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BEAT!

compiled and edited by D. Dickie, J. Chapman, P. Charron and many others.

MUSIC: The audience is greeted by a catchy jazz groove, as the lights go down, the music fades.

PROLOGUE

ON STAGE: Allen Ginsberg is reading HOWL for the first time at the gallery 6 poetry reading in San Francisco.

ALLEN (Alone on stage)

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.

Angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection top the starry dynamo in the machinery of night

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz

who bared their brains to heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roof illuminated

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war

who were expelled from the academies for crazy and publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull

who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from battery to holy Bronx on Benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo."

SCENE 1

MUSIC:(Slow, plodding New York theme)

ON VIDEO: (a black and white sequence transports us to ten years earlier. New York is the backdrop to the birth of BEAT! Ex: post war mayhem, times square hipsters.)

ON STAGE: (Jack Kerouac, in the dark, provides a live voice over.)

JACK (Alone on stage)

"New York... the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair... with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves. The mad dream-grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful cemetery cities beyond Long Island. The high towers of the land... the place where paper America is born."

ON VIDEO:( Jack is on his way to the library at Columbia U. He wears a football jersey and a cast on his leg. An injury has cut his season short, so he spends time at the library, digesting large amounts of literature. This day, his reading time is interrupted by an enthusiastic schoolmate with a letter. The student is Hal Chase, the letter, from Neal Cassady. As the video fades, the lights come up on Jack.)

JACK (Alone on stage)

"First reports of him came to me through Hal Chase, who'd shown me a few letters from him written in a New Mexico reform school. I was tremendously interested in the letters because they so naively and sweetly asked Hal to teach him all about Nietchze and all the wonderful, intellectual things that Hal knew.

He was a young jailkid shrouded in mystery, then news came that Neal Cassady was out of jail, newly married, and on his way to New York. It was after I had broken my leg and lost my football career. And with the coming of Neal began the part of my life you could call my life on the road."

SCENE 2

MUSIC:(Manic bebop, road theme)

ON VIDEO:( Neal and Luanne Cassady are somewhere on the road between Denver and NYC. The scene provides insight into Neal and Luanne's manic characteristics.)

SCENE 3

MUSIC:(Walking bass, very quiet)

ON STAGE:( William S. Burrough's apartment in NYC. Bill is busy lecturing to Jack and Allen, just as he has been all evening.)

JACK "Say Bull, why do you feel writing hasn't progressed like painting has?"

BILL "Painting has been forced to evolve whereas writing hasn't. A hundred years ago, they were painting cows in the grass - representational paintings - and it looks just like cows in the grass. Well, a photograph could do that better. Now, one invention that would certainly rule out one kind of writing would be a tape recorder that could record sub-vocal speech, the so-called stream of consciousness. In writing, we are always interpreting what people are thinking. Suppose I had a machine whereby I could actually record sub-vocal speech? If I could record what someone thought, there'd be no need for me to interpret."

ALLEN "People absorb and repeat the words to jingles, which make them very effective. People don't go around reciting passages of books in their heads."

BILL "Yes, they do."

JACK "Not alot of people."

BILL "Alot of them don't know where what's in their heads came from. Alot of it came from books."

ALLEN "However, words accompanied by music tend to have a bigger effect."

BILL "This fits right into the Bicameral brain theory. If you can right to the non-dominant side of the brain, you've got it made. That's where the songs come from that sing themselves in your head, the right side of the brain. There's a very interesting book I read that you would both benefit from, called the Origins of Consciousness in the breakdown of the Bicameral mind by Julian Jaynes. His theory is that the first voices were hallucinated, that everyone was schizophrenic up till about 800 BC The voice of god came from the non-dominant side of the brain, and the man who was obeying these voices, to put it in Freudian terms, would have a superego and id but no ego at all. Therefore no responsibility."

JACK "You know Bill, writing could be good therapy for you."

(Hal Chase enters)

HAL "Wow!... Oh... Wow!"

