He [Jack Kerouac] was invited by one of his Italian editors: I found out about the invitation as Jack called me from Hyannis where he lived with his mother. They invited him to promote the Medusa collection: they had chosen “Big Sur” as the 500° volume of the collection and they wanted Kerouac to do a publicity tour or at least to show up in Milan, Rome and Naples, and they offered him 1000 dollars. Kerouac had accepted to come and when he telegraphed to ask for a delay because his mother had suffered a stroke and was paralyzed, they answered that the tickets had already been sent, and either he came now or never.
So, the 28th of September Kerouac came to Italy, for only 76 hours, because he needed 800 dollars to pay the rent and with the other 200 he would pay for part of his mother’s hospital bills. On the plane he drank whiskey which immediately had a bad effect on him; an editorial bureaucrat who was escorting him and whose name I have never known said to him that he was “making an ass of himself”, he was giving a very bad impression, and that by showing up drunk he wouldn’t earn the money of the Italian editor honestly.
This is what made him go crazy. As soon as he arrived, he told me that he was desperate, and asked me to join him immediately; I met him at the Hotel Cavour after a few minutes, to the great embarrassment of the editorial officials who had been told to avoid me. He was completely paranoid, he told me that they were reproaching him the 1000 dollars and they had given him an injection, he felt his tongue heavy with morphine, he wanted to go back home, he wanted absolutely to “tell them off”, he wanted to cancel the commitment, and he demanded to know what kind of injection they had given him.
[…]
But the invitations were already sent. The editorial official that followed us around to control him, to verify that we would not steal Kerouac and maybe cut him into pieces and hide him in a trunk, told him that they had to go to the press conference; and he didn’t understand the “tell them off” that Kerouac continued to repeat in a sort of stupor. After that, Kerouac took a bottle of whiskey to give himself some nerve and in that state went to the press conference, where he could no longer fight the sedative and fell soundly asleep.
After two hours they woke him up because they had to do a television interview; they carried his dead weight and put his head under cold water and as soon as he saw me he started to repeat again “tell them off, tell them off”; no one understood, or maybe they pretended not to understand and so the interview began. Naturally Kerouac didn’t want to answer even the most simple and banal questions, such as “Which writers influenced you?” or “Tell us about your mysticism”.
[…]
