Jack Kerouac is dreaming of a motorcycle

I have always been mildly disappointed that Kerouac never wrote about riding motorcycles. He was much more interested in cars, probably taking his cue from Neal Cassady, who reportedly stole hundreds of them as a teen in Denver.

To Cassady, cars were great places to make out with girls. In their drives across the country, Kerouac and Cassady would drive all night, blast the radio, and talk. It's tough to do that on a motorcycle. But Cassady was given to discourse, not self-reflection. You can't have an audience aboard a bike. Maybe there's a correlation.

I'm certainly not a Kerouac scholar, but I've found only a single reference to motorcycles in Kerouac's writing; I stumbled across it in his Book of Dreams, a collection of his remembered dreams:

"Joe and I are riding his motorcycle, I'm sitting ass back, heels of my new crepsoles dragging in the Southern town street -- I want to ask Joe to slow down so I can turn around but he doesnt hear or care, it's Rocky Mount or Kinston, we cross the railroad tracks and go out and go speeding over the countryside but suddenly it leaves us and a great gap of nothingness and sand hundredfoot canyon yawns beneath us and all we can do is fall but Joe has that wild crazy hope the wheels'll stay upright which they more or less do, we ride the saw horse, at the bottom is a dry creek, another climb up sand steep bank like those we tumbled on Lawrence Boulevard nightmarish vast waiting…"