Among my favorite human beings are my high-school classmates Julian Brownlee and Mike Knecht. Mike is a writer and a (real) cowboy; Julian—named for his grandfather, Cal Poly President Julian McPhee—a standout athlete (football, baseball) with a marvelously dry sense of humor with whom I smoked my first cigarette, a Marlboro, in the St. Patrick’s Parish Hall in 1965.

That wasn’t very humorous, but it was my owned damn fault. I turned green.

And then—to show you how obstinate I am—the same thing happened shortly after, this time with a cigar called a Rum Crook, in the Fair Oaks Theater, during a film in which the Disney actress Hayley Mills (the original Parent Trap) appeared in a scene that revealed her nude rear end. That, and the Rum Crook, proved too much for me to tolerate. I think somebody—I don’t really remember who—found me sprawled on the sidewalk beneath the Coming Attractions, took pity on me, and drove me home to Huasna Road.

A little later, in high school, I found that there was a little knot of us in the AGHS Class of 1970—Julian, Joe Loomis, John Porter and me—who all shared January birthdays as well as given names that began with “J.”

Anyway, Mike and Julian are currently on that road trip—Mike’s posting from time to time on Facebook—from San Luis Obispo County to North Carolina for a wedding, in Julian’s Subaru. (A fine car; we’ve owned three.)

The photo shows them at the Great Divide. It has just occurred to me that they, heading east instead of west, are doing a Reverse Kerouac. These two may not know it, but not only are they are among my favorite human beings, but On the Road is among my favorite books.

And Kerouac, while working as an SP brakeman, lived in San Luis Obispo for a short time. I get all Kerouacky when I go to my much-beloved San Francisco and visit the City Lights Bookshop, where another one of my favorite human beings, my former AGHS history student Erin Messer, works.

It was a major gathering place for the Beats, including Kerouac, Cassady, Ginsberg and the City Lights founder, the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died recently.

I believe that he was more or less 140 years old.

The only bookstore that comes close to City Lights is Shakespeare and Company, founded by Sylvia Beach–from Altadena, California, of all places–and it stands just across the Seine from Notre Dame. I’ve been to Paris twice, but I was too intimidated to actually go inside the bookstore that was once frequented by Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, John dos Passos, Ford Madox Ford, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. I’m just a little fellow.

It was enough for me to sip a latte the size of a soup bowl at a sidewalk cafe, Les Deux Magots, and gaze fondly at Shakespeare and Company’s facade. (Hemingway would’ve done the same, but with a Pernod, a pad of yellow lined paper and a dozen #2 pencils sharpened with his pocketknife.)

After I’d finished my latte, I got moderately but happily lost in the Latin Quarter, the old university section, with my nose almost against the glass of shop windows and looking around corners up narrow alleyways—an alley, in Europe, is called a “close”— once prowled by belligerent university students, thinking it was Poly Royal, armed with cudgels and fortified by red wine. The alleys, always in shadow, are 14th-century relics that somehow escaped Baron Hausmann’s reconstruction of Paris in the time of Napoleon III.

That was a good Lost. I think Mike and Julian are reasonable navigators, so they won’t get lost. They might run into a little culture-shock, like the time the guy hollered at me from a pickup truck in the Ozarks:

“Hey, boy!”

Actually, it was more like:

“Hey, BOY!“

I was 25 years old and walking to a hamburger stand in Licking, Missouri, for some French-fried mushrooms, an Ozark delicacy. I looked nervously for the Easy Rider Rifle Rack in the pickup’s cab, but it turned out that the man was just asking for directions.

But that’s another story. As to this current road trip with Mike and Julian, I don’t know which one is Kerouac and which is Neal Cassady. I don’t think that’s very important. It’s more important to have friends like these. We don’t see each other very much anymore, but every time Mike posts, our friendships are renewed.

It’s a gift, you see.