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The Drunken Odyssey

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The Drunken Odyssey

Tag Archives: Jack Kerouac

Aesthetic Drift #4: On the Road, After Living in Jack Kerouac’s House, Part 2

18 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Aesthetic Drift

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Tags

Ciara Shuttleworth, Jack Kerouac

Aesthetic Drift #4 by Ciara Shuttleworth

On the Road, After Living in Jack Kerouac’s House, Part 2

When I left off with Part 1 of this blog, I was in Winside, Nebraska, where I lived for a large chunk of my childhood.

After sending Part 1 off to John King, I spent one more day in Winside before getting back on the road, and made a large garden-heavy dinner with Lin Brummels, her son Zeke and his wife Mollie, and her daughter Liz.

LinLizZeke

Lin’s cilantro and spinach were taking over her garden, so I made cilantro hummus and we steamed spinach, grilled huge chicken breasts, and sautéed mushrooms and Brussels sprouts in salt and pepper. I hadn’t seen Zeke since 1998 and Liz in even longer, but I wasn’t surprised that they have turned into exceptionally kind, articulate, funny adults. It also came out that the next people to occupy the old farm house my family had lived in were two women who used it as a brothel, departing quickly once winter hit. The Brummels got a dog out of the deal, named John Dog after the john who’d abandoned it near starvation.

The next morning, I left with a heavy heart, hoping to find myself back in Winside soon. I was stopped by road construction outside Pierce, Nebraska, and photographed Flat Jack with a local girl, holding the “Slow/Stop” sign, who had taken Flat Stanley on her family’s vacation last summer.

OutsidePierceNE

Flat Jack and I drove through O’Neill, “Nebraska’s Irish Capital,” past an abandoned school house at the edge of Bassett, over Bone Creek outside Ainsworth—which is roughly where we hit the 2,000-mile mark of the road trip. Johnstown is a middle-of-nowhere town with a few old pioneer wagons by the exit, a bank and a dry goods store, both of which look long-closed, and an open and active saloon, even though it was before noon. The landscape was changing…more firs, more pines, but fewer trees in general, and not nearly as green. Entering Cherry County, a sign that proclaims, “God’s Own Cow Country.”

I stayed on Nebraska highways as long as possible before cutting through the impoverished Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Groups of men walked down the highway, heads tucked to chests, and a drunk man attempted to kiss a woman on the sidewalk and was pushed aside and lectured as he laughed.

I spent two nights in Spearfish with a friend from the University of Idaho MFA program, Matt Bauman. He teaches five classes of comp a semester and, while still kind, there is now a pervasive sadness about him. He isn’t writing much and isn’t submitting his work for publication. We Googled colleagues from the program, and I was shocked to find that most of our talented group are, like Matt, not publishing. We did a short hike to Roughlock Falls in Black Hill National Forest, went to the lookout tower on Terry’s Peak, and explored Deadwood.

Deadwood

I left hoping that Matt would launch himself back into his writing.

LittleSalmonRiver

My initial plan was to visit a number of friends in Montana, but when Arian Katsimbras, a young poet recently graduated from the Virginia Tech MFA program, suggested I visit him and my fellow University of Idaho alum, Lindsay Wilson, in Reno, I thought, “Why not?”

I put in a 626-mile hard-haul through Wyoming to Salt Lake City where I stayed a night with David and Carol Kranes. On the way, I crossed the North Platte River, which was placid, but a couple dozen miles later, it was narrower and rushing. As I cut through Rawlins, Wyoming, to get on I-80, a deer stood so still in a cemetery, I thought it was a statue. As I was about to look away, the deer bolted across the cemetery and was gone.

I hit Salt Lake in late-afternoon. I am a fan of David Kranes’ work, especially a 1989 novel, Keno Runner.

DavidKranes

He was the artistic director at Sundance Playwrights Lab for fourteen years, which is where he and my father met in 1990. David and Carol immediately poured wine and set out a spring guacamole with chunks of cucumber that I need to request the recipe for.

CarolKranes

We told stories about family friends from the Sundance era, and talked books and travels. There is the bedraggled body of a deer behind a shed in their backyard, headless after guys working on their house must have cut off the head for the antlers! They are still obviously in love and have recently become grandparents. Although this was my first time meeting them, their hospitality made me feel at home and I hope to visit them again soon. I dawdled over breakfast and insisted on taking photos, but then hit the road again, for the 500+ miles to Reno.

