GLR November-December 2022

dismiss what he called the “little dramas” of early love and de sire. Just a couple of pages before the tangent about Ernie Malo, Jack Duluoz remembers an evocative episode involving his friend Lousy: “The first night I met [Pauline] all I could do was smell her hair in my bed, in my hair—told this to Lousy, I smelt her in his hair too. It interested Lousy. When I told him we’d fi nally kissed the night before ... Lousy wanted me to kiss him like I had kissed Pauline. We did it, too; the others didnt even stop talking about the team.” Perhaps the other boys sitting around Jack’s bedroom didn’t suspect that the kiss was anything

come, he needed me now.” He offers to pay Dean’s way back to New York and proposes they then go to Italy. It’s as close as he comes to admitting he loves Dean and wants him to himself: I tried to remember everything he’d done in his life and if there wasn’t something back there to make him suspicious of some thing now. Resolutely and firmly I repeated what I said—“Come to New York with me; I’ve got the money.” I looked at him; my eyes were watering with embarrassment and tears. Still he stared at me. Now his eyes were blank and looking through me. It was probably the pivotal point of our friendship when he realized I had actually spent some hours thinking about him and his troubles, and he was trying to place that in his tremendously involved and tor mented mental categories. Something clicked in both of us. In me it was suddenly concern for a man who was years younger than I, five years, and whose fate was wound with mine across the passage of the recent years; in him it was a matter that I can ascertain from what he did afterward. He became extremely joyful and said everything was settled. Self-conscious and unable to talk about what has just happened between them, the two men stand on the sidewalk near Dean’s home and behold a Greek wedding party—an ancillary sign that they are officially a couple. Their trip back East reveals that Dean cannot commit to Sal any more than he can to his many female lovers, but it is a sweet and telling moment nonetheless. By the end of On the Road, Sal wants to believe he has found “the girl with the pure and innocent dear eyes that I had always

other than play-acting—or maybe they saw it as part of a homoerotic world they already had experienced on their own. In any case, Kerouac’s willingness to include these brief episodes about Lousy and the alluring Ernie Malo in novels published in the 1950s is re markable. It is as if he’s daring his critics to

In On the Road , Kerouac’s alter ego Sal Paradise cannot stop rhapsodizing over the young car thief.

object while privately wagering that most everyone has had early experiences that fall outside the straight and narrow. In On the Road (1957), Kerouac’s alter ego Sal Paradise doesn’t kiss Dean Moriarty or pray for Dean to love him back. However, Sal cannot stop rhapsodizing over the young car thief and womanizer that many would find unsettling. Early in the novel that popularized the Beat Movement, Sal Paradise com pares his new friend to “a young Gene Autry—trim, thin-hipped, blue-eyed, with a real Oklahoma accent—a sideburned hero of the snowy West.” Soon thereafter, caught up in the excitement that Dean has brought to his stagnant existence, Sal acknowl edges the transactional nature of their budding relationship: He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him. He was conning me and I knew it (for room and board and “how-to write,” etc.), and he knew I knew (this has been the basis of our relation ship), but I didn’t care and we got along fine—no pestering, no catering; we tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking new friends. I began to learn from him as much as he probably learned from me. Sal’s infatuation with a known hustler had begun even before they met, when he read letters Dean wrote from a New Mexico reform school to a mutual friend. That friend has no interest in tutoring Dean when he arrives in New York City with his new bride, but Sal is happy to let the restless, oversexed young man take up his time. Dean’s raw physicality and nonsensical bab bling pull Sal back from the edge of despair. On one occasion, after he and Dean have had a falling-out, Sal tries to make a life for himself in Denver, where Dean grew up. But without his friend around, Sal slips into a terrible de pression. With money he gets from a female friend, he takes off for San Francisco and arrives in the middle of the night at the home Dean shares with his second wife: “He came to the door stark naked and it might have been the President knocking for all he cared. He received the world in the raw. ‘Sal!’ he said with genuine awe. ‘I didn’t think you’d actually do it. You’ve fi nally come to me.’ ” It turns out that Dean is miserable in his marriage, in poor health, and desperate to leave. Sal thinks: “I was glad I had November–December 2022

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