The Legacy of Kerouac and the New Dharma Bums

I’ve been living on Route 66 for two years. It’s not a metaphor for a nomadic lifestyle, it’s real. My address is 343 Central Avenue, Albuquerque, New Mexico, Historic Route 66. It’s no coincidence, either. Some of the reasons that led me to choose Albuquerque as a possible and vital destination among many other more comfortable or more prestigious cities in which to live and run one of the world’s Cervantes Institutes, was the echo of Jack Kerouac, his “On the Road” and, of course, Route 66. Justine led me to Egypt and Sal Paradise to New Mexico. The ways of the heart are inscrutable, and perceptions of the world depend a lot on your sentimental education. In my case, like that of many others born in the 1960s, it is connected with the counterculture. Living on Route 66 during the centenary of Kerouac’s birth makes one rethink (to use that fashionable Anglicism). This route, America´s “Mother Road,” as Steinbeck called it in “The Grapes of Wrath,” is an example of what Kerouac stands for today and the road’s legacy, both idealized and real.

On Albuquerque’s long Central Avenue we find Nob Hill, the city’s “hip” neighborhood. The place where cafes have cashew milk because now it turns out that soy milk is bad for your health, although not as bad as cow’s milk. The place where a second-hand comic bookstore coexists with a bookstore called “Organic Books.” It is also the area where skinny boys with beards wearing beanies and sweaters with holes walk first thing in the morning carrying a cardboard container overflowing with fresh vegetable juice and a copy of William Burroughs’ “Junkie.”

Two miles east, you reach an invisible border. You can tell by the smell. If you run into a skinny and attractive guy with a beard, a beanie and a sweater with holes, he doesn’t smell like Santal 33 perfume by Le Labo but like urine. And you can smell the aroma of fried chicken wings without labels showing they were raised “humanely” from the restaurants in the area. They carry a glass with a sugary soft drink in one hand and a bottle of fentanyl by Janssen Labs in the other.

The difference between being a beatnik in the 1950s or a hipster today and being a bum then and being a bum today depends on where you come from; whether you have a family to provide economic support or not. If you come from a wealthy family, you can always afford to be bohemian and dress like you live on the streets.

Kerouac knew that and described it in his book “The Dharma Bums” along with his desire to distance himself from what we later idealized as the Beat Generation. The big difference between what Kerouac tells us in “The Dharma Bums” and in “On the Road” is that in the 1950s, people who were chronically homeless and those who were beatniks were mixed up looking for new experiences. Travelers on Route 66 knew they could turn back. Perhaps that is why now, on the centenary of Kerouac’s birth, that element of freedom, of experiencing, of traveling as a hobo on freight trains, of bohemian life that constitutes the European myth of the Beat Generation is not as popular in the United States as it is in Europe. Here and now, to talk about the homeless is to touch on a particularly scary issue, because the streets are filled with middle-class people who may be living on the street because of a bill for appendicitis surgery. Romanticism has no place in the word “bum.” In Europe, on the other hand, the counterculture has become a myth. The most significant example of that is Dior fashion designer Kim Jones, who was inspired by old Jack and other Beat authors in creating this year’s Dior “Homme” autumn and winter collection. His feature design is a white cotton T-shirt with a photo of the original manuscript of “On the Road” and a portrait of its author. The garment can be in a closet of pipes and pallets in any attic of a young man from some big European city for $890.

Kerouac tells us on this centenary that his dharma bums would now be called “homeless” (a perverse euphemism) and that the new bohemians, the kings of the counterculture, wear Dior T-shirts bearing the face of one of the writers who best told the story of America’s 20th century, although, sometimes, we forget.