I think of northern Nevada as my father’s. Nebraska belongs to the family, but northern Nevada belongs to him. I was ages ten to twelve when we lived in Las Vegas, but Elko and Fallon and the great stretches of desert and scrub will always be in my father’s heart the way the Pacific Ocean is in mine. I stopped at Elko’s Folk Life Center and was given a tour by Artistic Director Meg Glaser.

MegGlaserElko

The gift shop has my father’s chapbooks and a Paul Zarzyski CD for sale, and I saw the stage where both have read their poems. Meg told the story of my father talking their way into Mona’s Ranch, a brothel, to buy t-shirts, and getting out just before they brought the girls down to try and sell an hour or two of old-fashioned Nevada party-love.

In Reno, I checked into the El Dorado for $37 a night.

ArianBookstore

Arian swung by to pick me up and we stopped by the local bookstore before hitting the bars to drink too much whiskey, as poets often do when meeting for the first time.

ArianCiaraBarPic

We talked writing and books, and he told me how gentrified Reno has become since he left, but the bar we ended up at is still authentic, still a place where fights break out on the weekends. He’d bartended for years prior to grad school and it is a life he has no interest in diving back into. At a booth near us, a kid fell asleep, and although the kid’s friends were ignoring him, dancing and drinking, Arian said they would get him home safely, even if they had to carry him to his apartment; that is how Reno is.

JackEnjoysReno

The next morning, I slept in and then wandered with Flat Jack, taking pics.

InReno

That evening I met up at the Depot, a local brewery, with Arian and his girlfriend, Jessica, a law student in Seattle, as well as Lindsay Wilson and the fiction editor for The Meadow.

JessicaArianCiaraLindsay

We called it an early night, at around 9 P.M., as I had another 600+ miles to drive the next day to Grangeville, Idaho.

I left Reno in a torrential downpour, with heavy traffic that pulled off a little ways outside Reno on USA Parkway—there must have been a shift-change at a factory. I hydroplaned three feet into the next lane at one point, even though I was going below the speed limit. Luckily no one was in the lane! By Winnemucca, the rain had all but cleared off. As I crossed over into Oregon, I went through a small town, McDermitt. Feral cats crossed the highway at a leisurely pace and, a few miles further north, two bobcats dashed across the road and into the brush before I had time to stop for a photo.

Although it was a nearly 600 mile drive to Grangeville, and despite the 55mph speed limits through Oregon, the day flew by as I went back and forth between Mountain and Pacific time zones. I’d been on the road for nearly 4,000 miles. Although road-tired, I was still curious about ever-changing landscapes, the people’s faces in towns I coasted through. I was fully enjoying my temporary gypsy existence. The American landscape is diverse, beautiful, and I’d been through lush southern forests, across the rich clay hills of agrarian northern Nebraska, the South Dakota badlands, Utah salt flats, flat stretches of Nevada desert….

On the road, everyone cuts forward, although yesterday is no more gone than where you nighted last. Because I stopped often to take pictures, I’d pass the same semis three times in one day. As a woman traveling alone, there are road-rules: don’t stop at rest stops or gas stations with no other women around, don’t linger anywhere too long or too far from your car, get in your car and drive on if strange men try to talk to you, don’t get pissed when a semi cuts you off to pass a slow RV, because it takes much more to downshift than it does for you to slow in a car, and say yes to the miles and how your mind drifts.

Cocoa, Ciara, Jessi, Luke, Mo, Lone Tree, Nebraska, July 28, 1988

Cocoa, Ciara, Jessi, Luke, Mo, Lone Tree, Nebraska, July 28, 1988.

I thought about how my family packed up an AMC Eagle station wagon in 1988, Cocoa the Irish Wolfhound in the very back, my mother, younger sister and brother in the back seat, and my older sister, Mo, and I sharing the shotgun seat—in charge of music and maps as my father drove—for the trek from Winside, Nebraska, to Las Vegas, Nevada. We did it again when we moved from Nevada to eastern Washington. Even before those epic road trips, my parents piled my older sister and I into a Pinto wagon to move just after Christmas of 1979 from the Bay Area to Fairbury, Nebraska.

