From Third year is the charm

Warren knows I hadn’t even met Neal yet at that time, but I was really caught up in the ideas about him Kerouac had put in On the Road, which I read in high school, even before I came up north to start college. And then amazingly, not too long after that first encounter with the Vipers, it turns out one day my other buddy Norman and I go up to Kesey’s place in La Honda to try to get Norman’s guitar back, because Kesey borrowed it when the Pranksters took off on the bus to go across country and now Norman would really like to get his guitar back. (I’ll have to tell you more about Norman later, and the gang that came out from the University of Chicago, and became the Anonymous Artists of America).

So we go up to La Honda, and while we’re there, maybe the most amazing thing that ever happened in my life happened, because reality crossed over with fantasy, or imagination, or literature, or whatever it was, because up pulls this Volkswagon Micro Bus, comes to a stop in the big dirt parking lot in front of Kesey’s place, still in the middle of the woods, and out pops Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Neal Cassady. Neal is carrying a six-pack of beer and walks over to me and whispers in my ear really loud and frantic, “Hey man, got any amphetamines?” which I didn’t, and of course I said no. But now I don’t know if I’m reading Kerouac’s fiction, where he takes his real friends and turns them into mythology, or if I’m in my real world, awake, which of course I was, but it was a little confusing. Not confusing but very affirming that, yes, you could just use your imagination and make it up as you go along, and it will all be a gigantic story that fits together and includes having the most incredibly wild times you could imagine.

Excerpt from Warren and I on the Sidewalk in Front of the Blue House