The troubling thing about the Beats is that they are a right bunch of earnest prigs, clicking their fingers and calling each other “man” and proselytising about “negroes”. This was all well and good when I (sort of ) read the book at nineteen and didn’t know bugger-all, but now I was thirty and had lived a bit. Of course the Beats were a great movement and begat modern counterculture and gave birth to the Sixties, but fifty years later to remain humourlessly enamoured of them would be a sure indication that you ain’t no kind of comedian. And I may not be much, but I am a comedian. At least I’d read the fucking book, which is more than can be said for that layabout Matt Morgan who was accompanying me on the trip – in his first on-camera role of note. Matt, who has a brilliant mind, which he uses mostly to self-diagnose increasingly unlikely new ailments to satisfy his hypochondria, announced that he couldn’t read the book because the writing was too small, or the cover was too crap, or he was worried that he’d developed a flesh-eating book allergy. So the pair of us embarked on a trip to pay homage to a legendary book which neither of us could be arsed to read. Which just about sums us up.
On the first day of shooting, which was blessedly in Blighty, we went to meet Neal Cassady’s widow, Carolyn Cassady, who ridiculously lives in a caravan park in Bracknell, Berkshire. A place, it seems, for aspirational hillbillies – trailers but with window boxes, and inside carriage clocks and chintz. Now me and ol’ Matt had developed a brilliant on-air chemistry for our radio show, utterly authentic, our relationship perfectly transposed to the studio. But telly is a different animal and, on it, so am I. A lone wolf, a prowling jungle-cat glaring sexual charisma and insidious seduction of my subject. I couldn’t be expected to do that with Matt sat there, piping up with the kind of enquiries you’d toss a lollipop lady on a classroom visit.
I don’t know if you’re aware, but as a presenter I had a terrible reputation for being difficult. A reputation for being difficult is what you have while you await the day where you have enough power to do what you want professionally. Then you are just focused and determined. Until then, though, you are difficult, and this was still my difficult phase. It manifested thusly: I like documentaries, and in fact most entertainment, to have some integrity, so if you’re filming the meeting of a presenter and, say, Carolyn Cassady, I prefer to just turn on a camera and film it. Often protocol and tradition mean that you go and meet Carolyn, say hello, then turn on the camera and say hello again in a contrived and awkward way – I find it embarrassing. Plus I found presenting alongside Matt, like we were Richard and Judy (Regis and Kelly), bloody odd as it disrupted my tried and tested seduction methods. Therefore after about thirty minutes of impotently flirting with a baffled little old lady while Matt asked where she’d got her porcelain shire horses and coalscuttle I was ready to make a break. I have a self-destructive streak. A thread of divine madness that sometimes makes me really funny and wild but other times makes me a fuckin’ liability. I get this gurgling discontent in my belly, a sense that everything is pointless and that nothing, nobody is worthwhile and that maybe it’d be better to slip off under a blanket or a drug and never face the light again. I think it’s fear, dread, terrible knowledge. It can come at any time. It came on in Carolyn’s caravan. “Fuck this,” I thought. I wordlessly stood and drifted to the door. I smiled at Carolyn in a way that I hoped reminded her of Neal and slipped outside. There was a car waiting, I got in and sat and eyed the caravan park, a pre-emptive refugee camp for a disaster that hasn’t happened yet.
Inside Matt rolled his eyes and explained as he’d done a thousand times that I was a peculiar man and meant no harm. It was my childhood, the drugs, the dreams; the drug-induced dreams of childhood.
I told the driver we were off, he turned the ignition. Matt made his way outside and explained to Iain, the producer, Paul, the cameraman, and Adam, the soundman, that I was a good bloke but complicated. That I had unique and delicate methods. That I needed nurture like an orchid but that with that care I’d bloom and create something wonderful, that the key to working with me was to respect that I was fragile, brilliant and mercurial, a complex and challenging man – sensitive but ultimately rewarding. I saw them nodding in hard-won agreement as my car screeched by, Hendrix bawling, door flung open, my torso thrust through like a hard-on through a drunkard’s fly – “See ya later, suckers!” I hollered like a nutter as I hammered the horn. “See? Sensitive,” said Matt.