I find joy on the road. As I neared Grangeville, with only three nights left of my fifteen-day road trip, I realized my love for the road is the result of family moves that included many photo-stops, bologna and mustard sandwiches, truck stops where our Wolfhound would growl at anyone who came too close. It is the excitement of going somewhere new, and the desire for “what’s next?” once landed.

On the move to Las Vegas, Mo and I Xeroxed copies of a Dwight Yoakam photo and wrote notes on them for hotel housekeeping or to leave on the back of toilets at gas stations. We had practiced his signature, so would sign each as if it were a personal note from Dwight. Having Flat Jack along on my post-Kerouac House road trip gave me a similar giddiness. It was Jack who insisted I find someplace to turn around on many two-lane highways to retrace our steps back to a creek or abandoned house or pretty horizon. Often I’d say something about traveling alone and be corrected: “And Flat Jack.” Flat Jack became a major part of the trip, a curiosity for friends to follow on Instagram and Facebook.

Flat Jack is also the catalyst for a book. Kris Wetherholt of Humanitas Media Publishing saw the #flatjackontheroad images early in my road trip and contacted me through my father. Would I be interested in doing a book of Flat Jack photos and stories from the road? I became even more diligent about snapping pics with Flat Jack!

I hit Grangeville in late-afternoon and Gary Gildner met me at the city park to lead me up the mountain to the home he shares with his wife, Michele. My father and Gary have been friends since before I was born, but I had not seen him in over a decade, and had not met Michele. This visit, like the Winside visit, was important, because I was reconnecting with someone, as an adult, who had known me since I was a child. Gary and I had spoken over the phone and corresponded via email when we published in the same issue of The Southern Review, but to share meals and wine and stories tied it all together.

GaryMicheleGildner

The Gildners set me up in the guesthouse they built above a two-car garage. The wood from the barn they’d torn down to build it lined the walls and framed the windows and bathroom mirror. It was like staying in a country resort. Michele left a TV tray on the bed with nuts and chocolate, a book, lotion (she knew I’d be dried out from the West’s arid heat after months in Florida!), and the wifi password. A true hostess and great cook, Michele made me feel at home… as if I’d known her for years. She is a graceful and lovely former ballerina. I spent as much time, if not more, with Michele as with Gary. The memories that came up when trading stories were inspiring, and I plan on writing an essay about the six months my family lived in Gary’s Des Moines home while he was a writer-in-residence at Michigan State University and my father was visiting writer at Drake University.

DeerAtGildeners

After two glorious nights with the Gildners—hiking, writing from place to place on their property, and spending afternoons and evenings with them, I hit the road again for a day in Moscow, Idaho, where I went to grad school.

My first stop was Mary Blew’s house. I correspond with Mary regularly, so there wasn’t much catch-up to do, but she is someone I will never get enough of. Mary and I sat on her porch with whiskey, talked for hours before I headed up to the university campus to say hello to Yvonne Sertich, who had been my boss when I was Programs Manager for Executive Education, and then to Terri and Mike Gaffney’s home, where I would spend the night. After a glass of wine, we headed for Moscow’s Art Walk.

Annie, Mike, and Terri.

Annie, Mike, and Terri.

I met friend and fictioneer, Annie Lampman, at the Prichard Art Gallery, and we swung by photographer Nick Beymer’s exhibition briefly before meeting Buddy and Camie Levy for drinks at the Garden, and meeting back up with the Gaffneys for dinner at Maialina.

BuddyLevy

Jack (left) and Buddy Levy.

I ran into countless friends and acquaintances along the way and was reminded how warm and welcoming Moscow is. Why did I think one night would be enough? It was a terrific way to end the road trip, a mini-reunion/mini-homecoming before driving the final miles to eastern Washington.

BackInEasternWA

Now that I have landed in the scabland of eastern Washington north of Moses Lake, I am beginning to write toward the Humanitas Media Publishing book, and will need to go through the 1,000+ photos I took on the road. I am also hunting down the original copyrights for the two Flat Jack images I used…to gain permission for use in the book. Humanitas Media plans on donating a portion of the proceeds to the Kerouac Project of Orlando.

I am also pulling together a chapbook anthology, through my father’s Bunchgrass Press, of poems from a group of writers that significantly influenced my work and life while I lived at the Kerouac House. The chapbook anthology will be printed in an edition of about 100 on 100% cotton paper and will not be for sale, will only be available from the writers involved. This treasure will forever bind together, through poetry, some of my favorite people.

