Beneath the Cloudmopped Skies

The year before he won fame, Jack Kerouac came to the Northwest to find peace. Instead he found his demons on a mountain peak and madness in Seattle.

I went topdeck as the ferry pulled out in a cold drizzle to dig and enjoy Puget Sound. It was one hour sailing to the Port of Seattle and I found a half-pint of vodka stuck in the deck rail concealed under a Time magazine and just casually drank it and opened my rucksack and took out my warm sweater to go under my rain jacket and paced up and down all alone on the cold fog-swept deck feeling wild and lyrical. And suddenly I saw that the Northwest was a great deal more than the vision I had of it of Japhy in my mind. It was miles and miles of unbelievable mountains grooking on all horizons in the wild broken clouds, Mount Olympus and Mount Baker, a giant orange slash in the gloom over the Pacific-ward skies that led I knew toward the Hokkaido Siberian desolations of the world. I huddled against the bridgehouse hearing the Mark Twain talk of the skipper and wheelman inside. In the deepened dusk fog ahead the big red neon saying: PORT OF SEATTLE. And suddenly everything Japhy had ever told me about Seattle began to seep into me like cold rain, I could feel it and see it now, and not just think it. It was exactly like he’d said: wet, immense, timbered, mountainous, cold, exhilarating, challenging. The ferry nosed in at the pier on Alaskan Way and immediately I saw the totem poles in old stores and the ancient 1880-style switch goat with sleepy firemen chug chugging up and down the waterfront spur like a scene from my own dreams, the old Casey Jones locomotive of America, the only one I ever saw that old outside of Western movies, but actually working and hauling boxcars in the smoke gloom of the magic city. — From Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums

Photo courtesy of Jim Jones

Jack Kerouac first glimpsed Seattle’s skyline fifty-two years ago, from the deck of the Bremerton ferry. He was high, and not just on that half-pint of vodka. He was reeling under the literary and spiritual influence of Gary Snyder, the great poet from Lake City Way whom he would soon hero-worship as “Japhy Ryder” in his 1958 novel The Dharma Bums. It was Snyder who got the thirty-four-year-old writer a job as a fire lookout at Desolation Peak in the North Cascades in the summer in 1956.

“He was so psyched about this experience,” says Jim Jones, the Queen Anne Hill author of Kerouac in Seattle and three other Kerouac books. “That’s the big breaking point in his life. He was unknown, right on the verge of being famous — which is what killed him.”

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Kerouac died of alcoholism at age forty-seven in 1969. But rolling into the Port of Seattle that first time, a “crucial moment but a JOYOUS moment” (as he wrote to a friend), he felt utterly alive. He had just spent the happiest times he would ever know in Mill Valley, California, with the monkish Snyder, on whom he meant to model his reborn life. On the Road, the comma-free, paragraph-less masterpiece he’d typed onto a single 127-foot paper scroll in twenty blazing days, had been accepted, after editorial rejections, lawsuit threats and the last-minute rewriting of the last few feet, which were chomped off by his pal Lucien Carr’s dog. By the time his ferry docked on June 20, 1956, the novel was destined for publication, though no date was set.

He didn’t know the book would make him famous 442 days later, inspiring a million road trips and drug trips, plus scads of classics by young writers (including John Updike’s Rabbit, Run and Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). Nor could he foresee that the original scroll would become so sacred that the owner of the Indianapolis Colts would buy it for $2.43 million in 2001 and put it on an international tour, like the Dead Sea Scrolls. Kerouac’s heirs are currently battling in court over his twenty-million-dollar estate. Even his ratty old raincoat became precious: Johnny Depp bought it and a few knickknacks for $50,640.

Rapt in the Seattle rain, Jack couldn’t know that in 2009 the Kerouac flame would still be, as he remarked of the 1956 University of Washington campus in Desolation Angels, “all right and pretty Eternal.” In September, the jazz-and-verse group Band of Poets celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Jack’s Mexico City Blues with a bash at Hugo House. Last month Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard commemorated the fortieth anniversary of Kerouac’s death by contributing, along with alt-country star Jay Farrar, to the soundtrack for One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur, the new documentary about Kerouac’s death spiral. This month, tied in with the landmark Frye Museum exhibition The Old, Weird America (see page 66), film critic Robert Horton screens scenes from the movie Kerouac wrote, Pull My Daisy.

The Stevens Hotel at First and Marion, Kerouac's home for his two Seattle nights. Jim Jones says there's no evidence he ever stayed at Belltown's Jell-O Mold Building, and he probably did not drink at the Blue Moon Tavern, as legend wishfully has it. Photo courtesy of Jim Jones.