Having assured myself that skidding off in a loopy dust cloud was “what Kerouac would’ve wanted” and therefore less a tantrum and more a touching tribute, I rang Nik and told him I wasn’t making the documentary. “Don’t worry, though,” I added, “I gave that man the greatest posthumous nod since Elton John fucked up the lyrics to ‘Goodbye Norma Jean’ for Lady Diana.”
I panic before jobs begin or when I arrive in new environments. This is because I like to control my surroundings so as to avoid emotional peril or attack. We were due to leave for the three-week road trip the next day, but I was basically a bit too scared. The reason for this fear was my lack of acceptance of the conditions under which we’d be filming, and acceptance is a vital component of recovery. In NA you have a sponsor, someone who’s been in recovery longer than you who can give you advice. Mine is Alfie. Alfie is a greengrocer’s son turned merchandise magnate and photographer, but his greatest gift is his charm. People like to be around Alfie, testament to this fact is his disproportionately high number of eclectic, famous friends. Billy Bragg, Ed Norton and Lee Dixon are all chums of Alfie’s. When I was in Hawaii making Sarah Marshall and Ed Norton showed up, the only thing he wanted to talk about was Alfie. This is because he listens, gives good advice and is funny. Plus he looks hilarious. Like George Cole playing a bloodhound who’s had his hair cut in Hoxton.
In this crisis I turned to Alfie. Alfie can always offer a new perspective on a problem in spite of, in his own life, being afraid of insects, viruses and kiwi fruit. When it comes to other people’s problems he’s a swami. In this case he told me to stop being self-obsessed and think of others and how they might feel about being on the trip. Whilst thinking of others may superficially seem like kindness it’s actually a selfish technique to stop you thinking of yourself. With this deployed I reversed my destructive decision and decided to go, forgive me, On the Road.
Me, Matt and the crew flew to Boston and drove on to Lowell, Massachusetts, where Kerouac was from, with me all the while robotically asking people if they were OK and kindly offering them boiled sweets for the air pressure – even after we’d landed.
Lowell is a small town where the only reasonable response for a talented man like Kerouac is to clear off. We were only there for a night, but for me a night without a woman is like Gerry Conlon’s prison sentence – long and completely unjust. Luckily the hotel was screening that perennial classic of modern sexploitation, Girls Gone Wild, which whilst being spiritually deplorable does serve as a masturbatory aid. If for some reason you’re unfamiliar with the franchise allow me to puncture the sphere of your ignorance. In Girls Gone Wild real girls are encouraged to not so much “go wild” as to flash their boobs, bottoms and on occasion vaginas in exchange for T-shirts. A girl that had truly “gone wild” would most likely savage the off-camera antagonist who was cajoling them into nudity with the offer of cloth and smash through the window of the heavily branded tour bus before rejoining her pack. These girls aren’t so much “wild” as eager for approval. Let’s put aside the obvious moral problems these films present and instead celebrate how sexy they are. Normal porn is now so candid and formulaic that it can pass across the retina unaddressed like an escalator handrail, but this evil smut is sufficiently tethered to reality to trick the wank-weary mind into stiff, prickly interest. I once heard that pornography is bad not because it shows too much but because it shows too little, it demeans and reduces humans, strips us of our divinity and splays us on a slab like pork. That’s probably true, but were it not for those wild girls that night in Lowell would’ve been c
ontinuing still.
The next day we shot some dry interviews with folks who’d known JK, then rode a vintage Dodge to the cemetery where the clicking and bongos stopped to have a look at Kerouac’s grave. The grave was adorned with snacks left by well-wishers, who’d paid tribute to the dead author with Ritz crackers, Rice Krispie bars and peanut butter. It’s confusing enough when people leave flowers for the dead as a generic gift to their remains, or cigarettes for Jim Morrison in Père Lachaise, but at least there is tradition and pertinence to prop up these trinkets for the dead. But Rice Krispie bars for Jack Kerouac’s corpse? Why? Because of the Snap, Crackle and Pop? “Wipe away that tear, my love, and reflect that now our Jack, dear Jack, has gone to the place that perhaps he always sought. The road is over for him, his destination reached, so weep not at his grave but leave a Rice Krispie treat.” I scoffed down much of the food and stole the remainder, trotting out the already tired “It’s what Jack would’ve wanted” defence.