The road trip was the perfect way to extend the Kerouac House residency. I am grateful to Dona Black, Bret and Susan and Donovan Gottschall, Lin Brummels, Zeke and Mollie Brummels, Liz Daehnke, Carolyn Rabe, Bill Burris, Jim Hansen, Matt Bauman, David and Carol Kranes, Arian Katsimbras, Lindsay Wilson, Jessica Berry, Gary and Michele Gildner, Terri and Mike Gaffney, Annie Lampman, Buddy and Camie Levy, and so many others for the beds, meals, drinks, stories, and joy. I am also grateful to my folks, Red and Kate, who are my biggest fans and supporters, who are part of everything I do, and who will sleep soundly again now that I am off the road. Roughly 4,500 miles over fifteen days are behind me, but the projects will keep the residency and road trip—and Flat Jack—alive for some time.

_______

Photo by Drew Perlmutter.

Photo by Drew Perlmutter.

Ciara Shuttleworth was born in San Francisco and grew up in Nebraska, Nevada, and Washington state. Her poetry has been published in journals and anthologies, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Confrontation, The New Yorker, The Norton Introduction to Literature 11e, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review. Shuttleworth received an MFA in poetry from University of Idaho, a BFA in painting/drawing from San Francisco Art Insitute, and a BA in studio art from Gustavus Adolphus College. She was a 2014 Jerome Foundation Fellow at the Anderson Center at Tower View, and The Jack Kerouac Project of Orlando’s 51st resident at Jack Kerouac House.

Aesthetic Drift #3: On the Road, After Living in Jack Kerouac’s House, Part 1

04 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Aesthetic Drift

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Tags

Ciara Shuttleworth, flatjack, Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Aesthetic Drift #3 by Ciara Shuttleworth

On the Road, After Living in Jack Kerouac’s House, Part 1

I am in Winside, Nebraska, the place my family called home from 1983-1988. I am sitting on a porch owned by family friend Lin Brummel, and her dog, Pickles, is beside me, enjoying the shade but ever-aware of the cats and anything else that moves. I am six days into a two-week road trip from Orlando, Florida—where I was the 51st writer-in-residence at the Kerouac House—to eastern Washington.

on the roadI planned the trip for two reasons. My friend Dona Black lives in Hinesville, GA, and said it would be a shame for me to be in the southeast without visiting her. The other reason was because I do not yet have the money to live and write in Winside for months…and I wanted to visit… I wanted to see what would come from a journey back to the place my family always meant to return to.

I’ve never owned a car—have always lived places where a car wasn’t necessary. When I went on Expedia to look at car rentals, Alamo was priced at $10/day! I immediately booked two weeks. The next day I went back online to extend the trip and the prices were around $100/day—Jack Kerouac’s spirit leaned on Expedia’s pricing for one day to give me an opportunity to go on the road. I am certain of this.

At my final dinner at the Kerouac House, a friend suggested I make a “Flat Jack” to take on the road, to take pics of Jack along the way. So I printed out some photos, backed them with 100% cotton drawing paper, and started out. Leaving the House was emotional. After three months, I have become close with a number of people, and I have enjoyed the warmth and support of a thriving literary community. I’ve also come to love Jack, his spirit, his work, his kindness.

Flat Jack Kerouac at Kerouac House

I drove to Hinesville on Friday, May 29, and Dona and I went for seafood. Crawfish are not to my taste, I discovered. We wandered Savannah all day Saturday, snapping pics with Flat Jack, which I posted with the hashtag #flatjackontheroad on Instagram and Facebook. I left early Sunday morning and drove roads with names like Horse Stamp Church Road and Crooked River and Wirebrush. There were armadillos, shells cracked open like eggs, on the sides of the roads. When the fog burned off, vultures swung slow circles against a too-blue morning sky.

The dirt was redder the further west I drove. I listened to the radio for a bit, catching 100.9 having a “Don Williams Weekend,” the “Gentle Giant’s” songs and other old country hits like “Sleeping Single in a Double Bed” and Charlie Pride’s “I Don’t Think She’s in Love Anymore.” A spattering of rain and such lushness as I drove through Alabama… Red Cliff Church Road, Fire Tower Road, and so many churches along the way, especially once on Highway 96. Confederate flags hung as high as American flags. Near Tupelo I was tempted to drive out of the way to Elvis Presley Lake, but didn’t.

