On the Road
Lawrence Ypil
Dog-ears in the wrong notebook
IF only I were cooler, hipper, more reckless, I know I would already have read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road when I was younger: in a car, on a boat, sitting on the edge of a port while a storm rages, while I am waiting for a boat that will never arrive, at least not that night. In the the backseat of a car. On a bed, in a room, on a couch, I am merely crashing into. At a table. Across a gas station. On a wooden bench. In front of a convenience store. In a city I didn’t know the name of, because I had lost count of how many towns the bus had passed since the last city I knew the name of, and I didn’t really bother finding out because I was merely passing through.
I would have cared less. I would have taken things more lightly. I would have thought less about what I was just about to say and would have actually said to them, and would have made more enemies from what I had to say than from what I chose to remain silent about. And I definitely would have read Jack Kerouac’s book On the Road. And my copy would not have been the Penguin classics edition I had borrowed from the library, but a tattered pocket book version I would have picked up in the one used bookstore of the city, its pages brittle, its ink faded, dog-ears all over. Or something I would have pocketed for myself in one of those beach resorts owned by foreigners scattered all over the islands that had a library which no one really used except by other foreigners who brought books they were reading because their idea of a vacation always involved one or two hours of reading every day. And once they finished reading it, they would always leave it behind, because why carry back a book one had already finished reading? Why take a book with you when you knew that there would always be another version of it available in the library back home? There would always be a library back home. There would always be other people who had read the book and would have an old copy of it lying somewhere in their house, under a couch, behind a shelf, stuck between copies of newspapers from a year back they had always thought of throwing away but never got to. Besides the locals never really liked to read when they were on vacation. At home, yes. And sometimes. But never when the family was there anyway, to hang around with, to catch up with the news with at the swimming pool, in the hotel room, in the car. Why read a book when one could talk one’s heart out? Or read a crowd instead of a page, or haggle for the lowest prices of bags or necklaces, or gather around the guitar an uncle had thankfully brought with him and sing. I would have sung too, if as a child I was a bit more reckless, if I had such an uncle too.
Besides, books were never meant to be thrown away — at least not where I am from. If they are bought then they are kept. If they are borrowed, then they are returned to their owners, sometimes. And because they are almost always more expensive relative to almost everything else — lunch buffets, movie showings, shirts — then they are almost always just flipped through and then returned to the shelves. They are never written on. They are almost always when bought covered in plastic. A book well-used is one that’s read from cover to cover. They are lent to cousins. They are meant to last at least a generation, if not more. If I had felt the urge read to Kerouac’s On the Road when I was younger, if I were cooler, how much would it have cost? Would I have found a copy?
But because I have become what I have become, and because I am or am not what I would have been or could have been, I am reading On the Road, while I am sitting at table having coffee, overlooking a well-tended field of grass where a cat carefully steps over a temporary straw fence to press its nose against the palm held open by a stranger. It is Sunday. The grass is still wet from the previous night’s downpour.
Kerouac’s sleek sentences rapel themselves towards an end that may or may never arrive, but that’s completely fine, because I realize the end is not really the point of the book. The point, it seems, is all this moving-moving, all this jumping from one town to the next, from one city to the next, then back, until it is either exhaustion or desperation that forces the man to stay for awhile in towns that remind me of the last city I had just lived in. But he never stays so long. He always manages to find a reason to start moving again — or maybe that is the result of Kerouac’s sentences: never giving enough of a reason to stay within the sentence which is never enough really, always propeling us to the next, and the next. Kerouac who writes about a man that is really himself, who I want to say: stop, just stop. Perhaps I might be so reckless to say, I won’t finish it. Perhaps I might possess the brashness of youth to say, I might.
