Where Are They Buried? (49 page)

But Jack didn’t react well to his sudden celebrity. Trying to live up to the image he’d presented in
On The Road
, his penchant for drink considerably worsened. He pursued Zen Buddhism and moved to California, but his brightness dimmed and he aged prematurely. In the half-dozen years after
On The Road
, Jack published many similar books, including
The Dharma Bums
and
The Subterraneans
, but most had actually been written years earlier.
He lost his momentum as a writer, though he continued to be an involuntary celebrity through the 1960s. But mostly, Jack drank.

Defeated and disconnected, in 1961 Jack moved in with his mother, watching television, playing solitaire, and retreating into an alcohol-induced mania. In 1967 he married Stella Sampas, a maternalistic childhood friend, and the remainder of his life was spent sharing a home with both women. At 47, Jack died of an abdominal hemorrhage—he had drunk himself to death.

He was buried at Edson Cemetery in Lowell, Massachusetts.

At his death Jack was destitute, but in 2001, his original
On The Road
manuscript was sold at auction for $2.43 million.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From either I-495 or Route 3, follow the Lowell Connector to Exit 5A and turn onto Route 3A south toward Billerica. After a mile you’ll see the cemetery on your right. Enter at the main entrance, which is on the right just after Route 3A breaks into a “Y.”

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
The main road inside the cemetery is 3rd Avenue. Follow it to Lincoln Avenue, turn left, then stop 30 feet after Seventh Avenue. Forty feet into the lawn on the right, in the Sampas family plot, is the flat stone that marks Jack’s grave.

FEBRUARY 8, 1926 – FEBRUARY 3, 1968

Raised by an alcoholic father in skid-row hotels, Neal Cassady was a car thief who developed the suave instincts of a charming con artist—though he never seemed to want to con anybody out of much more than a ten-dollar bill or a roll in the hay. He became one of the most vibrant members of the Beat movement and ultimately influenced Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Tom Wolfe, and the Grateful Dead, among others.

Neal met Jack and Allen Ginsberg in New York in 1946. Allen, a homosexual, immediately fell in love with him, and Neal, ever the hustler, began a sexual relationship with Allen, balancing it with his numerous heterosexual liaisons. But Neal and Jack soon left New York and began racing aimlessly around the country on adventures that would become
On The Road
. Jack wrote about their exploits even as they unfolded, but Jack grew frustrated, unable to find a style that fit the content. Later, a series of letters from Neal gave Jack the idea of documenting the trips exactly as they had happened, without pausing to fictionalize or even think, and to write the book the way Neal talked, in a rush of mad, unpretentious ecstasy. This spontaneous approach worked, and
On The Road
became a sensation by replicating Neal’s unconstrained voice.

Neal was in tune with America and he resonated along the same frequency as the currents that were giving rise to the hippies and their “flower power.” In 1964 Neal met Ken Kesey and before long, Ken’s work was also showing the influence of Neal’s optimistic ideals. Neal swayed the scene at Ken’s “acid tests” while the Grateful Dead provided the soundtrack. Later, while his old friend Jack withdrew into alcoholism and early middle age, Neal began an entirely new series of road adventures as one of Ken’s Merry Pranksters. A natural highwayman, he was the driver slinging abstractions in double time behind the wheel of their psychedelic bus, Furthur.

In San Miguel, Mexico, twenty months before Jack died, Neal wandered away from a Mexican wedding and, with a belly full of drinks and assorted recreational drugs, he decided to walk the fifteen miles to the next town. Neal slipped into the chilly desert night wearing only a t-shirt and jeans, and the next morning was found comatose alongside a stretch of railroad tracks. He died later that day at 41.

Neal was cremated, and his ashes are kept by his son in an ornate box. On a scrap of paper stapled to the box’s side are the fading, typewritten words:
Contiene Cenizas Del Sr. Neal Cassady Jr
.

JUNE 3, 1926 – APRIL 5, 1997

Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac greatly influenced each other’s work. From Jack, Allen learned to write instinctively and impulsively and, in Allen, Jack found a tireless promoter for his labors. But during the 1960s their paths diverged. While Jack withdrew, Allen became more visible. In 1955, while television’s married couples slept in separate beds, he released his declamation against the hypocrisy and silence of society’s elders in his poem “Howl.” But, unlike Jack, Allen stood publicly in defiant contrast to every kind of conformity.

Allen’s detractors saw him as a drugged-up, blissed-out, left-wing pederast (which, of course, he was), but they failed to recognize that his relentless bombardment of the excesses of America’s consumer-crazed culture was right on the money. The whole confused mish-mash of the nation’s changing scene needed a point man, and Allen, never one to ignore any sloppy mainstream contradiction, gladly volunteered.

Away from poetry, he was a ringleader at be-ins and antiwar demonstrations and, in one particularly politically charged stunt, he even “exorcised” the Pentagon. He was at the acid tests, he was with the Dead and the Hell’s Angels, and he supported Abbie Hoffman’s hijinks at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Long before “coming out” was defined, Allen proudly pronounced his homosexuality. In music, he championed Bob Dylan as the electronic poet laureate and, later, songwriters from Patti Smith to Beck systematically took Allen’s lyrical models to heart. He coined the term “flower power” and extolled the virtues of Buddhism, along with just about every inebriant or psychedelic drug that came his way. Wherever something “happened,” it seemed, Allen Ginsberg was there.

At 70, surrounded by 40 family members and friends, Allen died of a heart attack related to his terminal liver cancer.

