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In Jack Kerouac's Beat Generation classic
of the 1950's,On the Road (1957), the autobiographical narrator, Sal
Paradise, describes his entrance into San Antonio from Fredericksburg
on what back then would have been U.S. Highway 87. He and his friends,
Stan and Dean, are "all red-eyed from the continual mistral-winds of
old Tex-ass," because, as Sal observes mischievously, they are "getting
down into the hot country now, boys, the desert rats and the tequila"(271). Like Graham Greene back in 1938, Sal and his buddies are on
their way to Mexico; as they descend from the hills northwest of San Antonio,
Sal's first impressions of the city resemble Greene's earlier comments about
it being a kind of miniature Mexico: Suddenly, we were in absolutely tropical
heat at the bottom of a five-mile-long hill, and up ahead we saw the lights
of old San Antonio. You had the feeling this all used to be Mexican territory
indeed. Houses by the side of the road were different, gas stations beater,
fewer lamps. . . . We stopped at a mad gas
station to get a grease job. Mexicans were standing around in the hot light
of the overhead bulbs that were blackened by valley summerbugs, reaching
down into a soft-drink box and pulling out beer bottles and throwing the
money to the attendant. (271-72)
As Sal and Stan get drunk on several bottles
of beer, the narrator enthusiastically gushes, "We were already almost out
of America and yet definitely in it and in the middle of where it's maddest"
(272). |
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But they have a medical problem: Stan has an infected arm,
and he needs medical attention, which leads them to the only identifiable
local structure mentioned in the episode. After asking around for directions,
they take Stan to the nearest hospital, located "near downtown, where things
looked more sleek and American, several semi-skyscrapers and many neons
and chain drugstores, yet with cars crashing through from the dark as if
there were no traffic laws" (272). Sal notices that "the hall of the hospital
was full of poor Mexican women, some of them pregnant, some of them sick
or bringing their little sick kiddies. It was sad" (272). The 1950's setting,
the location of the hopital, and the low economic status of the patients
being treated--all lead to the conclusion that Paradise is describing the
old Robert B. Green Hospital, situated just west
of downtown. The building has been more recently updated and renamed
the University Health Center--Downtown, but it still treats indigent patients of the city.
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Two views of University Health Center--Downtown, formerly the Robert B. Green Hospital
Photo Credit: AccuNet/AP
Jack Kerouac Memorial Monument, Lowell, Mass.
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While Stan is being injected with a syringe of penicillin,
Sal and Dean go back out onto the streets of "Mexican San Antonio," where
the semi-tropical climate is "fragrant and soft--the
softest air I'd ever known--and dark, and mysterious, and buzzing" (272).
Sal and Dean enter a "crazy San Antonio pool shack" (272), where they buy
Cokes (not coke, though they probably would have if it had been available),
put dimes in a jukebox, and listen to the music of Lionel Hampton. At this
point in the narrative they notice a crippled boy playing pool at one of
the tables and being harassed by other pool players. Sal describes the boy
as "some kind of malformed midget with a great big beautiful face, much
too large, in which enormous brown eyes moistly gleamed" (273). Dean's fascination
is apparent in the comments he makes to his companion: "Don't you see, Sal,
a San Antonio Mex Tom Snark, the same story the world over. See, they hit
him on the ass with a cue? Ha-ha-ha! Hear them laugh. You see, he wants
to win the game, he's bet four bits. Watch! Watch!" We watched as the angelic
young midget aimed for a bank shot. He missed. The other fellows roared.
. . . They had the little boy by the scruff of the neck and were mauling
him around playful. He squealed. He stalked out in the night but not without
a backward bashful, sweet glance. "Ah man, I'd love to know that gone little
cat and what he thinks and what kind of girls he has--oh, man, I'm high
on this air!" (273) Leaving the pool hall, the two Fifties-era Beatniks
wander along some residential streets, which seem to have a kind of primitive
appeal to Sal, with their "dark, mysterious blocks" and "innumerable houses
hid[den] behind verdant, almost jungle-like yards" (273). The experience
of the preceding hours elicits from the intrigued narrator the section's
concluding exclamation, "I never knew this mad San Antonio! Think what Mexico'll
be like! Lessgo! Lessgo!" (273), but not before they return to the hospital
to retrieve Stan, whose infected arm has improved as a result of the penicillin
injection. |