JACK "Wow Hal?"

HAL "Hold on, cause there's a maniac and his bride on their way up here!"

JACK "The guy that wrote those crazy letters?"

(Neal and Luanne burst on-stage)

MUSIC:(Manic bebop)

LUANNE "That was so crazy...Hee Hee Hee... etc."

NEAL (off on a tangent)

"Phew! Naw man but what I'd tell you is, I didn't know that I'd appreciate remembering these things more. So therefore, when I was there, I didn't pay much attention to any of this. I was all hung up on something else, you know, so I can remember, say for example, but now that I can remember it doesn't do any good, because... man... I can't get it down, y'know... I remember it well, what happened cause I'm not doin' nothin', see?... Hee Hee Hee.

"Forty-six eighty three seventeenth street, when the god's hell are we ever gonna get out there? We're gonna hafta do that, immediately! Hah! Hee! Humph! You know what I'm sayin', you know! (pointing at Jack)

(Neal runs around introducing himself to other characters)

HAL "Is that the latest from your journals, Neal?"

NEAL "You haven't taught me how to write yet!"

JACK "What makes you think you can't write now?"

NEAL "Thassit! Of course, yes, yes, yes! You hear that honey?"

LUANNE "Yah, maybe you could learn from these boys."

BILL "I remember that Sinclair Lewis was asked what to do about becoming a writer, and he always said, "Learn how to type.""

NEAL "The strangely weird piece of utter perfection is surely brewing in my awakened souls being. I taste the touch of life and pray my mind to preserve its good name. Gone, with cheerful eye, is youth, now I neither fondly preen, nor have restless dream. It seems as though no thing can ever again disturb by breathless beam, the sun a welding torch has fused, at last, a wholesome one. Yes, now past is the peak of pulsated paste, yet, long till the sadness of evenings fate. Not green, not molding; wise grace of life my hand is holding."

(Others react with enthusiastic support, Luanne giggles uncontrollably, all are caught up in the moment except for Bill, who now stands to show them the door.)

BILL "That's enough, that's enough, I have an appointment."

(Everyone swings out of the apartment, leaving Bill alone)

SCENE 4

MUSIC:(Weird free-form jazz)

ON VIDEO:( Bill is seated alone on-stage and provides a live voice over.)

ON STAGE:( Screen shows various hallucinated images of Interzone.)

"This is Revelation and prophecy of what I can pick up without FM on my 1920 crystal set with antennae of jissom...I, William Seward, Captain of this lushed-up hash-head subway, will quell the loch ness monster with rotenone and cowboy the white whale. I will reduce Satan to automatic obedience, and sublimate subsidiary fiends... Some of us are on different kicks and that's a thing out in the open the way I like to see what I eat and visa versa mutatis mutandis as the case may be. Bill's naked lunch room...Step right up... Good for young and old, man and bestial. Nothing like a little snake oil to grease the wheels and get a show on the track Jack.

"Now some citizens really wig when they make with the new religion. These frantic individuals do not know how to come on. No class to them... Besides, they is subject to be lynched like who wants somebody hanging around being better 'n other folks? 'What you tryin' to do Jack, give people a bad time?..'So we gotta play it cool, you dig, cool... We don't shove anything up your soul, unlike certain cheap characters who shall remain nameless and are nowhere. Clear the cave for action. I'm gonna metabolize a speedball and make with the fire sermon.

"I will issue a bull on immaculate birth control, gentle reader. The word will leap on you with leopard man iron claws, it will cut off fingers and toes like an opportunist land crab, it will hang you and catch your jissom like a scrutable dog, it will coil round your thighs like a bushmaster and inject a shot glass of rancid ectoplasm...

"Gentle reader, we see God through our assholes in the flash bulb of orgasm... Through these orifices transmute your body... The way OUT is the way IN.

"I must report virtual absence of cerebral event. I am aware of your presence, but since it has for me no effective connotation, my affect having been disconnected by the junk man for non-payment, I am not interested in your doings... Go or come, shit or fuck yourself with a rasp or an asp - 'tis well done and fitting for a queen- but the Dead and the Junky don't care... They are inscrutable.

