Kerouac In DisneyWorld

By Michael Shay (June 2000)

The Live Oak tree that shelters Jack Kerouac's old Orlando home is almost 350 years old. The tree sprouted in the middle of the 1600s, barely a century after the first waves of Spanish explorers set foot in Florida and long before DisneyMania landed in this part of the state and changed it forever.

It's an old one-story wooden house, with a screened-in front porch that Kerouac might have slept in during the days before air conditioning became a God-given right. For now it's empty, the only occupants dust bunnies and a few stacks of books waiting for readers. Marty Cummins, owner of Chapters Bread & Books, is spearheading the process of turning the place into the Jack Kerouac Project of Orlando. This non-profit plans to transform the house into a residency center, housing four writers a year. So far, the project has received major grants from businessman/fan Jeffrey Cole and the Darden Corporation, parent company of Red Lobster restaurants. A local small press has donated a portion of its book sales to the project; a weekend fund-raiser with a concert and a film screening was held last October. And donations of any kind are welcome.

There's a slight disconnect when you think of Kerouac in Orlando. I can picture him in funky North Beach in San Francisco. I have visions of Kerouac on the road with Neal Cassady, wildly criss-crossing the West, even partying at Cheyenne Frontier Days. But it's tough to imagine Kerouac living with his mother in this sad little house in Central Florida, a locale he labeled a "heatwave horror" after his first summer here.

I visit his old rental house on a gentle April afternoon. My sister Eileen, who lives in Orlando and takes it in stride, takes a photo of me on the front steps. I take her photo on the same spot. We are literary tourists, she and I, the first of what may become a constant stream to the place where Kerouac wrote "Dharma Bums." He was living here when "On the Road" was published and fame caught up with him in 1957.

Roger is a gnomish 83-year-old man who lives across the street with his wife and Basset Hound. He is not impressed with Kerouac the man or Kerouac the Beat legend. "What did he ever do for anybody?" he asks. "You ever read 'On the Road?' " I tell him that I read it twice, saying I admire the book and wouldn't mind writing one like it.

"I read it," he says. "It's trash." Roger is not Kerouac's only detractor. While "On the Road" earned many kudos upon its release, some critics were less than enthusiastic. "Typing, not writing," is how Truman Capote characterized Kerouac's work.

Roger's yard is a showplace of Florida flora. He's a retired Orlando city worker whose backyard is alive with yellow shrimp plants, pomegranates and oranges. He may not like Kerouac, but says he won't mind having writers for neighbors. "Couldn't be any worse," he says, noting that "whores and drug addicts" were recent denizens of the writer's old house which had, until recently, been two rental apartments. The Kerouac Project bought the house in 1998 and plans to launch its writers' residency program on September 1.

For Roger, the transformation of the house from neighborhood eyesore to artists' community can't come soon enough. But he wishes that the literary project "would quit drag-buttin' around" and get the house and yard in shape. "Look at that place," he said, pointing to the forlorn wooden front and a pair of rusty air-conditioners drooping from windows. "Needs some work. And that yard." He shakes his bald, sun-scarred head. "Some boys came and they must have taken 100 bags of leaves out of there."

The house looks like the one I lived in as a student at the University of Florida in Gainesville, just a few hours to the north. In fact, it may be in better shape than my student house, which had untrustworthy plumbing, a leaky roof, and a resident population of flying palmetto bugs.

But it's clear that the Central Florida building boom passed by the Kerouac house with barely a nod in its direction. Houses are being snatched up by well-heeled yuppies. Old structures are demolished and replaced with ones more suitable for the new millennium. There's one right down the street from Jack's old house. Earlier that day, my sister had shown me around town. We had passed the multimillion-dollar house of NBA basketball star Horace Grant in nearby Winter Park, with its indoor regulation-size basketball court that overlooks a lake. Grant had to battle city fathers to build this Hollywood-like house in this sedate community. Before it was finished, Grant was traded from the Orlando Magic to the Portland Trailblazers, which makes for quite a commute.

One has to wonder what Kerouac would make of Orlando, a New City of the South plagued by crime and traffic and a full array of fundamentalist preachers on the airwaves. While I was there, a man was arrested for loading semen in a squirt gun and firing it at teen girls at local malls. The spring drought was igniting fires in the woods west of the city and a pall of smoke hung like fog in the air. I met a woman, a New Jersey transplant, who told me a story about an alligator prowling her neighborhood lake. She called wildlife officials to complain. "He's eaten all the ducks," she said. The wildlife officer asked: "Is it aggressive?" She retorted: "Of course it's aggressive; it's an alligator!"

In 1969, Kerouac died in St. Petersburg, Florida, from internal bleeding caused by advanced cirrhosis of the liver. He was 47. One commentator called Kerouac's death "suicide by attrition." His books live on, selling more than 100,000 copies annually. The writers who come to this new literary center can revel in Kerouac's accomplishments, maybe wonder at his shortcomings. His output was tremendous, and his life has spawned a cottage industry in Kerouac biographies and memorabilia, as well as an array of sites that arepart of the Kerouac Literary Tour: Orlando; his boyhood home and neighborhood in Lowell, Mass.; Greenwich Village haunts of theBeats; Denver's Larimer Street (Neal Cassady's hang-out); and, of course, San Francisco.

If you're interested in residencies at the Kerouac house, contact The Jack Kerouac Project, Chapters Bread & Books, 717 W. Smith St., Orlando, FL 32804. It's a cool web site with a host of links to sites about Kerouac and the Beats. And if you find yourself in Orlando, get over to Chapters, a fine independent bookstore that stocks new/used books, including some collectible first editions, and homemade desserts that will give you a day-long sugar buzz.