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death. There was a twilight rebirth coming for both of them, of millennial reissues, new introductions, archives made over to wealthy academic institutions. Agents and percentage deals and personal assistants in white trainers. Corso, the canny street kid, was right. This was a clown-as-Hamlet afternoon, a chance to ventriloquize the bleached skull. To finesse whispers of forgotten Montreal TV into approved legacy promos. Celebrity seances and horribly bad journeys will be remade in heaven on gold cards.
    The last phone calls were ugly. Kerouac told his editor that he was going to Germany: ‘to see the concentration camps and dance on Jews’ graves’. And the worst of it was, this man reported, that Jack didn’t even sound drunk.
    The
Dr Sax
grotto was our final call before the restaurant. You could hear, close at hand, the rush and surge of the Merrimack. ‘This is New England,’ Kerouac wrote, ‘half like rainy Welsh mining towns.’ Rainwater was running in thick beads like glycerine tears down the square chin of the saint with the upturned eyes. These sideshow stations of the cross would be blasphemy among the slate chapels of the primitive Methodism of Maesteg; whitewashed temples like
Libanus, where, at six or seven years of age, I recited a few verses of the Old Testament, learnt phonetically, in Welsh. To a chorus of approval from the nodding elders.
    Kerouac positions his grotto between orphanage and roaring river. ‘Fireflies in the night flickering to the waxy stare of statues.’ Some of the display cases for buttermilk figures representing the passion of Christ are empty. Stolen? Removed for renovation? There is a rocky Lourdes shrine with a Cecil B. DeMille crucifix and a near-naked martyred man. Nailed, agonized, unrisen. In the cave of the grotto, thick votive candles splutter in medicine jars dressed with novelty illustrations of Mexican vitality. The supplicants, this day, are Cambodians. Henry is a little distracted. He’s waiting for a call from his wife – at home in Gloucester, facing hospital tests – and trying to negotiate the sale of their car.
    Kerouac was always looking for new borders. When situations of his own making – publishers, wives, mother – became difficult or impossible, he ran to Mexico City; the adobe hut on the roof, the company of Bill Garver, wise old junky, a connection who asked nothing of him. He liked the economics of ‘fellaheen’ streets, the cheap prostitutes and stimulants. He liked the solitude, the opportunity to uncoil narratives at his own pace, to improvise.
Mexico City Blues.
    Ellis Amburn, a sympathetic but undeceived witness of the end of Kerouac’s writing career, his editor on
Visions of Cody
, has the troubled author, in the grip of hallucination, spooked by intimations of future fame, striking out, in July 1950, to walk from Mexico City to New York, carrying two and a half pounds of marijuana wrapped in silk and lashed to his waist. Jack seems, already, to be trespassing on arrows of predetermined energy, directions of travel, undertaken by Malcolm Lowry or fictionalized by Roberto Bolaño. His fate as a rootless wanderer is confirmed after he crosses the border at Laredo and encounters an old man with long white hair. ‘Go moan for man,’ he is told. ‘After that,’ Amburn reports, ‘Jack seemed to accept that it was his destiny to walk across America on foot, often in total darkness.’ The manifest of the essential bad journey,
the suicide tarantella attempted and endured by Lowry, Neal Cassady, the poet John Hoffman, and Cabeza de Vaca in the sixteenth century, was in place. Magnetic attraction in the shape and shadow of a smouldering volcano. A land breast. The dark god Vulcan of the Lowell Mills made actual in sparks of iron-fire.
    There is an ‘immense triangle’, Kerouac said, between New York, Mexico City and San Francisco. Self-defined as a ‘religious wanderer’, he would trudge, in hobo mask and threadbare disguise, from city