"When any other being is contacted, it is sad: because you see the limitations, the pain and fear and the final death. That is what contact means. Now I, William Seward, will unlock my world horde... My Viking heart fares over the great brown river where motors put put put in the jungle twilight and whole trees float with huge snakes in the branches and sad-eyed lemurs watch the shore, across the interior: A vast subdivision, antennae of television to the meaningless sky. In lifeproof houses they hover over the young, sop up a little of what they shut out. Only the young bring anything in, and they are not young very long. Illinois and Missouri, miasma of mound-building peoples, groveling worship of the food source, cruel and ugly festivals, dead-end horror of the centipede God reaches from Moundville to the lunar deserts of coastal Peru.

"America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting."

SCENE 5

MUSIC:(New York groove, double time)

ON VIDEO:( We catch up with the group, in between destinations, they are having a grand old time in NYC 1946)

SCENE 6

MUSIC:(Junky groove, sinister and dark)

ON VIDEO:( After hours party scene, group is seen with other local luminaries. As the party dies down, people disperse. Leaving Allen and Neal alone.)

SCENE 7

MUSIC:(Rhythmic pulsing beat, slow and quiet)

ON VIDEO:( Still, straight shot of an unfinished bedroom - small bed, no furnishings, some candles and incense, little light.)

ON STAGE:( Allen and Neal sitting cross-legged on the floor staring relentlessly into each other's eyes. They are trading ideas, and slowly gaining momentum as they go at it.)

ALLEN "...But our viewpoint has clouded, we no longer can see through the mist. As Blake said, "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."

NEAL "Man! Whooee! That's just it! We fritter our life away to details, we gotta simplify! Simplify!"

ALLEN "Everything is holy! Everybody's holy! Everywhere is holy! Everyday is an eternity! Everyman's an angel!"

NEAL "Yes, yes, yes! The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware..."

(Long pause, more eye-staring)

ALLEN "Who wandered around and around at midnight... "

NEAL "... in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went... "

ALLEN "... leaving no broken hearts... "

NEAL "... who lit cigarettes in boxcars... "

ALLEN "... boxcars, boxcars racketing through snow towards lonesome farms in grandfather night... "

NEAL "... who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-"

ALLEN "Golgotha jail solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation... "

NEAL "The weight of the world is love... "

ALLEN (Right on the tail of Neal's words)

"Under the burden of dissatisfaction, the weight"

NEAL (Immediately)

"The weight we carry is love."

(Eye staring interlude)

NEAL "Who drove cross-country seventy-two hours to find out if I had a vision or he had a vision... "

ALLEN "... to find out eternity."

ON VIDEO: ( Another long pause while staring continues, then lights down to film of high shot of a bed, Neal & Allen lying down together. Neal reaches over and embraces Allen, pulling him close.)

MUSIC:(Creepy road groove, expectant and unresolved)

ON STAGE: (Lights up on Neal hitchhiking, silent. Hal Chase narrates from downstage)

HAL "And so, Luanne finally tired of his constant absence and split to Denver, leaving Neal to Jack and Allen. Meanwhile, the divisions in our group became more and more pronounced as time went by. Jack and I had the All-American "Wolfian" outlook, while Allen and Bill were more sinister, homosexuals even, representative of the dark underbelly of America.

Of course, Neal tired of New York soon enough and rushed off to meet up with Luanne in Denver. He's been writing us regularly, and he just sent Jack a colossal, monumental piece of correspondence that Jack fell in love with. It was written in one long sentence, no punctuation, as if recording exactly what he was thinking. The part of the letter that Jack told me about was essentially Neal's routine in Denver, it goes something like this: Neal's balling Luanne at the hotel and as soon as that's over, he rushes off to his new gal Carolyn (of course neither of them know what's going on) and bangs her at once, then he takes off with his pals - first hew has to beg Carolyn, who already hates his friends - the he goes out till six in the morning, and goes to see Luanne and start all over again. The action is moving to Denver."

