On the Road

I went to see the USA in my Chevrolet, but couldn’t see anything because of the schmucks in their trucks.

I came of age reading Kerouac, whose name still fills my head with that long lost American night of the open road that went on forever, the smell of old cars, the mystery of neon lights from road houses with 50 cent beer and juke boxes that took nickels.

There are still a few, scattered and hidden scraps of old America left in places like South Florida, the kitschy shell shops and diners and dives and tourist cabins and weathered marinas and clap-board fish shacks and fruit stands, but like the arteries of my generation, the clogged roads are increasingly lined with Sheratonhyattholidayinnmarriot mountains of concrete corporate sameness and the plastic sign forests of frenzied franchise foodmongers blaze like ugly flowers forever and ever, road without end, without variation, without sense of place. Sometimes, cruising in the sealed and air conditioned car, if you can take your eyes off the roadrage racers with the ghetto wheels and megawatts of distorted bass and cell phone gabbing drivers; the videoscreens glowing behind blacked out windows long enough, you can see the clear turquoise and aqua waters of the Florida Keys.

The streets of Key West’s old town are lined with American Victorian architecture of the Southern sort, slowly and gently decaying and peeling in the soup thick and stewpot hot air, but a cruise ship the size of Cincinnati fills those streets with sunburn-red tourists by the thousands, more shabbily dressed than the homeless men who sleep in the vacant lot next to the VFW hall on Elizabeth street where feral chickens peck in the dirt for bugs. Somewhere in the old harbor someone is playing a guitar and trying to sound like Dylan but you can only hear it through the BAROOM BOOM – BABOOM BOOM from someone’s fully pimped, chrome wheeled and purple Japanese bubble car with Pokemon eyes weaving slowly through the Excursions and Navigators and Hummers and drunks on scooters while somewhere in the dark, out behind the honky-tonk hell, the vast and blood-warm Gulf of Mexico glows softly in the moonlight.