He was buried at B’nai Israel Cemetery in Newark, New Jersey.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Take Exit 13A off of the New Jersey Turnpike (I-95) and follow Routes 1 and 9 north for a mile to McClellan Street. Turn west on McClellan Street and, after a half-mile, make a right turn onto Mt. Olivet Avenue. Banai Israel is the last cemetery on the left, though there is no sign.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Park at the gate next to the brick shed and walk into the cemetery along the paved drive. From the circle, the Ginsberg family plot is 30 feet to the right.

The self-penned epitaph gracing his stone reads:

Father Breath once more farewell,
Birth you gave was no thing ill,
My heart is still as time will tell.

FEBRUARY 5, 1914 – AUGUST 2, 1997

In 1945 Jack and Allen shared a Greenwich Village apartment with William S. Burroughs, who, as the elder, published sage, introduced his juniors to the esoterics of literature and the lowlife haunts of the big city. William was the most colorful and curious of any would-be Beat. As the grandson and namesake of the inventor of the adding machine, he had turned his back on a life of privileged respectability to sample drugs and pass his life in an outrageous, self-destructive fashion.

At thirteen, William’s short essay, “Personal Magnetism,” debunking control, was published. Two years later he somehow “learned to hate horses” at a New Mexico boys school. After graduating from Harvard University in 1936, he lopped off his left little finger and presented it to his analyst. By 1942 William was working as a New York City exterminator because “he knew where all the roaches were,” but in 1946 William left the city after he and Jack were arrested for failing to report the murder of a quasi-friend. Although William, Jack, and Allen never again lived in proximity, Jack followed William to his various expatriate enclaves around the globe, and Allen later bluntly assessed William’s impact on his writing by saying, “He showed me the world.”

William got married and, after being a no-show for a New Orleans court appointment where he was to answer charges of drug possession, he and his wife, Joan, moved to Mexico City where William shot Joan dead in 1951 while trying to reenact the story of William Tell. He left Mexico before the incident could be investigated and, for the next twenty years, flitted about the globe more or less on the lam. Though he was spiraling into drug addiction, he was also writing again and, after Jack visited him in Morocco and helped him organize his “routines,”
Naked Lunch
was published in 1959.

Though William’s style mirrored that of his Beat buddies, the content of
Naked Lunch
came from some other distant netherworld. It’s a torrent of nightmarish descriptions of bodily functions, sex acts, and grotesque medical procedures told under the influence of hallucinogenic addiction. It was praised as “a daring assault on conformity” by some quarters, while others dismissed it as “gibberish masquerading as social commentary.” But, not surprisingly, it achieved cult status and William rode that success back to New York in 1974. Later, William began to write more conventional narratives, including
Place of the Dead Roads
, and with the renewed interest in the Beat movement during the materialistic 1990s, its stone-faced godfather gained new popularity as an avant-garde pioneer.

At 83, William died after suffering a heart attack and was buried at Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-70, take Exit 245B, follow West Florissant Avenue north for a half-mile. Enter the cemetery at the Willow Gate entrance on the right.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Inside the cemetery, make an immediate right after the office, which is Fountain Avenue. The drive winds around a bit, up and down a hill, then becomes Lake Avenue.
Turn left when you get to the “Y,” and the Burroughs plot is immediately on the right, marked with a big, white, granite obelisk.

There are a half-dozen Burroughs family members buried in this plot and none has his or her own stone; there’s only the single obelisk. The William that most interests us is in Grave Number 7, which is the top grave all the way to the right as you look at the plot from the road. His grandfather William, inventor of the adding machine, is two plots to the left. The executor of William’s estate planned to install individual grave markers for every plot, as well as a pair of decorative benches but, as William has been dead five years now, that proposal seems to have lost its momentum.

AUGUST 22, 1920 – JUNE 5, 2012

As a child, science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury was an inactive film buff who was romanced by the fantasy of Buck Rogers, Lon Chaney, and the World’s Fairs. “When I was born, the auto was only twenty years old and radio and TV didn’t exist. I was born at just the right time to write about all of these things,” he said.

But with the fantasies came nightmares and Bradbury often spoke of night visions that left him sweating and sleepless. A visit to the carnival at twelve brought him face-to-face with Mr. Electrico, a magician who awakened Bradbury to the notions of reincarnation and immortality, catalysts that led him to become a writer. “He was a miracle of magic, seated at the electric chair, swathed in black velvet robes, his face burning like white phosphor, blue sparks hissing from his fingertips,” he recalled. “He pointed at me, touched me with his electric sword and said, ‘Live forever.’ I decided that was the greatest idea I had ever heard and I knew something special had happened in my life. I stood by the carousel and wept.” From then on, he spent at least four hours a day every day, unleashing his night visions in stories he wrote on butcher paper.

His stories began to appear in small genre pulps and in 1939 he began putting out a mimeographed fan magazine
Futuria Fantasia
. In 1941, Bradbury sold his first story and his big break came in 1950, when some of his Martian stories were collected and published in a volume titled
The Martian Chronicles
. The thematically linked stories celebrated the romance of space travel while condemning the social abuses that modern technology had made possible. Their impact was immediate, and critics who had dismissed
science fiction as adolescent prattle praised them as stylishly written tales of morality set in a future that seemed just around the corner. Bradbury’s follow-up bestseller, 1953’s
Fahrenheit 451
, was written in the basement of the UCLA library, where he fed the typewriter 10 cents every half-hour. “You’d type like hell. I spent $9.80 and in nine days I had
Fahrenheit 451
.” An indictment of authoritarianism, it portrays a book-burning America of the near future, its central character a so-called fireman whose job it is to light the bonfires.