“I enjoy [Kerouac’s] impressions of America, certainly more than anything you’d find in Reader’s Digest,” he recalled. “The roar of the crowd in a bar after work; working for the railroad; living in cheap hotels; jazz.” Kerouac was Waits’ passport to the after-hours world, a place where a young nighthawk could pick up scraps of conversation and use them to piece together the lives of anonymous uncelebrated Americans.