In Kansas City, Missouri, I stayed with an artist from my San Francisco days, Bret Gottschall, and his wife Susan and almost-two-year-old red-headed son Donovan. As we sat with beers in the backyard, Bret picked up a firefly and I commented how small it was. “They are always this size,” he told me. “You were just smaller when catching them in Nebraska.” In the morning he picked up his guitar and sang “I Wanna Be Your Dad” to Donovan. The Gottschall visit, as with the visit with Dona, was wonderful.

I was about 50 miles into Nebraska when the landscape hit me—I felt a comfort, a kinship.

flat jack elkhorn riverSan Francisco is the place I consider most “home” as an adult, but Kid Ciara is still in Nebraska with skinned knees and wild red hair. There is an unabashed curiosity to how people approach you here. There are ponderosas and box elders and elms and small creeks, old farm houses and outbuildings in various stages of decay, and a sky that is at once close and so, so large.

My first stop as I drove into Winside was the Elementary School, where I spoke with the young principal and the replacement teachers for Mrs. Puls (first grade) and Mrs. Mann (fourth grade) about the bus driver who was let go when she retook her driving test to discover she was legally blind. I walked the halls, through the gym/cafeteria where I got a concussion when another student stepped on my shoe lace while we ran laps, and the library where I watched the Challenger explosion.

I wandered downtown Winside, taking pictures.

WinsideI was struck by how people move: with purpose. They don’t move fast, but there is a precision to it—many of these folks are farmers, and they understand both stillness and necessary motion. These are solid people, and they choose to live here, take pride in what they do. Their offspring get multiple degrees, and a few return. Winside is a rural community, yes, but one with a lot of success stories. There are people who don’t remember my family aside from our Wolfhound at the time, affable and docile Lefty, who was 185 pounds.

I left town and headed to Lin’s house, taking roads of thick gravel over red clay. I was able to drive straight in on the gravel roads yesterday, but today I had to take 35 over a mile before cutting in because half of Lin’s road is pure mud after an early-morning thunder and lightning storm. When I pulled up the driveway, Lin came out to greet me, still beautiful, and walked me around the property, lush right now with spring grass and flowers.

Today I went by the old Hansen place, where my family lived in the 1980s.

HansenPlace from the RoadIt is in disrepair, and Jim Hansen, the son of Lila, the woman we rented from for $50/month, uses it to milk goats (they make cheeses and butter) and birth goats and chickens.

the house 3There were goats on the back porch and all sorts of usable equipment and set-aside items throughout the house. It had once seemed so large to me, but now I see it for what it is: an old farmhouse with the necessary space to live comfortably. The sink I stood on a chair to wash dishes at. The old oil heater is still there, but detached, and they use a wood-burning stove now instead.

the house 2There is a bed in the parlor that Jim said is where he’ll go to if his wife, Julie, ever kicks him out of the big house they built just a bit down the road. Hansen said he would clean up the place if I ever wanted to rent it, so I’ll keep his number in hopes…because I wanted to clean everything out, buy a couple of old couches for the living room, an old brass bed for the room that had been my parents, and a pic of Samuel Beckett for the bathroom (my father hung one there and I was terrified to look at it at night, peeing in the dark or begging my older sister to go with me). I wanted to clear off the porch and get a couple old rocking chairs and sit there watching the next lightning storm roll in. I wanted neighbors coming in through the back door, without knocking, just like they used to.

The property has changed, too. Outbuildings have been subtracted and added. Jim Hansen has had to thin the row of ponderosas along the road, and the lilacs and tiger lilies have been torn out and replanted around their house.

The Black BarnThe black barn is now red. The old apple tree with the tire swing is gone. The circle driveway is overgrown.

I drove a mile down the road to the Rabe’s and Carolynn’s sister Cheryle was there with the blonde grandkids she adopted when babies, and Art, the youngest of Carolynn’s oldest daughter, Wendy. These kids are Nebraska—wrestling, playing with ear-mite-ridden cats, muddy-kneed and running as they want around dozens of acres. We played at Jim and Carolynn Rabe’s place often when I was a kid, and there wasn’t much changed: hay baled like great loaves of bread and the smell of hogs. Carolynn now works at the meat locker downtown, and Jim works for the county, so both were gone. I drove downtown to catch up briefly with Carolynn and then stopped by the Winside Museum where Bill Burris was scraping and painting in preparation for the Q125 celebration later this month.

