"I went into the Windsor hotel where father and son had once lived and where one night Neil was frightfully waked up by the legless man on the roller board who shared the room with them who came thundering across the floor on his terrible wheels to touch the boy. I saw the little midget newspaperselling woman with the short legs on the corner of Curtis and Fifteenth. 'Man,' Neil told me, 'think about lifting her in the air and f***ing her!' I walked around the sad honkytonks of Curtis street: young kids in jeans and red t-shirts, peanut shells, movie marquees, shooting parlors. Beyond the glittering street was darkness, and beyond the darkness, the west. I had to go."

Neal Cassady was an eccentric, hypersexual street kid who inspired the character Dean Moriarty in On the Road. The obscene circumstances of Cassady's childhood and the underbelly environments through which he and Kerouac travelled read like a descent into hell. At times, this hell is cartoon-like and kind of silly.

But it's some kind of hell nonetheless.

The quote here reads like a scene from a David Lynch movie, little person and all. There is a method to the madness of Kerouac's obscene language and absurd situations, though. For him, sexually graphic language was a tool that provoked people into reevaluating their views on sexuality.

Why do we have to be so uptight about sex? And about everything else, really? As the passage continues, we see that the narrator finds other elements of city living equally stale. Equally stifling.

The open space of the road, as well as the relatively recently settled American West, became Beat symbols for escape. These less-traversed spaces represented free-thinking and transcendence for those boys. The darker the language Kerouac used to describe corrupt city life, the brighter and more rewarding an escape from it seemed—not just to him, but to his readers.

Kerouac plays fast and loose with grammar here. We're pretty sure "frightfully waked up by the legless man" isn't quite right. He even makes up a word or two.

Like we said, the Beats were especially fond of free-wheeling free verse—of trading in the traditional rules of poetry and prose for their own distinctive styles.

They also loved their obscenity. But their use of profanity wasn't just intended to shock people, or make them giggle. (We heard you over there.) This harsh language was combined with other elements of Kerouac's writing style in order to play up the grittiness of urban life.

Dude really wanted to make you believe that New York was a place that you needed to run from. So, his crass sexual language is often paired with run-on sentences, inconsistent capitalization, long, made-up words like "newspaperselling," and improper grammar; together, these literary devices leave you with the foul taste of the city in your mouth.

Kerouac and his Beat bros were also interested in writing the way people actually talked. So his writing style also mimics the language of a real boy-on-the-street from that era. The uneducated characters of On the Road simply had no use for the rules of polite society… they didn't live in that world.

And yes, in case you were wondering: it was incredibly subversive to write how people actually talked back then. This was many decades before people would turn to each other and say, "lol."