SCENE 8

MUSIC:(Cheesy 1950's soap opera music with a comic edge)

ON STAGE: ( Neal is standing center stage, casually flipping a hammer. Luanne stands to the far left, just beside the band. Carolyn stands far right.)

LUANNE "Of course Neal came back, he loves me. Neal will always love me, not necessarily me alone but it's OK, our relationship is like that.(dreaming)

When I was sixteen we got married, everything was great and we drove to New York together, well, he drove and I just kept him entertained. When we got there things were still great, like Jack for example, he's really sweet. I don't know, I guess that it was the other ''hipsters' that Neal started hanging around with that I just wasn't ready for. Most of them were just too far gone from my world for me to understand them - Neal, of course loved them all. He's always been a babe desperate for knowledge. For weeks before we even left Denver Neal was busting to get to New York and the intellectuals of the east-so desperate to learn more about philosophy and poetry, though he never really read or wrote anything.... (giggle)

I remember when we arrived in New York, we were so hi off of each other, but soon he was always leaving to go be with Allen or Jack, to learn, he said.

I told Neal that his intelligence was every bit as formal and shining and complete, with out all that tedious intellectualness, but I guess he needed more than me to convince him. And everyone out there clicked with him, for me? The New York scene was just getting too cold and dreary, eventually I never saw Neal anymore. So I left, to come back to Denver, but I knew he'd come after me... "

(Neal puts down his hammer and rushes over to Luanne, grabbing her passionately, she responding in same way)

NEAL "... honey, what the hell we doin'?"

LUANNE "Just keeping myself occupied long enough so as I can get some fuel."

NEAL "Yessir! That's my gal, but I don't have alot of time."

LUANNE "Of course not, too many cars to be parked."

NEAL "Whoooeee man! One of these days I'm gonna jump in one of them cars and instead of parking it, I'll put down the pedal and be on my way to scoop up my little bride."

LUANNE "And where shall we go this time?"

NEAL "New Orleans"

LUANNE "I want to go to Mexico."

NEAL "Yes, Mexico, let it be Mexico!"

LUANNE "But first... (They embrace for a kiss, after a pause)... Whooee baby, love to stay and keep you company but... (Leaves Luanne and picks up his hammer and starts to flip again.)

CAROLYN "The first time I met Neal was at a party at one of my friend's apartments in Denver. He seemed confident in the smoky, dim-lit basement, with his shirt off and sweat pouring down his back - continuously cajoling, gesticulating and pointing at nothing in particular. There was something strangely attractive about him. As soon as our eyes met, he rushed over and begged me to tell him my name, and when I did, he darted out of sight.

At the time I knew nothing of his stalking interests, or that he had taken the liberty of inconspicuously finding out my home address from my close friend at the party. Well, when I arrived home that night, who was sitting on my front steps but Neal Cassady! He looked so lonely and cute in such a pathetic way that I had to invite him in for a bite to eat, and then we ended up talking and lying in bed together for the rest of the night.

Now he comes around at least twice daily, sometimes I don't even open the door, because I know wzz player, Bird or something, and he's blowing a hot solo right off the top of his head, and never looking back."

JON "What do you think of this new jazz, is it all a result of the standard swing time big band music getting stale?"

JACK "Well, people will always love music that they can dance to, but the music becomes formulated, and that Benny Goodman stuff all sounds the same."

JON "It serves its purpose well, and it employs lots of musicians."

JACK "From what I know, swing is simple, and the musicians are so good that once the learn the charts, it must become a monotonous bore."

JON "That's true, this new bop is hard to predict, the horns are crying for freedom.. "

JACK "crying for freedom, yes... "

JON "Bop cats are confident in their search for atonal orgasms"

JACK "Now it's jazz, the place is roaring, all beautiful girls in there... "

JON "It's funny, but I don't find that too many women are digging the small combo horn blowers"

JACK "Aw, come on"

JON "Maybe it's just that bop has become the exodus of dance"

JACK "No! Jon, dancing will never stop."

