Visions of Jack

I'm not a beatnik, I'm a Catholic.

I was just looking at the jukebox. Just playing records. She said, "You want to play with me?" I said, "Sure. How much?" She says, "Five bucks, two dollars for the room." "Was it nice, Jack?" "All women are nice."




"Whee. Sal, we gotta go and never stop going till we get there." "Where we going, man?" "I don't know but we gotta go."

I'm writing this book because we're all going to die--In the loneliness of my life, my father dead, my brother dead, my mother far away, my sister and my wife far away, nothing here but my own tragic hands that once were guarded by a world, a sweet attention, that now are left to guide and disappear their own way into the common dark of all our death, sleeping in me raw bed, alone and stupid: with just this one pride and consolation: my heart broke in the general despair and opened up inward to the Lord, I made a supplication in this dream.

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 read ‘On the Road’ in maybe 1959,” Bob Dylan said. “It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s.”

- Jack Kerouac, March, 12, 1922 - October, 21, 1969