O P I N I O N
NOT THAT PROFOUND
By Nathan Graziano
On Friday, we officially usher in the summer of 2025, and I’m finding myself doing the things that older guys tend to do, such as reflecting on the summers of my youth with both nostalgia and disgust.
This year, I’m reflecting on the summer of 1998, the summer when I tried to be Jack Kerouac.
Of course, there is nothing original about a young man with literary ambitions wanting to be a bohemian and throw aside his suburban shackles in order to discover some elusive truth that exists on an exit off I-70 where there is an “Elvis is Alive” Museum in the back of a gas station in Nowhere, Mo.
In the summer of 1998, I was 23 years old, recently graduated from college and had just finished my first high school teaching position, where I was a full-time substitute for a teacher on maternity leave. I didn’t have a teaching position lined up for the fall at the time, but that didn’t matter to me.
I was going to be Jack Kerouac and fully prepared to accept my new life “On the Road.” Like Kerouac, I was poised to write the next great American novel, once I had a little road grit beneath my nails.
So as soon as school ended that June, my roommate at the time, my good friend and brother, Jay, and I packed a bag of clothes, procured an ounce of dirt weed and set out in his truck with our only goal being to drive until we hit the Pacific Ocean. Then we’d turn around and come home.
However, we weren’t really that cavalier. I was going to interview for a teaching position in Las Vegas—very un-Kerouacian—and Jay had a cousin who lived in Boulder, Colo., where we could stay and shower and eat something other than fast food, or something dished from a vending machine.
I still learned a lot about myself camping in the Redwoods in California, or setting up our tents beside a lake in Montana. There were no cellphones at the time, and we didn’t have the internet. For more than a month, Jay and I lived off the grid, eating breakfasts at Mom and Pop diners in Idaho, and pissing off locals at bars in Butte, Mont.
Jay and I returned to New Hampshire a month or so later, road-weary and more than excited to eat proper meals and sleep in our own beds again. I never wrote that great American novel, but I was offered the job in Las Vegas and drove across the country again, with all of my worldly possessions packed in a Honda Civic, a few weeks later to start my professional career.
After a decade removed those experiences, and my roommates on the lake, I would write a short book of thinly-veiled fiction about that year and call it “Hangover Breakfasts.” It was published in 2012 by the venerable and now-defunct Bottle of Smoke Press, and I believe the book is now completely out-of-print. Still, I consider it one of the best books that I’ve ever written.
Here is a piece from the book:
“Hey, Jack Kerouac”
With the U.S. road map we bought at a gas station, Ray and I lit out of town. We lit out into an American landscape of three-lane interstates, strip malls, and fast food chains; we lit out into the rest stops, the Motel 6’s, and the ghostly skylines of Midwestern cities we’d never remember. We lit out in search of dive bars and campgrounds and hundreds of miles of straight road, looking for fast times and free drugs and loose women who exist only in fiction.
I envisioned myself as Jack Kerouac and brought my battered copies of The Dharma Bums and On the Road to read between hangovers and one-hitters. I envisioned a fling with a diner waitress in Nebraska, slow-dancing in a Missouri roadhouse with a toothless man’s youngest daughter. I envisioned parties in The Rocky Mountains, port wine and crappy cocaine. I envisioned my toes dipped in The Pacific, grunge girls in Seattle, our ears popping as we drove through The Great Divide.
However, by the time we hit The Redwoods, I was sad and homesick and tired of sleeping in a tent.
Now, fifteen years later, my vision has come true, and I’ve become Jack Kerouac: a man in his mid-thirties, drunk and depressed, trying his best to make his words stick to anything. But I’m not a genius, and I’m not famous. I just drink too much.
from “Hangover Breakfasts,” Bottle of Smoke Press, 2012
Wax nostalgic with Nathan Graziano if you wish. Find him at ngrazio5@yahoo.com