Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [37]
But for some reason, I took a chance and bought that book and Dharma Bums anyway. And once I got into them, I found a window into a way of being that had never occurred to me before: madness.
“The only people for me are the mad ones,” Kerouac wrote, doing for the word “mad” what Holden Caulfield had done for “goddam.” “The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars!”
There it was. The missing integer: a wired, crazy energy that would cause me to live every moment at a higher frequency. I had been sleepwalking through life, a follower, a sheep. But now I could see that it was madness that would set me apart. It was madness that would wake up Bob and make him take notice.
“Here’s to the crazy ones,” Kerouac wrote. “The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers … The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo … Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
Perfect. This was so exactly a description of the new me: one of those people who never said a commonplace thing and was crazy enough to change the world. There was no way Bob would be able to resist an amazing maniac like me whose melodic laugh was “a triumphant call to the demon god.” In fact, Bob might have to get in line. Plenty of artsy souls who were younger, hipper, and a lot cuter than Jack Kerouac’s old-guy author’s photo would probably want to be with me, too. I would be their inspiration, their muse. Though, of course, I would be an artist, too. I would put on my leather jewelry and my thrift store wide-brimmed hat and go burn burn burning like Roman spiders across the stars.
Having arrived at a plan, I felt I needed to get it all done instantly.
“ ‘Sal, we gotta go and never stop going till we get there,’ ” I underlined in my copy of On the Road. “ ‘Where we going, man?’ ‘I don’t know but we gotta go.’ ”
I was ready. Well, almost ready, since I couldn’t apply for my driver’s license for another year. It was not going to be as easy to go screaming into the night without access to a car. It was also not going to be as easy to do something else that was clearly essential for my new identity: hit the bars. But dammit, that wouldn’t hold back a mad genius like me! Especially now that I knew that what I had to do to join my artistic destiny was get roaring drunk. And not half-assed, like the time I siphoned off some of my father’s Cutty Sark. No, I was planning on full-out “barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, and running—that’s the way to live” drunk. I would reach “the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows … where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiances shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven.”
Okay, maybe I had no idea what any of that actually meant. But as long as I didn’t have to take a test on it or listen to any jazz trumpeters in short-sleeved shirts play mosquito music during it, I could see no reason why it wouldn’t all work out perfectly.
Getting mad roaring drunk was my main priority that night when Debby and I took off on our crazy mad bikes to attend an amazing maniac