Winside MuseumSo here I am… on Lin Brummels’ porch, overwhelmed and nostalgic for the time when all this was mine. There is a place I visit in dreams. I am driving down a gravel road, fishtailing on gravel when I go too fast, sinking a bit into the soft spots. There are farm houses every couple miles. In the dreams, I feel this place is home. I know the turns, the hills, the small copses of trees. I miss the Pacific Ocean every day, but today, as I drove country roads just to be on them, I realized the place in those dreams is Winside, and that I have retained so much of this place: how different the gravel is here—thick and fine and varying shades of red and orange, the smell of the dust and the livestock and crops, how despite the hills it seems flat because the sky is so blue and close. I feel comfortable and safe. I feel at home and know that when I leave in another day or two, I will yearn for here as much as I do for the Pacific. And I will find my way home again and again, because that is what Winside is.

_______

Photo by Drew Perlmutter.

Photo by Drew Perlmutter.

Ciara Shuttleworth was born in San Francisco and grew up in Nebraska, Nevada, and Washington state. Her poetry has been published in journals and anthologies, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Confrontation, The New Yorker, The Norton Introduction to Literature 11e, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review. Shuttleworth received an MFA in poetry from University of Idaho, a BFA in painting/drawing from San Francisco Art Insitute, and a BA in studio art from Gustavus Adolphus College. She was a 2014 Jerome Foundation Fellow at the Anderson Center at Tower View, and The Jack Kerouac Project of Orlando’s 51st resident at Jack Kerouac House.

Episode 114: Maya Sloan!

24 Sunday Aug 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Craft of Fiction Writing, Episode, Ghost writing, Jack Kerouac

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F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, High Before Homeroom, Jack Kerouac, Maya Sloan, Rich Kids of Instagram, The Kerouac House, The Kerouac Project, Thomas Warming

Episode 114 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

On this week’s show, I talk to fiction writer and ghost writer extraordinaire, Maya Sloan.

Maya SloanTEXTS DISCUSSED

Rich Kids of Instagram

High Before Homeroom

 NOTES

Learn more about the Kerouac House here.


Episode 114 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In Boozo Veritas #30: In Tobacco Veritas

24 Monday Feb 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in In Boozo Veritas

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In Boozo Veritas, Jack Kerouac, Smoking, Teege Braune

In Boozo Veritas #30 by Teege Braune

In Tobacco Veritas

Like many children, my elementary school public education was peppered with fear-based demonizations of multifarious social evils. The DARE program taught us that there are only slight differences between marijuana, cocaine, and heroin, and while the legal status of alcohol and tobacco made these vices more complicated, we were nevertheless made to understand that indulging in either would most likely lead to death or a wasted life. I grew up believing that these temptations made the adult world a very frightening place indeed, and swore that I would never partake in any of these life shattering behaviors.

For many years I found it easy to stick to my guns on this issue. Growing up in midwestern suburbs, not many people were offering my pre-adolescent self controlled substances. My parents drank an occasional can of beer or glass of wine and explained reasonably that alcohol in moderation was okay for adults. The only people I knew who smoked were my grandparents, and they did not make it appear particularly glamorous. Through most of my childhood I thought of smoking as something only old people did.

The fact that the same girl who won the DARE essay contest only a year earlier became the first of our peers to become a pot head was a class joke in middle school. If for a moment in my preteens my parents’ divorce or simply the awkwardness of puberty had me desiring to become a juvenile delinquent, my strict disciplinarian of a mother squelched it before I got started. Furthermore, most of my friends were like-minded innocents whose social activities largely revolved around church youth groups, and the friends I had who did start smoking pot also began huffing. The obvious damage this was doing to their young brains was a better deterrent against drugs than DARE had ever been and the source of many disturbing memories to this day.

