Chapter 5, all of 3 ½ pages, is hardly remarkable, a sort of ‘filler’ to bring Kerouac over to Denver following a drunken night in Cheyenne, where he’d finally passed out in a bus station. He forgives ‘Montana Slim’ (he kinda had to, considering the huge lie he’d told about Slim in the chapter preceding), his depleted $50 experiences another night multiplying like loaves and fishes, as it dwindles at about ½ the rate it had ought to have been dwindling, considering his bar hopping and partying, and he shows no qualms over having tried to pry a waitress away from her boyfriend for a one night stand, and tried to convince another woman she had ought to take a perfect and stupidly drunk stranger from the east coast (himself) home across the plains in the middle of the night simply so he could screw her. To his credit, Kerouac admits she sneered at him. If Kerouac continues to mix with westerners without a competent baby sitter, particularly with his ingrate’s attitude towards western women, he might need two or three guardian angels, just to stay alive.

I was ‘up the line’ at Hungry Horse, Montana, and tequila drunk on Cuervo Gold, to that point you puke, pass out to semi-comatose state and the next day your liver will hurt. One of our local girls, I knew who she was but I did not really know her in any sense of acquainted, gathered me up, and took me home. She’d cleaned up my face, maneuvered me onto a bed, unbuttoned and removed my shirt and yanked off my trousers, covered me with a blanket and went off to sleep in her own bed. In the morning, I found a clean robe draped over the end of my bed, a note explaining she’d had to leave for work, I was welcome to use the shower, should fix myself some breakfast, my clothes were washed and in the dryer and to please lock the door behind me on my way out .. all to be taken as a humanitarian act.

One gets the impression in similar circumstance, Cassady and Ginsberg would have taken turns screwing me, while passed out, and Kerouac would have written about it.

Now, about this point, I have an observation. Kerouac has a sort of ‘ethics free’ vain or narcissistic conscience, a weak ghost of empathy that only appreciates his self, and in a guilty way at a distance. It is a faint conscience.

At Denver, Kerouac looks up ‘Chad King’ who in actuality is Haldon ‘Hal’ Chase. Other than being the critical character at the center of responsibility for getting Kerouac and Ginsberg acquainted with Cassady, Chase it would appear will be a bit player in Kerouac’s work and with good reason (I’ve not read ‘On the Road’ ahead of this narrative, taking it chapter by chapter without knowing what lies ahead, but I do a short research on the characters as they ‘enter the scene’), Chase is a Denver resident who’d not grown up an abused kid on skid row.

Now, when an honest westerner realizes he has played a critical part in perpetrating a world-class fraud, he’ll behave like Chase had, later on. Some years after Chase had disavowed Kerouac, Ginsberg and Cassady altogether, Kerouac biographer (he’s had more than his share) Gerald Nicosia looked up Chase at home. Haldon ‘Hal’ Chase or ‘Chad King’ had subsequently run Nicosia off, threatening him with a rifle. This is a straightforward action you could believe in, attesting to the ‘veracity’ of the ‘Beat’ writers, by Chase. We’re about to meet Ginsberg and Cassady, and because authentic Rocky Mountain folk tend to call a spade a spade, no beating around the bush so to speak, let’s have a brief but honest glimpse at just what sort of characters Kerouac will be chronicling, in the coming chapters.

Cassady ‘got his start in life’, eventually pointing to his becoming Ginsberg’s hero and a writer, at age 14, when his ‘mentor of promising but disadvantaged young men’ began butt-fucking him. By the time of Kerouac’s hooking up with these two ‘On the Road’ (in Denver) Cassady is already giving Ginsberg literal blow-jobs, something he would do for the next twenty years despite Cassady since having become married and having kids, and Ginsberg having acquired a “life-long” partner.

This work is so patently founded on dishonest characters, and chronicled by their avid admirer and co-conspirator, I believe it will be safe to say [by the end of this work] there is nothing can be believed AT ALL in relation to anything written by Kerouac. Or for that matter, nothing can be believed as written by his ‘beat generation’ peers.

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