JON "Well of course I know that!"

JACK "Besides, just because Big Band music has always had specific dance routines or steps, people always had to dance a certain way for a certain song. But now the music has broken down the conventions, the focus is on improvisation, which means that the dancing should be completely free as well... "

JON "But when I see Bird or others, no-one seems to be able to find a steady beat that they can dance to."

JACK "I see everyone moving in a weird subtle way, smiling, spinning, it's a freedom that takes the pressure off of people. Course, I also see guys not dancing, but just standing against the wall and letting the horn be the star."

JON "So you think that instead of everybody focusing on the dance, they are tuned into the wind of the horn, and composing random images and thoughts."

JACK "Yes! The average bar crowd is ready to let their ears go out of tune and let the music be spontaneous rather than learned."

JON "Just like Bird"

JACK "Just like the horn"

JON "The horn!"

JACK "Yes, Jon!"

JON "What?"

(Pause)

JACK "A new season approaches, a season of night-long ramblings, one of liberation. The work-aday citizen is dead."

JON "You mean a renaissance?"

JACK "Well, now that the big war is over, you can be sure that the freedom we were scared to lose will be used."

JON "I can see it happening already."

JACK "Of course, it's been going on since the dawn of time."

JON "Yes, bohemians are a fixture."

JACK "Not just that, but, I mean bohemians don't have to be underground, y'know?"

JOHN "True"

JACK "That's what our generation will do, crawl out from the underground and experience, experience life."

JOHN "It's true, people spend far too much time and energy trying to figure out death. Our generation has confronted it, like our Dads. Now that the fighting is over, maybe we should get hooked on... on..."

JACK "Sensation."

JOHN "That's all fine and all, but we haven't touched upon the real question, have we?"

JACK "Which is?"

JOHN "Who is our generation? How do we know that the term generation even means anything? There was the lost generation, who, much like us, denied all things conventional."

JACK "They were existentialists."

JOHN "Aren't we?"

JACK "Ya but, everyone I know is kinda furtive, kinda beat... "

ON VIDEO: (Unknown character rounding streetcorner, nodding his head and beating his slouch hat against his thigh to the rhythm of a tune in his head.)

"... They all go along the street like they were guilty of something, but didn't believe in guilt. I can spot them immediately. And it's happening all over the country, to everyone, a sort of revolution of the soul, I guess you'd call it."

JOHN "YES!"

JACK "Hee Hee Hee... Maybe we're a beat generation!"

JOHN "Go Jack!"

JACK "Go... Yah!"

ON STAGE:(Jack moves underneath video screen.)

JOHN "I had only read about characters like these in Dostoyevski or Miller. By the time I met Jack and these other bohemians I had settled down with a good woman who worked to the bone and left me alone all day to write. But to write is to experience, right? So I would search out people in the village and keep in touch. Through Jack, I met a whole gamut of criminals and freaks, who were living life at ground zero. Jack and I were fascinated by their desperate romantics, and were always picking up new connections with other times square creatures who were bumming around.

"But I would always split early to be home before my wife got in from work. I had to make it look like I was writing all day. More than often, I would show up at the gathering of intellectuals at someone's hip little pad. Their parties counted on unexpected guests (like me) to bring liquor with which to make themselves more welcome. See, the interplay of relationships under the benevolence of alcohol was the main thing.

There'd be rooms thronged with people, many of them unsure just what they were doing there, but intrigued by all the talk, the smoke and laughter, and the ceaseless movement by which people at a party disguised their self-consciousness. The brighter crop of philosophy and literature students from Columbia squatted on the floors, vying for repute in that elaborate game of intellectual snobbery which passes for conversation among the young and intense. They'd group themselves (at a safe distance so as not to appear too interested) around the one or two authentic literary figures who had managed to drop by.