Eventually, I found my way around to all three vices: alcohol, tobacco, and drugs. Interestingly, smoking was the first to pose a real temptation. I smoked my first cigarette at the age of thirteen and found the experience utterly unappealing. Years went by before I ever considered smoking again. Then in high school I began to idolize the cinematic icons of other eras and while looking at pictures of Gary, Cooper, James Dean, and Paul Newman, it occurred to me that if done correctly, smoking could be very very cool.

JAMES DEAN IN TIMES SQUAREpublished in "Made In America"

I knew I would never be as handsome as these men, but I thought that perhaps by emulating their personal style, I could obtain something of their je ne sais quoi.

The real clincher came when my dad bought me a copy of Jack Kerouac’s San Francisco Blues and shortly after I read On the Road. I wanted Jack Kerouac to be my friend and my mentor. I had actual dreams in which I would meet him in some chance encounter, and he would be so impressed with me and my writing, he’d ask me if I wanted to go on a road trip with him. In my poems and journal entries I replaced all the commas with dashes and began to model my whole persona around him. I started combing my hair back instead of letting it hang down over my forehead and bought a jacket that looked similar to the one he’s wearing in this famous photograph. I knew that without cigarettes I was missing an important detail and understood that at some point I too would start smoking.

Untitled 1

I continued to hold it off for awhile. I knew my mom wouldn’t tolerate it. I didn’t have any older siblings to buy cigarettes for me, and continued to be involved in youth groups though my belief in Christianity was quickly waning. I smoked my second cigarette the night I graduated from high school, and though it was as unpleasant as the first, I continued to smoke throughout that summer until the dizzy buzz of nicotine overshadowed the hacking cough that came with inhaling huge billows of smoke. I bought my first pack of cigarettes at the campus convenience store my first weekend of college. It only cost two dollars and fifty cents. It took me three or four days to finish that pack, but as soon as it was gone, I bought another one. I was already hooked.

It’s ironic that by the time I was a full blown nicotine addict my obsession with Jack Kerouac had already begun to abate. It didn’t matter at that point. Most of my friends smoked and joining them was the best way to distance myself from the goody-two-shoes church boy I had been in high school. Many of my peers had been smoking at least occasionally for two or three years at that point, but no one needed to know that I had only smoked my second cigarette a few months before.

Three years ago, almost to the day, after numerous failed attempts, I finally kicked the habit. For the first time I was quitting because I truly wanted to be free of the addiction, not because I thought I should. Smoking had ceased be enjoyable. Lighting up was merely a compulsion, one I began to hate especially when I couldn’t catch my breath even after the most minimal exertion. That being said, at the peak of my withdrawal, I felt deeply sad like I was losing a fundamental part of my identity, like I was saying goodbye to a dear friend.

I’ll cave once in a while, usually after a few drinks, and bum a smoke from a friend. One or two puffs is all I can handle and the next day I feel congested and hung over. Typically, if I feel the need to smoke at all, I prefer toasted cavendish from my briarwood pipe and even that is rare. Usually I find the odor of a smoky bar or a passing stranger’s cigarette intolerable as though I had never been a smoker at all, but every now and then it catches me off guard, and the scent of tobacco brings a wave of nostalgia over me. I’ll remember the mystically enticing way cigarettes smelled when I first developed a taste for them, when each one helped to identify a little more with my hero.

___________

teege

Teege Braune (episode 72, episode 75, episode 77) is a writer of literary fiction, horror, essays, and poetry. Recently he has discovered the joys of drinking responsibly. He may or may not be a werewolf.

In Boozo Veritas #1: The Rum Also Rises

05 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Drinking, In Boozo Veritas

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Drinking, Hemingway, In Boozo Veritas, Jack Kerouac, Teege Braun

In Boozo Veritas #1 by Teege Braune

The Rum Also Rises

I had intentions of becoming a writer long before it ever occurred to me to become a drunk. Long before alcohol held the appeal of the forbidden, sips of my parents’ beer, wine, and champagne merely tasted bitter or sickeningly cloying. Written words, were my only forays into the intoxicating and dangerous. Fantasy fiction was an escape from a reality that found me simultaneously outgoing yet socially awkward and unpopular. I created characters who overcame monsters in make-believe worlds to compensate for ritualistic embarrassment at playground sports. Moreover, I found that words spilling out of my big, overly-talkative mouth were often the source of ridicule whereas words I wrote on paper seemed to inspire praise.

