Kerouac wore khakis and Basquiat had his kicks.

I penned the title in reference to the tag line to a Gap ad featuring Jack Kerouac and Reebok’s posthumous tribute to the artist, Basquiat. I imagined writing a polemic about how art that starts out as a radical project often gets folded into the very consumer culture it initially set out to subvert. I wanted to throw in Marxist-inspired rhetoric like the ‘commodification of the avant-garde’ and ‘petty bourgeois morality’. But that level of angst was more fitting for a younger self, hypnotized by the “explosion of consciousness” expressed in On the Road, or a self in the first hour of “a mind-expanding trip into emotion and sensation, drugs and liquor and sex, the philosophy of experience and the poetry of being,” as the dust jacket on my well-worn copy proclaims.

The novel was for me and, for my taste, too many others a mystical departure from the bleak and stifling status quo. I dreamt of the magic of motion that Kerouac so aptly describes: “We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move” (111). I thought that I could, like Dean, be a con-man and invent characters for every scene. Like Sal, I thought that I might find myself truly and finally alive on the road. I fancied myself a seeker and so, I thought on the road I, too, might find God. In the aftermath, I feel disillusioned. I had been running from myself and chasing the “point of ecstasy I had always wanted to reach”. I always caught up and that moment never was quite close enough to touch. I wasn’t free. The experience often reminds me of Foucault’s discussion of the omnipresence of sex in pop culture – our movement away from overtly puritanical restrictions of sexual behavior is merely a ruse, sexuality remains deviant – and likewise, drug use remains criminal. As society embraces counterculture, commercializes it, and finds in it a space where individualism is seamlessly recast for capitalism, its message is watered down, if not downright nullified.

Perhaps, I am at ease now with something a bit more tempered – less reactive, more responsive. I find myself put off by the realization that On the Road now occupies a new space in our national, cultural narrative from when it first appeared. It seems like false advertising. I am embarrassed that I bought it. Apparently, Kerouac is now as American as apple pie or, at the very least, the Gap.