Viva Las Neon Hell Part Three: [Grand]Son of Las Neon Hell

Note: There will be no links in this post. I have not the time. Take some initiative yourselves and look up whatever you're curious about, dammit. Do I have to do everything for you people? I'm a MAN not a MACHINE!*

Gaaah!

I have literally hours and hours of work to do. I woke up early [7:45 a.m.!] to do it. It is now 10:14 a.m. and I have, as yet, done none of it. Instead I am writing on my blog. I have fully succumbed, finally and really.

So. To finish off the "Viva Las Neon Hell" trilogy. Right. We were to the Kerouac exhibit.

Yes, so we awoke somewhere in the vicinity of noon and dragged our boozy, degraded, broken selves from bed. We oozed into the car. We slithered through the blazing midday sun. It was hellacious.

Traffic was a god-awful nightmare -- miles upon miles of grinding, honking, glinting, screaming, dusty, gritty, smoking, sweaty motorists, just inching their way somewhere, anywhere. They were looking for the action, wherever it was. They didn't care. We felt like tiny white corpuscles, slowly squeezing our way through thick, clotted avenues of diseased blood. Our heads hurt.

Our driver -- who I'll call "Max" -- was wheezing and fuming with rage. His face was a deep burgundy behind aviator sunglasses. The customary Parliament Light cigarette was clenched fiercely between his teeth. It was jerking up and down as he ground his jaw back and forth. His head jerked from side to side -- blood-shot eyes scanning for an opening. Stop and go. Stop and go. Inch forward. Honk. Curse. Inch forward. Stop and go.

We had called nearly three different libraries in the Greater Las Vegas Area -- none knew anything about the exhibit. "Kerouac? Who's that?"

This shouldn't have surprised us -- Las Vegas is not known as a haven for this country's literati. All the same -- Kerouac? I can understand your run-of-the-mill average Joe-Schmo Budweiser drinker not knowing who Kerouac was. But a library? Jesus H.

Disappointed and barely moving on our quest to see The Scroll, Max was reaching some kind of breaking point. He was becoming erratic; something that isn't safe in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Suddenly his cell phone rang.

Max: "What?!"
Caller: [Inaudible].
M: "I'm in fu-king LAS VEGAS, that's where!"
C: [Inaudible]... "Las Vegas?"
M: "Trying to see this motherf-cking Kerouac manuscript and all these sons of b-tchs are in my motherf-cking WAY, God-amnit!"
C: [Inaudible].
M: "WHAT HAPPENED? LAS VEGAS HAPPENED."
[At this point, Ben sticks his head out the window and begins screaming wildly at the cars flanking us].
M: "This city should be BOMBED and toothbrush-combed by archaeologists to figure out what the f-ck went wrong with American society!"
C: [Inaudible].
M: [Much more calm] "Yeah, yeah. I'll call you later."

We were all shocked in the car. Max, however, seemed more settled after his outburst.

Miraculously, as we sat at one of the thousands of interminable stoplights that infest that town, Max asked a man idling next to us, "Where's the f-cking Kerouac!" "The Rainbow Library. Six blocks down, take the next exit," he responded.

Hallelujah.

Max, fired by our triumph, flashed a nicotine-stained grinned and roared off, dodging cars and motorcycles.

We screeched to a halt in the Rainbow's parking lot -- next door to a Kentucky Fried Chicken, Wal-Mart and a Big Lots -- and ran into the building.

It was cool and quiet. Dimly lit. It smelled good. We had found sanctuary.

Suddenly the frenetic pace we'd been laboring under for more than 40 some hours slowed to that of a collection of devout monks. We bowed and slowly shuffled toward The Exhibit.

It was closed for lunch.

Fighting back a primal shriek of rage, Max tensely asked the head librarian if there was any way we could get access to The Scroll. He looked at us with some skepticism. By this time we were a sweating, shivering mass. Bleary-eyed and greasy. Max's head had taken on a spastic movement -- fueled by wells of hate, he jerked around like an angry ostrich.

"Uh... where are you guys from?" he asked with trepidation, glancing at the security guard.

"Ah'm frum Al'uh-BAMA," our other compatriot (who I'll call "'Bama" for obvious reasons) immediately piped up, pride evident in a slight quaver of the voice.

"Idaho... uh... IDAHO. That's... uh... wherewe'refrom. Yeah. Idaho. Over 2,000 miles to see this. Straightthroughthenight. We drove. Yesterday. Kerouac," Max stuttered and spat, eyes twitching and darting around the room.

"Me too," I said.

"Well, okay," the librarian was obviously a conservative man. Beaten down by years of silence and disrespect. Vegas is a tough town anyway, even tougher on librarians. "I guess I can let you in."

With that, we were admitted to a private viewing of The Scroll.

It was magnificent. The room was like a shrine. More dim than the main library, softly lit by recessed bulbs high in the vaulted ceiling. Muted blue-grey colors served as the back drop for several large black and white photos of Kerouac at work. In all the pictures The Scroll was visible. Finally, there, in the middle of the room sat an upraised glass case, more than 40 feet long -- like a casket. It was The Scroll. Unrolled only part way, most of its nearly 126 foot length was visible only at the end, where it turned from a sheet of delicately yellowing telex paper to a hefty roll about six inches thick.

It was beautiful. There were edits written on the page in pencil. There were words x'ed out by the typewriter. It was THE original copy. Untouched, save for by the author himself. As I've said before and since, despite the fact that Kerouac was a no-account drunk who couldn't be intimate with a woman unless he paid her for it, it is truly a thing of importance to view a work of art in its entirety. Slovenly and lazy good-for-nothing enthusiast that I am, it's good to see that some things are actually completed. I never seem to finish anything.

We wandered around in silence, snapped a few pictures (against the rules, but waived for our special Road Warrior status) and left quietly nearly a half hour later.

We smoked a few cigarettes in meditation.

"Well, I'm out of here," Max said, crushing his out.

He dropped 'Bama and me off at the Bellagio back on the Strip and barreled out of town, taking with him a pair of my pants, my drawing pad and my pens.

"I'm never coming back to this godforsaken sh-thole again!" he screamed waving at us as he roared from the casino.

'Bama and I secured lodging on the 20th floor of the hotel and proceeded to smoke and eat and wander around for the next day. While he is a Professional Gambler, and I am but a light-weight without enough money to buy food (much less risk it on games of chance) the rest of the trip is more his story than mine. Suffice to say, the 30 minutes with Kerouac more than made up for the other, more heinous aspects of our experience.

My blood is too thick for Las Vegas. I can't cotton to these people. I don't understand them and they don't understand me and if ever the twain do meet, I'm going to have to seriously re-assess my life -- or Las Vegas will have finally fallen down into that subterranean cesspool that I suspect gives it its power.

In closing -- bah!

*I guess there is one link. Go here for another version of this story. Written by "Max."