As I matured and graduated from young-adult fantasy to the twentieth-century canon, it was the escape of literature that introduced me to the escape of alcohol. Long before I’d consumed an entire beer, I idolized drunken men of letters like Jack Kerouac and Ernest Hemingway. If travels to exotic locations like New York, San Francisco, Paris, and Pamplona were the initial appeal of On the Road and The Sun Also Rises, alcohol seemed like the best way to enjoy such remote places. The logical conclusion to which I came was simple: if I couldn’t visit the lands I longed to see, I could at least drink in my own boring, midwestern town. If nothing else, classic male American writers teach us one thing, that the train to adventure, sex, and literary praise is fueled by booze.

Though my parents had never demonized alcohol, they rarely indulged in more than a glass of wine or beer with dinner and never kept much around the house. The majority of my social interactions revolved around church youth groups. Thus, I had made up my resolve to get drunk quite awhile before I finally found an opportunity to actually do so. Unlike most teenagers, I had graduated high school before I finally imbibed, but the summer before my freshman year of college I had my jaunt.

One evening I accepted the invitation to stay the night with a friend whose older acquaintance had bought us a veritable cornucopia of beverages that were never meant to be consumed in the same sitting. We enjoyed wine coolers while watching Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, forced down beer, for which I had yet to develop a taste, and then, already thoroughly tipsy, retired to the back porch where we smoked cigars as we passed around a bottle of spiced rum that we chased with Mountain Dew. Slumped, relaxed, and feeling, at least for a few more minutes, really good, I imagined myself in a Parisian cafe with Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley or some roadside bar with Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise. At last I’m becoming a real writer, I thought.

THE RUM ALSO RISES

As the back porch, my hometown, and entire life to that point vortexed around me, I felt myself being transported like Dorothy in her twister from a black and white, straight-laced, church-going youth into a colorful and romantic boozy adulthood. I promised myself that I would document this momentous occasion lest I forget any detail in the sober light of morning, but as my brain sloshed inside my skull, a few illegible lines about feeling dizzy and horny were all I managed to scratch out before puking into the backyard. I shrugged off the advances of a predatory and unappealing woman ten years my senior who seemed intent on stealing my virginity despite the vomit dribbling off my chin and crawled off to sleep in a hammock that rocked like a schooner adrift in a rough ocean. I fitfully slept and woke continually to puke over the side of my vessel till morning when, still drunk, I drove home and with a bottle of aspirin, greasy breakfast, and several tall glasses of water nursed my first hangover.

So, you may be asking, did your young and naive narrator learn the folly of alcoholic excess? Did he realize that literary inspiration does not arise, without fail, from the murky depths of a besotted imagination? Did I in my dry-mouthed and head-pounding misery swear off the sauce forever. No, I did not! Later that very night as I, only seventeen and already fully recovered, spun my tale of over-indulgence at youth group to peers who had yet to taste the secret pleasures and sufferings of alcoholic depravity, I exaggerated my induction into adult fun with romantic flourish. Even then I was already chronicling my life of literary decadence and planning my next binge.

___________

Teege Braun 5

Teege Braune is a writer of literary fiction, horror, essays, and poetry. Recently he has discovered the joys of drinking responsibly. He may or may not be a werewolf.

Episode 49: Monica Wendel (Redux)!

18 Saturday May 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Drinking, Episode, Poetry

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Chelsey Clammer, Craft of Writing, Creative Writing, Drinking, Jack Kerouac, Kerouac House, Monica Wendel, Poetry, The Dharma Bums, Writing Podcast

Episode 49 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing, literature, and drinking, is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

On this week’s show, I interview my friend, the poet Monica Wendel, who is in residency at The Kerouac House,

Monica on Jack's steps

Photo by Ashley Inguanta

plus Chelsey Clammer writes about Marya Hornbacher’s Madness.

Chelsey Clammer

Texts Discussed

The Dharma Bums

On the Road

No Apocalypse

Madness

Notes

Two great Orlando events are coming up this week:

1. On Wednesday, May 22, 7 PM, the fiction writer Colin Winnette will be reading in the sOFT eXPOSURE reading series.  Get details here.

2. On Saturday, May 25th, please come to Monica’s farewell reading at The Kerouac House.  Get details here.

See the Glossary’s Film of David Foster Wallace’s This is Water:

Episode 49 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing, literature, and drinking, is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

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