In chapter 12 Kerouc typically wilts again in difficult circumstance, when leaving burned bridges behind, hitch-hiking away from San Francisco. He takes the inland route via Fresno and stuck in Bakersfield, catches a bus to LA. He meets and hustles a Mexican girl on the run from an abusive husband and lands her in a motel in Los Angeles where he gets laid and makes plans with her he has to know are phony, she is looking for stability, he will tell her any story to keep getting laid.

The lies are patently obvious. If he were headed to Texas as stated, he’d not have detoured to LA by catching a bus from Bakersfield. The direct route is south (and best shot at a short route from truckers) via Tehachapi and beyond and then east. I’ve hitch-hiked the same country and driven it as well.

If the were such a thing as ‘down the line’, the toe would be the Blue Moon tavern close to the Stoltz sawmill just outside Columbia Falls on the Road to Whitefish. I’d been drinking there with a Chippewa friend, ‘Bugs.’ We were relieving ourselves at the urinals when a tall redneck type looked out through his drunken haze and queried Bugs, “What are you, a Mexican?” He was just being stupidly curious, we’d Mexicans in the neighborhood as well. Bugs reply was “I’m the meanest fucking Indian you’ll ever meet” which served its purpose and the guy shut up and left us alone. I knew Mexicans and Indians, and it was no big deal. There was more natural social tension between the rednecks and longhairs than between races in our neighborhood.

But we were all country people and had more in common than not, and one thing we had in common was a sort of extreme native humor. Like the longhair who’d normally have nothing to do with chicken fighting until nature delivered into his flock a homosexual rapist rooster and he began scheming right away, thinking how he could humiliate rednecks that enjoyed cock-fighting by springing a pervert-chicken on them by surprise.

By all accounts the rapist-chicken would be a formidable foe in any chicken fight. This chicken had been observed to have a sort of ‘mesmerizing’ look of a killer when he’d approach the other rooster who’d be flustered by the pervert chicken’s movement away from any frontal confrontation, not running away, but circling his opponent to get behind. Always seeking approach from the rear, there being no honest face to face fighting intention, about the time the opposing chicken expecting a normal fight would begin an opposite turn to meet the pervert’s expected attack, he’d made a fatal mistake, quick as a snake can strike, the rapist rooster would leap, beak snagging neck feathers from behind, and be on the unsuspecting rooster’s back and fuck his adversary just as though it were a hen. The raped rooster would then just lay there with a dying squawk, precisely as though it’d been killed as opposed to screwed.

This last phenomena particularly suggested a clear victory in the imagined fighting ring, how would the rednecks be able to admit anything other than their straight chicken had been whipped, fair and square?

Well, the problem was, chicken fighting was never a big deal in our area of Montana, and he wouldn’t raise enough betting money from the rednecks to make any such endeavor worth the risk involved, plus the pervertrapist rooster’s owner knew that by springing any such surprise, he’d likely not escape the event alive short of employing a sub-machine gun. A trivia note, the rooster’s name happened to be Jack...

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