ball-bearing plant until he had paid off the $100 debt and then returned to New York, later remarking "there's no tragedy in Grosse Pointe." Edie followed shortly after.

Back in New York, Burroughs had begun his 'study' of heroin addiction and the apartment was regularly visited by Times Square junkies and small-time hoods. It was the beginning of what Kerouac later described as "a year of low, evil decadence." Edie worked as a cigarette-girl in Fifth Avenue nightclubs and supported the whole group. Finally, tired of coming home from work and finding everyone strung out on drugs, she moved out.

It was clear to her that Kerouac was not the sort of husband who could support a wife and afer seeing her in her natural element of priviledged Grosse Pointe, he realized that Edie was only a weekend bohemian.

When she wrote him in 1949 saying "I love to drink coffee with people in the morning," Kerouac realized that she had become a "sad, straight woman" and later wrote in 'Visions of Cody,' that he and Edie "were no longer on the same team."

While Edie moved back home and later re-married, her former room-mate Joan Vollmer wasn't so lucky. A long-time benzedrine addict, she was accidently killed in 1951 in Mexico City after goading husband Burroughs into performing their usual parlour trick for guests by shooting a champagne glass off her head ala William Tell. This time the famous marksman missed. The bullet went through the middle of the forehead.

Gerald Nicosia is the first biographer Edie has granted an interview. But despite his six days of intensive probing, she is not totally happy with the final result. "I don't like the gossip in it because it's all wrong," she says. She acknowledges the amount of work Nicosia put into the biography, but says there is too much critical analysis of Kerouac's writing "without really coming to the point that what Jack's books are about is not what you read, but what you feel."

Like everyone else who ever knew Kerouac, Edie is writing a book about him. And despite the obvious jumping-on-the-bandwagon, she and the others have every right to - after all, Kerouac himself made his fortune and reputation doing the same thing - writing about his friends. However, she intends to concentrate on the love story and write about the "shy" boy she knew long ago. She and Kerouac kept in touch over the years. She claims that a month before he died, he phoned her to say that he was divorcing his present wife, Stella and wanted Edie to come visit him in Florida.

Her book will focus on the early 1940s period and the times Kerouac and Neal Cassady (the hyperactive sexaholic main character in 'On the Road," came for visits in Grosse Pointe during one of their cross-country road trips. She recalls Cassady as being quiet and out of his element on such visits. On one occassion, after fixing him up with a girlfriend, Cassady only caught the woman's attention when he ended a party by flushing his underwear down the toilet and clogging the pipes.

But referring back to another of her dissatisfactions with Nicosia's mammoth books, she says, "If there's one thing I refuse to do, it's to write about Jack and I as dull. Our life was not dull."

After we've finished talking, Edie gives me a tour of the mansion on the estate where Kerouac stayed on his visits and during their brief marriage. Since the house is up for sale, many of the rooms are empty or the furniture has been piled up in the centre. The drapes are pulled and Edie goes about opening them ujp and letting the light and fresh air inside.

As she takes me tbrough the house, she points out various areas of interest - "There's the library where Jack would spend hours reading; Neal Cassady slept in that bed; this circular bedroom was our room, he did a lot of writing in here - this is the tower he described in 'Doctor Sax ..."

I linger in that round room in the top of the tower where Kerouac lived and wrote. I try to feel whatever it is I'm supposed to, but instead my gaze is drawn out the window. Everything around the house is lush and green. Edie has a masters degree in Horticulture and the estate is a wonder of woods, shrubs and vines. As evergreen as her memory of her first husband. I remember a quote by Jim Christie from a review he did of another recent book on Kerouac - "It is about an entire way of life that has ceased to exist - and further can no longer exist because the rules have changed and the world has changed."

And with sadness, I know he's absolutely right. Nonetheless, I consider cashing in my bus-ticket and hitch-hiking back to London. It's true, the world Kerouac knew is no longer the same, but the man's spirit lives on and the road will always offer more interesting experiences when you meet strangers head on and share time and space with them in their cars, rather than sitting alone, looking out the grimy window of a Greyhound.

But then I come back to reality, remember how frustrating it is trying to hitch a ride out of Windsor and ask Edie for a lift to the bus terminal.

- 30 -


POST-SCRIPT - Edie died a few years ago. She never did finish her book. But that didn't stop publishers - City Lights Books - from taking the small number of pages she had written and padding them out into bookform years after her death in 1992 - "You'll Be Okay - My Life with Jack Kerouac' by Edie Kerouac Parker, published in 2007.

I haven't read it. I don't need to, I lived it.

PHOTOS - some snapshots from my visit. The top is a poster celebrating the 25th anniversay of 'On the Road.' The middle is a porrait of Jack painted at the time of their marriage by Edie. The bottom is a watercolour painted by Jack himself and featured in the above poster. One of the few paintings he ever did, it's remarkably good and manages to sum up every cliche about the lonely hitch-hiker - the battered suitcase at his feet, stuck in the middle of nowhere on a country road - and passed by yet another car that didn't stop to pick him up.