When Lester Young turned Jack Keroac onto Marijuana

[Disir]

The writer who would do more to romanticize jazz and marijuana than perhaps any other was a twenty-one-year-old student at Columbia when he first encountered Lester Young. Jack Kerouac was a working-class kid from the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, who came to New York to attend the elite Horace Mann School before entering Columbia. A fellow classmate at Horace Mann named Seymour Wyse introduced Kerouac to jazz and black life, and he was enthralled. He was just starting to write about jazz when he met Lester Young in 1943, during one of the nocturnal forays that would change the course of his life. They shared a cab from the Village up to Minton’s Playhouse, the nightclub in the Hotel Cecil on 118th Street between St. Nicholas and Seventh Avenues in Harlem, where the bebop revolution was percolating and where, according to Edie Kerouac-Parker, Kerouac’s girlfriend at the time, who later became his first wife, young Jack encountered something else as well. “Lester Young turned Jack on to marijuana,” Edie Kerouac-Parker related. “I believe it was the first time Jack was ever really high on it. And I mean high.”

…On that glowing night in Harlem in 1943, Prez was still at the top of his form, and young Jack Kerouac was mightily high. Kerouac was thrilled to be hanging out with the man everyone called Uncle Bubba, the apotheosis of cool, who had this funny pigeon-toed walk; who called the police “Bob Crosby,” white people “grays,” and black people “oxford grays”; and who, after encountering a pretty woman, would trun to say, “Man, what a fine hat. How’d you like to wear that hat?” Of course, there was a different type of hat for every type of woman: “Skullcap?” “Homburg?” “Mexican hat dance”?
Great Encounters #48: When Lester Young turned Jack Kerouac on to marijuana

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