Jack Kerouac’s ‘lost’ debut novel was published a few months ago. This week, ninety years ago, Jack was born. He is buried in a cemetery about four miles from where I live.

The simple way to make sure you don’t lose your novel is to send it to a gmail account. The Google servers are probably as safe a place to store it as any place. PC backup services are a good bet, too.

I thought someone stole my first novel, and it was my only copy. It happened in New Orleans, before Google, right around the advent of the PC. I set out to write the novel in the spirit of Jack Kerouac. That is, I sat before a portable electric typewriter and typed as fast as I could for five to seven hours at a stretch. I typed whatever came into my head. I figured there was a direct link from my subconscious—where stories take shape—down my forearms and into my fingertips and onto page after page after page.

I lived in a one-bedroom apartment in mid-city. On the other side of the wall was a law office. Each time I paid the rent (at the law office) the secretary commented on the duration and speed of my typing.

If I just kept typing, I knew that some work of art would emerge sooner or later.

At the time I was working on an offshore oil production platform in the Gulf of Mexico, two weeks on, one week off. I was cranking out about 100 pages in my off week. To get to work, I would drive four hours south, through the bayou, to Grande Isle, and from there the new crew would go to the platform by motorboat.

One time I planned to fly home to New England on my week off. Driving back to New Orleans there was a family hitch hiking in the bayou. I picked them up. Hitchhiking was more common back then, though I had probably never seen an entire family doing it, and I was also way more naïve and/or daring, definitely stupid. Anyway, the family consisted of a very large woman, a three year old girl, and a man who had the look of an ex-con, which he turned out to be.

To make a long story short, I let them stay in my apartment while I went home to Boston. This part is blurry, but it’s possible they drove me to the airport in my truck. I figured I had nothing in my apartment of value to steal. Nothing except for the most valuable thing in my life, my monumental work-in-progress, quite possibly The Great American Novel.

Upon my return I found the place not exactly trashed, but it was on the messy side. Then I discovered my novel was missing. It was one of the lowest points of my life. The law secretary told me that really good cooking odors had come from my apartment over the past week.

That evening I had to return to Grande Isle. All of humanity was on my shit list. I did not trust anyone. The boats left very early in the morning. No crew member ever stayed in a motel. They spent all or a good part of the night in a bar and then went to the boat and slept. Below deck had the worst smell in the world, a mixture of diesel fuel and vomit and to this day it sickens me to think about it. The less time you spent below deck the better. So I went into some bar and played pool and some guy said he would show me how to fold a dollar bill into a swan. What did he want from me? I hated him because he was human. The entire human race was despicable.

Fast forward four months, in my apartment I dropped something on the floor and when I picked it up, there it was, my novel, The Great American Novel was under the bed. The three-year girl had used it as a coloring book.