What Kerouac did know, just by looking at it from that ferry boat, was that Seattle felt significant. “The Northwest was very exotic to him,” Jones says. “He wrote about it four times, in The Dharma Bums, Desolation Angels, Lonesome Traveler and Desolation Blues. He was filled with Snyder’s Wobbly [Industrial Workers of the World] mythology and logger myths — ‘Wow, this is really the essence of America!’” The one-two punch of Seattle’s Skid Road and Desolation Peak inspired some of his finest work.

But his peak experience became the pits once he reached the mountaintop and began his mostly solitary sixty-three-day confinement in the chilly, mouse-infested lookout cabin. Snyder sent him there for rehab — to dry out his boozed-up body, elevate his spirit and eliminate distractions so he could write more masterpieces. The only book Kerouac brought was The Buddhist Bible. He was determined to become a quintessential Northwest poet-saint, like his mentor. But within days, the writer was out of cigarettes and Benzedrine, lonesome and self-loathing. A kindly woodsman gave him a tin of tobacco, but withdrawal from other vices wasn’t the bliss he’d naively expected.

He thought he’d see God, but he came to see something very different. “I’d come face to face with myself, no liquor, no drugs, no chance of faking it but face to face with ole Hateful Duluoz Me,” he wrote in Desolation Angels, in which he carries the name Duluoz.

“He had a running fantasy that he would someday go off into the wilderness and live in a mountain cabin,” says Joyce Johnson Pinchbeck, the New York girlfriend who was with Kerouac when fame struck in 1957. “When he actually tried it, he essentially had a mental breakdown.”

“He wanted Desolation Peak to be Mont Blanc,” the site of Romantic poets’ pilgrimages, says Jones. “Something symbolic, instead of seeing it for what it is.”

“Desolation Angels is all exalted writing, some of JK’s very best,” says Gerald Nicosia, author of the Kerouac biography Memory Babe and the just-published Jan Kerouac, “but that doesn’t mean he was happy during the experience he was chronicling. He was miserable on the mountain, could not hack being alone, and he finally had to admit it. He needed the bars, the people, the excitement of jazz clubs, the conversation and high jinks of friends, what he called ‘the madness.’”

“He must have been in a very fragile state when he hit Seattle,” says Pinchbeck, now a National Book Critics’ Circle award-winning writer working on a Kerouac biography.

Rivoli Theatre dancer Zabuda, who may be Kerouac's "Naughty Girl Sarina," with her fellow lilies of the alley. Photos courtesy of Jim Jones

Fragile, yet eager, says Jones. On September 12, 1956, packing a summer’s pay, Kerouac raced down the trail from his lookout back to Seattle. “His feet are all chewed up, but he just runs down the mountain, he’s so anxious to get back to the city.” He rented a room for $1.75 at the Stevens Hotel at First and Marion, where the Federal Building is now. Diving into what may have been the most physically pleasurable bender of his life, he hit the town’s top strip joint, the Rivoli Theatre, and immortalized it in his ecstatic essay “Seattle Burlesque,” which, according to critic Gilbert Sorrentino, is “Kerouac at his exuberant best, drunk on detail.”

“Seattle burlesque was such a highlight for him because it was a kind of celebration of coming out of that loneliness,” says Nicosia, “back to flesh kicks and excitement with people again.”

“I go all the way down to First Avenue and turn left, leaving the shoppers and Seattleites behind,” wrote Kerouac, “and lo! Here’s all humanity hep and weird wandering on the evening sidewalk amazing me outta my eyeballs.” He extolled “Seattle’s own redhead KITTY O’GRADY,” a warmup act for “the Naughty Girl — Sarina”:

And jumps to the organ, ragdown jazz drag, and here comes naughty Sarina — There’s a furor of excitement throughout the theater — She has slanted cat’s eyes and a wicked face — cute like a cat’s moustache — like a little witch — no broom — she comes slinking and bumping out to the beat.

While researching Kerouac in Seattle, Jones found what he’s pretty sure are pictures of Kitty and Sarina in an antique store under the Viaduct. “He changed the names only slightly, usually keeping the same number of syllables.” Sarina actually signed her photo “Zabuda.”

Kerouac had hoped the cleansing “cloud-mopped skies” of Seattle would make him pure — a word that crops up in his Northwest writing almost as much as “holy” does in On the Road. But after looking down on the clouds from his lookout, he fell off the wagon and eventually to his death as an alcoholic with ninety-one dollars to his name. Years before he came to Seattle, Nicosia says, he sat with his friend LuAnne Henderson, explaining the visions he saw in the clouds. Years later he told her, “I don’t see anything in the clouds anymore.” They closed in on him soon after he left Seattle.

“He would have his ‘satoris’ in New York, Big Sur, Paris, and other places,” writes John Suiter in the beautiful Northwest classic Poets on the Peaks, “but nothing Jack would do again would ever be as worthy of his great literary exuberance as his two months on the mountain.”

“He never went back to Seattle,” says Jones. “Maybe it was because nothing could ever equal that experience.”