"Through the rooms, like pale butterflies, flitted a number of young women, girlfriends of the students, exchanging the gossip of the sets they traveled in with offhand arrogance, all the time, snatching looks over their shoulders so as not to miss anything, and quickly moving on. In the crowded living room where a single light dimly shone, someone was strumming a zither the strings of which had been systematically tuned flat.

"It was no wonder that everyone split, the thing was to move, and I was stuck in New York writing about my wife... Reading about Jack's life through letters that he sent me. Letters concerning the immensity of the American landscape, Jack and Neal the giggling nihilists back and forth, from coast to coast in cars.

"I never received any letters from Neal, but heard alot about them. Apparently he wrote very quickly and never made a correction. It wasn't long before Jack adopted this uncensored, honest approach. Through Neal, Jack found his voice."

SCENE 10

MUSIC:(Blues and haikus, dueling words and music.)

ON STAGE:( Jack and Neal are on the road. They are jamming blues and haikus with the band, taking turns at it.)

"A vast cavern, huh?

I stop & jump to other field

And you wander around

like jap prisoners

in salt lake cities

under San Francisco's

sewage disaster.

"An explorer of souls and cities

a low down junky-

who has discovered

that the essence of life

is found only in the poppy plant

"Sorcerers hoppity skop

with the same familiarity

in my Buddhaland dreams-

monotonous monotony

of endless grape dirigible stars

"Fuck the mambo

Fuck is a dirty word

but it comes out clean

"No direction

no direction to go

Burroughs says It's a time-space

travel ship

connected with mystiques and mysteries

Burroughs says, We have destiny,

Last of the Faustian Men.

no direction in the void

is the news from the void

in touch with the void

everywhere void."

SCENE 12

MUSIC:(Background, depressing slow groove.)

ON VIDEO:( Jack wakes up alone on side of road.)

ON STAGE:(Jack hitchhiking)

JACK "It was over a year before I saw Neal again. I have no plans, no dates, no appointments with nobody. So I leisurely explore souls and cities. In god's name under the stars, what for? I felt like a speck on the surface of the sad, red earth.

"At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had to offer me was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, kicks, darkness, music, not even night. I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a "white man" disillusioned.

"I was only myself Jack, sad, strolling in this violet dark, this unbearably sweet night, wishing I could exchange worlds with the happy, truehearted, ecstatic Negroes of America. The raggedy neighborhoods reminded me of Neal and Luanne who knew these streets so well from childhood. How I wished I could find them.

MUSIC:(Neal's theme slowed down and darkened)

ON STAGE:(Neal comes on stage with a whimper, his thumb is in a very poor bandage. He seems down for the first time in the play. Jack gazes at him.)

NEAL "I hit Luanne on the brow on February 26 at 6 o'clock in the evening - in fact 6:10. And now listen to this: my thumb only deflected off her brow, and she didn't even have a bruise and in fact laughed, but my thumb broke above the wrist and a horrible doctor made a setting of the bones that was difficult and took three separate castings, twenty-three combined hours of sitting on hard benches waiting, and the final cast had a traction pin stuck through the tip of my thumb, so in April when I took off my cast the pin infected my bones and I developed osteomyelitis which has become chronic, and after an operation which failed and a month in a cast the result was the amputation of a wee bare piece off the tip-ass end."

MUSIC:(Building momentum and tension)

ON STAGE:(Neal wanders down center stage and picks up his hammer and begins flipping)

"We know life Jack, we're growing older, each of us, little by little, and are coming to know things. What you tell me about your life I understand well, I've always dug your feelings."

JACK "We can't quit now Neal, we haven't found the ideal bar yet!"

ON STAGE:(Enter Bill)

BILL "The ideal bar doesn't exist in America. An ideal bar is something that's gone beyond our kin. In 1910 a bar was a place where men went to meet during or after work, and all there was, was a long counter, brass rails, spittoons, player piano for music, a few mirrors, and barrels of whiskey at ten cents a shot and barrels of beer at five cents a mug. Now all you get is chromium, drunken women, fags, hostile bartenders, anxious owners who hover around the door, worried about their leather seats and the law; just alot of screaming at the wrong time and deadly silence when a stranger walks in. So drop into your grave Neal, after all ,you're the one that dug it."

