Red Admirable

My father is a man of facts. He is not necessarily a man of Fact, because many of his assertions are of dubious credibility and rely on material that was probably archived by Mother Jones in 1967 for being too radical. He rattles off statistics and corresponding social commentary with paralyzing facility, leaving everyone else silent over their tacos until he pauses, adjusts his jaw and says something like “Hannie? Can I get you another? Hard shell or soft?”

[my father is also a man of Krispy Kremes]

It seems as though I am the immediate family member most receptive to my father’s facts, but this is probably only because I spend the least amount of time with him. For years, now, one of his favorite facts to share with me (because facts are the kind of things that never go out of style; if it is a fact it is worth repeating, my dear loves) has been: “You know” –he always starts fact-statements with those two words, which is interesting because yeah obviously I know you told me like ten thousand times already and also wtf why you keeping telling people things if they already know them DAD– “you know, Jack Kerouac went to Columbia on a football scholarship.”

It’s true, this one. Jack Kerouac did go to Columbia on a football scholarship and Neal Cassady would have, too, if given the chance. Cassady, though, wound up attending only a university of the road and also one of Benzedrine; this much is clear from “Drive, He Wrote,” Louis Menand’s essay in a recent New Yorker.

[Donlin, Cassady, Ginsberg, LaVinge, Ferlinghetti]

Menand mentions Nabokov several times, which is fabulous, because Lolita and On the Road might as well be facing pages of the neverending North American travelouge. Each text shadows the other, and it turns out Neal Cassady and Lolita Haze are the same person. Also, they are probably each of us to varyingly extents, and that is probably why we as readers needed those books. Like, the other night when my friend told someone “you crush on people,” he clearly meant to be talking about Neal:

Cassady was a serial seducer, and, therefore, inveterately untrustworthy…He charmed people in order to get what he needed, and he was generally in need of something.

…Cassady had no material ambitions. He was content to get by, and although he had three wives in rapid succession, and juggled his attentions between them and assorted casual girlfriends, he was intermittently serious about all of them. Everything about Cassady was intermittent. He had a kind of sociosexual A.D.D.

I, for one, have always loved Jaffe best.