in college. I never finished; too rambling, too episodic, a self-indulgent string of adventures. Back then I was reading contemporary fiction—Bright Lights, Big City; Less Than Zero—the self-indulgent, episodic books of my own generation. And after college my reading list tended toward old-guard gays: James Baldwin, Frank O’Hara, Gore Vidal. With time to kill, and curious about what sent my father west, I decided Kerouac was worth a fresh look.
Ten minutes later I had plowed through two chapters, utterly absorbed. The beginning of On the Road recounts the narrator’s introduction to Dean Moriarty, an ex-con who blazes into New York full of wild energy, charming the intellectuals and the junkies alike. I knew the basics of the Kerouac legend, knew that his books were thinly fictionalized versions of his real life, and that Dean was based on Neal Cassady, who’d been a muse to the young writer. But that summary only hinted at what Kerouac must have felt for Cassady. From the moment Dean answers the door “in his shorts,” rambling on about sex, “the one holy and important thing in his life,” one idealized, sensual description after another piles up: thin and trim hipped and blue eyed and golden, “a sideburned hero of the snowy West,” “a western kinsman of the sun.” Dean can’t even park a car without being described as a “wrangler.” The Kerouac stand-in who narrates the book goes on at length about his “heartbreaking new friend”—heartbreaking!— describing him as a long-lost brother with a “straining muscular sweaty neck” whose “dirty workclothes clung to him so gracefully.” I’d never heard anyone depict a kinsman so ecstatically. Sure, there are mentions of Dean’s wife, but she’s labeled a “whore” and dispatched pretty quickly. Sure, Dean and Sal make an attempt at a double date, but the girls never show and the guys don’t seem to care. Right there in the first few pages of Kerouac’s most famous book—the one that inspired a billion red-blooded boys, my father among them—an undeniable erotic current pulsed along the surface.
When I finally looked up from the book, my eyes landed on a guy staring at me from the next table. He was my age, maybe a couple years younger, dressed in an Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt and a baseball cap. His gaze was strong and direct as I took in his features—brown skin and black eyebrows, eyes a bit close together, big nose. Indian or Arab, perhaps. I looked away and then back. This time, he raised his eyebrows and pressed his lips into a smile. The nod I sent back to him was very cool, but inside, I was already percolating.
“Kerouac?” A Midwestern accent: care-whack.
“Yeah. On the Road. Just checking it out.” I heard the hint of apology in my voice, caught reading a book I’d once dismissed.
“I’ve read all his stuff.” He stood up and moved toward my table, lugging along an enormous backpack, a fleece pullover and the Lonely Planet guide to Nepal. He wore tan cargo pants with zippered pockets staggered down the legs and those newfangled hiking boots, the ones that look like basketball sneakers crossbred with the brown-suede Earth shoes of my childhood. So maybe this wasn’t a cruise. He was just one of those perennial backpackers, happy for the excuse to converse with a stranger.
He shook my hand firmly, asked my name, told me his. I wrote it down in my journal later, but I couldn’t quite make out my scrawl—it was either Rich or Rick. He asked if he could sit down, and I said yes, not sure it was such a good idea because as soon as he dropped himself into the seat across from me, he launched a monologue about his round-the-world exploits. He’d say, “Then I went to Micronesia. Have you been there? Jamie, you have to make a point to go. It’s unbelievable,” and continue on about a cavern, or a reef, or a ravine that was “the best example of its kind in the whole world.” Personal history came next. He’d been working on an MBA but ditched the program to create a business plan at a dot-com start-up, “installing servers for the B2B segment—that’s business-to-business?” I didn’t understand the specifics. Mention business and my brain shuts down. He said, “I saved a substantial amount of income, and then I said good-bye.”
“Cashed out your stock options?”
“No, I didn’t wait that long. The writing is on the wall. All those geeks will live to regret it, working sixty hours a week, waiting around for the big payoff. Get the money now, Jamie, ’cause the Internet honeymoon is quickly drawing to a close.”
“You sound pretty sure about that,” I said, thinking about Woody’s job at Digitent, a little San Francisco company also funded by venture capital, also providing B2B services I didn’t particularly understand. They were gearing up for their initial public offering. I hated the long hours that Woody spent at their chaotic, cubicle-pocked office, but he was firm in his plan to work hard now and cash in later.
“Jamie, I’m telling you—do you work for a pre-IPO?” There was something disconcerting about the way Rick kept using my name, all the while keeping his eyes intently locked onto mine. I decided to cast out a lead.
“No, but my boyfriend does.”
“Oh.” A pause. Something had registered. “Trust me, Jamie. Tell him don’t wait around. There’ll be a lot of disappointed wannabe millionaires any day now.” Then he leaned forward and lowered his voice. “You guys should just get out there and travel together. It’s better to travel with someone, anyway. It gets lonely. You can imagine.”
“It’s a lonely planet, right?”
He smiled at me. “You’re a fun guy.”
“But I’m not much of a traveler. I’ve been in San Francisco lockdown for years.”
“San Francisco’s a fun city.” His voice had now, most certainly, gotten flirtatious.
I responded in kind. “I have a lot of fun there.”
“Yeah? You like to have fun?”
“Who doesn’t?”
“I bet you and I could have some fun, Jamie.”
I cleared my throat. “Planning on visiting?”
“Yeah, actually. In a few months.” He leaned in even closer. “But we could seize the moment.”
“This moment?”
“What do you say?” He looked around, lowered his voice. “I need to use the bathroom. How about you?”
Bingo.
We stood at side-by-side urinals, blocked by a metal divider, though I knew he was pulling on his cock just like I was. As soon as the room cleared, we both stepped back and showed each other what we had. His was longer than mine, skinnier, uncut. He looked at me through narrowed eyes, nodded his head slowly and mouthed “Nice,” no longer the conversationalist, suddenly Mr. Sex. It seemed funny that I’d ever thought him to be straight. He had the gay-pornspeak down pat. He stopped stroking for a moment and let his cock lay swollen on his open palm to be examined like something on a deli scale. “I’d sure love for you to take care of this,” he whispered. “I’m going to be traveling for a long time.”
“Sounds good, buddy,” I said, speaking the ’speak, too.
He quickly checked over his shoulder, then motioned me into a stall. We squeezed in and locked the door and were immediately upon each other—no kissing, just a lot of groping. Frenzied and clumsy. Beyond the metal stall door I heard footsteps and voices. I thought about my bags, unattended out by the sink, with my father’s keepsakes inside. I imagined a quick-handed thief making off with them, or an anxious airport security guard calling in the bomb squad.
Rick stepped onto the toilet seat so that only one pair of our legs would be visible—a ploy I remembered well from my World of Trade days. He crouched and leaned forward, sucking my dick into his mouth with an audible slurp, one hand on my ass, the other on his own cock, which he was pumping madly. I shoved from my hips, hoping to get hard again in his mouth, which was dripping saliva into my pubic hair. I thought about the time my friend Ian got gonorrhea in his cock, transmitted from the back of someone’s throat. I thought about having to sit through a six-hour plane ride with a damp crotch. I wondered if Rick’s flight was delayed, too, or if he was in a rush, needing to finish this off quickly. Voices shot over from the urinals, two men