In spite of my never-ending tributes to Kerouac the documentary seemed a little flat. If as was claimed we were genuinely trying to capture the essence of the book, we ought to have dispensed with the crew, got drunk and high and filmed ourselves trying to traverse America but ending up incarcerated. Cassady and Kerouac when embarking on their trips were not enslaved by schedules and BBC guidelines; my disregard of which was soon to have monumental consequences, but for now Matt was performing one of his vital functions – stopping me going berserk.
I don’t think the BBC were being disingenuous, I think they truly did intend to make an On the Road documentary that would really capture the pioneering hippie spirit of Cassady and Kerouac. But Cassady and Kerouac didn’t have runners, directors, production assistants and electric room keys when they crossed America. At no point did Neal Cassady lean across the car, tap his watch and say, “Jack, you do realise we’re scheduled to smoke this joint at 3.30 – for pity’s sake pull over.”
The only people for me are the punctual ones, the ones who are mad to arrive on time, mad to conduct interviews, mad to be in a meticulous documentary on BBC2, 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 and in the middle you see the blue centrelight pop and everybody goes, “That was a really well-made tribute film about Jack Kerouac.”
For me the rigmarole of making a TV show is antithetical to searching for satori, enlightenment, America.
Peculiarly, on this trip that was about two friends who loved each other deeply and the complexities of their relationship, me and Matt’s friendship began to eat itself like a naughty gerbil devouring its babies. The dynamic had begun to shift and falter. We were no longer two gadabout, punk chancers, stealing briefcases and filming hookers for kicks; I was at last becoming a movie actor and Matt was becoming troubled by the ch-ch-changes. In these situations it’s never wise to allocate blame for what went wrong so let’s do that right now. Matt can be a pain in the arse but I am mad. And demanding. Matt once said of me “Give him an inch and he’ll demand a moon base.” I have an enormous sense of impatience and entitlement. I’m writing this in a Transcendental Meditation centre in Iowa, where the snow flirts with Humbert gravity like Lolita and deer wander up to my window and nervously peer as I toil. Earlier two men massaged my entire body with warm oil in a Vedic ritual that helps you to be relaxed and enlightened. I’m from Grays in Essex; you’d think on some level this spectacle would impress-a-me-much. It don’t. I can see it’s beautiful, but I think, “This ought be happening.” Matt would be hobbling around nodding and wringing his cap in a contorted festival of gratitude.
I used to think we were like a band in which I was the lead singer and he was lead guitar; that the attention fell more upon me but we were in it together. But the reality is I am a performer and he is a writer and that is a less equal dynamic. So in a way the equality of our early friendship was compromised by our success, but I tried to bring him along every step of the way – every TV show, every gig, every film, every threesome, I brought Matt along because I felt we were brothers.
Matt had to do the driving whilst I navigated, and that formed the basis of a lot of conflict, the two of us sat in a car quarrelling over crumpled maps. It was an interesting friendship, but the disparity in our beliefs – my optimism versus his pessimism – became a tangible gulf on the American freeways as I began to actualise my cock-eyed musings, pipe dreams and witterings. It must be difficult to be close to a performer who has the kind of ego that I have, with my expectations. My modus operandi is that I’ll be content with anything, as long as I know that it’s the best that’s possible. I’ll sleep in a cardboard box, under piss-drenched newspapers, if that’s the finest accommodation available. But if I find out the person in the next alley has got a damp blanket, I’ll want it.
This divergence in our outlook began to manifest itself in the documentary and how we reacted to the spiritual quest at the heart of Kerouac’s tome. I thirsted for revolution, and the spirit of the Beats still glinted in the eyes of his old companions. I thought the Beats could rise again. Matt thought it was all cobblers.
