Truth be told, Kerouac himself never stayed here long. There were trips to Mexico, Morocco and New York. After living with his sister for a few months, Kerouac, then 35, persuaded his mother to hop a bus with him to California. But she hated it, and they returned to Orlando in July 1957, renting the bungalow apartment. On the Road would be published months later, and Kerouac could have been living large in New York.
Instead, he and his mother lived in Orlando on and off for five years, eventually abandoning the bungalow for a ranch house in a subdivision called Kingswood Manor. Though more famous than ever, he lived there in relative anonymity, enjoying air conditioning, a reclining chair and other bourgeois amenities but also mocking his surroundings.
"Across the street big boring Americans looking for togetherness," he wrote in a notebook unearthed by Kealing. "But won't get it from this old seadog."
In a new book, Kerouac in Florida: Where the Road Ends, Kealing documents Kerouac's alcoholic decline and his travels back and forth between Florida, Long Island and Massachusetts over the last decade of his life, always with his mother in tow.
Kerouac's final move was to St. Petersburg, on Florida's Gulf Coast, in 1968. He had lived there several years earlier, moved to Massachusetts, then returned at his mother's behest, little resembling the intense young man who wrote like the wind in Orlando. He drank himself to death in St. Petersburg in 1969, at 47. His ghost is said to haunt Haslam's, a bookstore he frequented there.
Orlando has enjoyed more prominence than usual in the Kerouac pantheon this winter: It was the first stop for a traveling exhibit of the 40m scroll on which Kerouac wrote On the Road. The scroll, which will move on to at least 11 other cities over the next four years, is at the Orange County Regional History Center in California until March 21.
Meanwhile, the trickle of pilgrims here grows. Besides the Navy man, whom he said he did not let in because it was 2:30am, May met a local grandmother and granddaughter, a father and son from Louisiana and more late-night visitors whose camera flash glinted off the bedroom blinds.
A sign on the door now asks visitors not to disturb the writer in residence. But those who chance to gaze on the tiny bedroom where Kerouac wrote or the stoop where he ate tangerines from backyard trees might experience something strange.
"There's a great concentration of energy in the back of the house," May said. "I feel him back there; I do."
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