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rareslashTitle: And The Highway Blistered Jazz
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
theo_winterwood
Fandom: On the Road by Jack Keruoac
Rating: mild PG-13
Pairing: Sal Paradise/Dean Moriarty, allusion to Dean Moriarty/Carlo Marx
Spoilers: None for any specific plot points.
Disclaimer: Characters are not mine, and (because I always feel I should say this, just in case) the views expressed are not necessarily always my own.
(also crossposted to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
rareslash and rarelitslash)
It was one of those clinical psychology terms that would keep Carlo Marx awake at night worrying over it and calling me or Dean or someone up and asking us to agree that it was a disorder, that it was wrong, he should be cured, but at the same time just wanting me or Dean or whoever to find a way to tell him not to kill himself over fretting about homosexuality like the neurotic fairy Jew he could be so much of the time. Him just a strange pale boy-child-not-man who mooned over sailors and poets and guys like Dean but would go all pink and tragic when he actually made it with them.
"Homosexuality" was one of those clinical words that was meant for Carlo Marx and designed to scare those with an ingrained fear already of mental disease. It didn't apply to me, or to Dean, and if you sometimes felt it wrench you in the gut when you saw him and wanted to put your hands all over his naked unashamed self and let him do the same, that didn't make you one of them. Sure, Dean had made it with Carlo a few times, but didn't make him any more a queer than any other real man out there.
And if he and I did the same thing once or twice, in that motel in Jericho, Arkansas over tea and beer and cigarettes, with a bop song crackling through on the motel radio, and another time in the back of a Ford truck that Dean had stolen from a Herald Springs corn farmer in California for the very purpose, and afterwards we left it in the field by the highway and hitched into Dalton with some migrants and high school footballers who had bottles of gin and sticks of chewing gum to share, that doesn't make us one of them, one of Carlo, one of those pale, cowering queers.
That doesn't make us like them. It's just a one-time, two-time, on-the-road-getting-hungry thing, where there's no prairie angel girl golden and pretty for Dean to look poetic at or me to cry love for, when there are no easy girls, no prostitutes, and when we've been staring at each other just too damned long. Not homosexuality, not like Carlo Marx describes, a horrible gnawing addiction, a need for endless cock and all those tears Carlo cries. It's not happy and free and unimprisoned like Dean and me, as we go, just go, across and through and past, all fast.
He's got a Chevrolet now, painted red and of dubious legitimacy, and Nevada is streaming by in a panting khaki blur smearing past the passenger door window, as the windshield eats highway with no sign of slowing or stopping. The two hitchers we picked up four towns ago are asleep in the backseat, a pair of down-on-their-luck runaway kids with holes in their shoes and someone else's clothes, and Dean is naked, glorious unashamed naked, as he drives and grins and whistles some song we heard in a jazz club in Michigan. I laugh and he looks at me, still grinning, and closes his mouth over mine, just for a blistering sunshine second, before he whoops and guns it up to one-ten and devours asphalt and tar beneath the tires.
I shout and laugh and clap him on the shoulder and think there's no sticking some cold clinical term on this, no putting some label full of unhealthy paranoia on friendship and freedom and fast cars and motels and driving hitching never stopping 'til you reach the hamburgers and neon.
Author:
theo_winterwoodFandom: On the Road by Jack Keruoac
Rating: mild PG-13
Pairing: Sal Paradise/Dean Moriarty, allusion to Dean Moriarty/Carlo Marx
Spoilers: None for any specific plot points.
Disclaimer: Characters are not mine, and (because I always feel I should say this, just in case) the views expressed are not necessarily always my own.
(also crossposted to
rareslash and rarelitslash)It was one of those clinical psychology terms that would keep Carlo Marx awake at night worrying over it and calling me or Dean or someone up and asking us to agree that it was a disorder, that it was wrong, he should be cured, but at the same time just wanting me or Dean or whoever to find a way to tell him not to kill himself over fretting about homosexuality like the neurotic fairy Jew he could be so much of the time. Him just a strange pale boy-child-not-man who mooned over sailors and poets and guys like Dean but would go all pink and tragic when he actually made it with them.
"Homosexuality" was one of those clinical words that was meant for Carlo Marx and designed to scare those with an ingrained fear already of mental disease. It didn't apply to me, or to Dean, and if you sometimes felt it wrench you in the gut when you saw him and wanted to put your hands all over his naked unashamed self and let him do the same, that didn't make you one of them. Sure, Dean had made it with Carlo a few times, but didn't make him any more a queer than any other real man out there.
And if he and I did the same thing once or twice, in that motel in Jericho, Arkansas over tea and beer and cigarettes, with a bop song crackling through on the motel radio, and another time in the back of a Ford truck that Dean had stolen from a Herald Springs corn farmer in California for the very purpose, and afterwards we left it in the field by the highway and hitched into Dalton with some migrants and high school footballers who had bottles of gin and sticks of chewing gum to share, that doesn't make us one of them, one of Carlo, one of those pale, cowering queers.
That doesn't make us like them. It's just a one-time, two-time, on-the-road-getting-hungry thing, where there's no prairie angel girl golden and pretty for Dean to look poetic at or me to cry love for, when there are no easy girls, no prostitutes, and when we've been staring at each other just too damned long. Not homosexuality, not like Carlo Marx describes, a horrible gnawing addiction, a need for endless cock and all those tears Carlo cries. It's not happy and free and unimprisoned like Dean and me, as we go, just go, across and through and past, all fast.
He's got a Chevrolet now, painted red and of dubious legitimacy, and Nevada is streaming by in a panting khaki blur smearing past the passenger door window, as the windshield eats highway with no sign of slowing or stopping. The two hitchers we picked up four towns ago are asleep in the backseat, a pair of down-on-their-luck runaway kids with holes in their shoes and someone else's clothes, and Dean is naked, glorious unashamed naked, as he drives and grins and whistles some song we heard in a jazz club in Michigan. I laugh and he looks at me, still grinning, and closes his mouth over mine, just for a blistering sunshine second, before he whoops and guns it up to one-ten and devours asphalt and tar beneath the tires.
I shout and laugh and clap him on the shoulder and think there's no sticking some cold clinical term on this, no putting some label full of unhealthy paranoia on friendship and freedom and fast cars and motels and driving hitching never stopping 'til you reach the hamburgers and neon.
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no subject
Date: 2007-05-16 08:43 am (UTC)ajfkslf!
Just--you've captured exactly their characters, and reading this is just like reading the book, just that flowing narrative that still makes sense and you've managed to pack so much emotion into sentences without reverting to flowery prose. There's great bursts of feeling and undertone and all of it just in this subtle piece.
Wonderful stuff. Can't get enough of it, really!
Please feel free to write more--
Kits
no subject
Date: 2007-05-16 08:30 pm (UTC)I'm really glad you liked it.
:)