ON STAGE:(Enter Hal)

HAL "Well Neal, what do you have to say for yourself? You asked me to teach you all about literature and philosophy. I showed you. I introduced you to a world of writing and ideas. You had the chance of your lifetime. You came to New York and fooled everyone into thinking that you were playing the lead to as literary jazz band without even knowing an instrument. All you could really do is snap your finger and tap your toes. Well, it's been some years, Neal and what have you learnt? Are you a writer now? Are you finished using the ones that cared for you? Now what? Time to hit the old road again, another timely escape. I can see through you now Neal, almost like a ghost. The ghost of a broken angel that only wants to get his kicks. Nietzsche was right Neal - "This is my pity for all that is past: I see how all that is abandoned - abandoned to the pleasure, the spirit, the madness of every generation, which comes along and reinterprets all that has been a bridge to itself."

ON STAGE:(Enter Luanne and Carolyn, they hover over Neal, on each shoulder.)

CAROLYN "For years you haven't had any sense of responsibility. You've done so many awful things. It never occurs to you that life is serious and there are people trying to make something decent out of it instead of just goofing off all the time. When will anyone ever trust you? People admire you, write about you, praise you, make up exaggerated stories about your driving, your constant surge of adrenaline. But now it's lost it's effect because you're forcing yourself and you feel that you have to! Your problem is your friends. They feed off of you and encourage you to perform. I wanted nothing more than a little understanding.

How could you spend all our money on that car!

How could you leave me alone and pregnant with no money!?

Why are you taking off with Jack again?

Why are you still smiling!?"

LUANNE "You have absolutely no regard for anyone but yourself and your damn kicks. All you think of is what's hanging between your legs, and how much fun you can get out of people and then throw them aside. Not only that but you're silly about it. Liar! Liar! Liar! I was always the one who really understood you. But we never figured out why we were doing it, I know there was no purpose it was just fun. It's still fun for you, but what about everyone that you've used? I know you're coming back but I don't want you back. I'm going to satisfy myself for once, I got me a rich man who takes good care of me. You're nothing but a memory."

ON STAGE:(Enter Allen)

ALLEN "NC, secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver - joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots and diner backyards on mountain tops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadsides."

ON STAGE:(Neal drops his hammer and splits, Jack leaves his typewriter.)

MUSIC:(New York theme, see Scene 1)

JACK "Adios, you who watched the sun go down, at the rail, by my side, smiling, - ADIOS KING!

"I settled down to write, in solitude, in pain, writing hymns and prayers even at dawn, thinking 'when this book is finished, which is going to be the sum and the substance and crap of everything I've been through throughout this whole goddamn life, I shall be redeemed.'. I did it all, I wrote the book, I stalked the streets of life, of Manhattan, of Long Island, stalked through eleven hundred and eighty three pages of my first novel, sold the book, got an advance, whooped, halehlujahed, went on, did everything you're supposed to do in life.

"But nothing ever came of it. No generation is new. There's nothing new under the sun. All is vanity.

"Forget it, go to sleep. Tomorrow is another day. Hic Calix! Look that up in Latin, it means, here's the chalice - and be sure there's wine in it!

"What is the feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see the specks dispersing? It's just this too huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies."

EPILOGUE

MUSIC:(None)

ON STAGE:( Allen Ginsberg is finishing HOWL for the first time at the Gallery 6 poetry reading.)

ALLEN "Visions! Omens! Hallucinations! Miracles! Ecstasies! Gone down the American river!

Dreams! Adorations! Illuminations! Religions! Religions! The whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

Breakthroughs! Over the river! Flips and crucifixions! Gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! Down on the rocks of time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! The wild eyes! The holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! To solitude! Waving! Carrying flowers! Down the river! Into the street!"

THE END