The Jailkid

Neal had had a rough childhood. The first thing we learn about him is that he was keeping correspondence with Hal Chase from a reform school in Colorado. He married a sixteen year old, who eventually called the cops on him. Jack keeps making references to the fact that he is a "con-man" He is a criminal, and what Jack Kerouac refers to as a "jailkid." But there is something unmistakably and genuinely interesting about him. He talks with great authority and large words when he really doesn't have a clue. He goes to Jack to learn to write, and later to Neal for poetry. He doesn't seem like the average criminal.

When an infant enters the world, they are greeted by a range of stimuli so great that the lack of sensory overload is remarkable. Everything is new, and nothing is boring or common place. Nothing is too ordinary to fail to spark excitement. As we grow older, we shed this outlook, object by object. But on occasion, a door is opened to a new range of concepts. (I learned three programming languages in three weeks when I learned what each one was capable of.) And in one of these doorways, we find Neal, who has seen the door to intellectualism, and looking for the key to the locked complex.