Matt had a girlfriend at the time, I did not, or if I did I certainly wasn’t honouring any half-hearted oath I may have spluttered out in an airport. I was gadding about across America, snogging girls in car parks and diddling women in discotheques and publishing houses (it was a documentary about a writer – take it where you find it is the womaniser’s creed) and watching Girls Gone Wild, which blessedly was at every hotel we visited, providing what Championship clubs would refer to as a “parachute” for the occasions where real women could not be found.
Accompanying the Adult Channel’s consistently available, morally reprehensible hit was the Movie Channel’s crème de menthe, the animated film Ratatouille – a hit Disney movie about a gourmet rat who makes it as a chef. Me and Matt never watched it but enjoyed riffing on the genesis of such a story. “How about a film in which a rat, of all things, makes it as a chef?” Why not? Who are we to say what species of animal we want to see making it as chefs? The very fact that rats are so commonly associated with poor hygiene and disease just makes the idea of him knocking up a lasagna all the more fun. “Could you also provide a film in which a girl makes it as a slut?” “Certainly Sir – she may need a T-shirt by way of remuneration …” “That shouldn’t be a problem …”
When you, or your mate, drive across the geometrically impossible expanse that is North America you become hypnotised, as the first pioneers must’ve been, by its endless possibilities. I met a cowboy near Dodge City who said, “There’s only so much horizon people can take,” meaning I suppose that some people find opportunity daunting, that limitless sky is frightening with all its scope for change and hope.
I bought my soon-to-be-beloved rootin’ tootin’ cowboy boots in Denver from a woman called Roxanne. She had two staff members there; one of them, Stephanie, had a lovely bottom. Roxanne attended to me like a famous person despite not knowing who I was. We flirted and played; Quentin Crisp called charisma “the ability to influence without logic”. I flirt with old men, children, anybody, but it’s not sexual, it’s mostly about real engagement, not the artificial prescriptive connections that we too often tolerate. Roxanne, the compassionate matriarchal stranger, sent the two shop girls off to have lunch with us, and much more in my case. God knows I would never have relented until I received my birthright orgasm.
It was in Denver that we actually shot something which had shades of Beat philosophy. We were about to leave town when outside what must’ve been some tragedy-strewn trawler net for busted meat-puppets, homeless people on crutches and in wheelchairs swayed in clumsy congregation outside a shelter. “I wanna talk to them lot,” I bawled. The term “Beat” don’t mean percussive rhythm, it means beat up, beat down by life, beat. These people were beat. Now I don’t wanna get all “Down and Out in Paris and London” but you can’t spend a
ny significant time as a junky without developing an affinity for the have-nots. In a Pavlovian way I’m still drawn to the damned, as it were them that led me to smack, it was at their feet I learned to cope with my condition, and there on the corner, choking on the symptoms of American affluence, the off-cuts of economic might shone like bleak beacons and drew me once more to their rocks.
Tentatively we pulled over and I clambered out of the pickup like a Labrador, Matt just behind. We read On the Road with them, perched on their chairs, ignoring their dogs. One woman who wailed and preached teary Bible verse lingers with me. She was a rigid archetype found among the homeless, the zealous drunk. I reached into the charade and told her with good-humoured cheek that she ought put aside the game she was playing. She chuckled with acknowledgement, like she knew she was doing an impression of a vagrant. All along her soul had a home.
We were about to up and off, with at last something authentic in the can, when the most anti-social social worker I can ever recall encountering lurched his goateed bulk into our personal space. Alerted by my lottery winner-style direct altruism – I’d been dishing out dollars on the street like they were flyers advertising dead presidents – he marched over to give me a piece of his mind, which judging from his vocabulary he could ill afford.
“I run this shelter,” he growled. “This is my corner!”
“Well, you should be ashamed of yourself,” I retorted. “Everyone here is destitute.”
He sprayed yet more spittly rage. “Fuck off, you ponce,” I said. I hate them do-gooders, telling you not to give drug addicts money for drugs. As if that is the junction where the problem can be solved. “Maybe if they don’t have any money they’ll just eat wind-fallen fruits and busk.” No, if you are a drug addict you will find a way of getting drugs, you’ll give up your house, your dignity, suck dick, rob friends and strangle pets to get your paws on a bag, a bottle or a rock. You can’t just threaten to send junkies to bed with no pudding and hope they’ll buck up.
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