ALL THINGS KEROUAC 5

Paul Blake Jr. lives out of a pickup truck at a city dump in Sacramento. Back in St. Petersburg, his challenge to the estate is now assigned to Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Judge George Greer.

The lawyer is Bill Wagner, a veteran Tampa attorney who specializes in personal injury cases. He said he has never read Kerouac and had to go on the internet to figure out who the writer was when he got the case.

That Kerouac was close to his nephew is uncontested. Blake is the Lil Luke in several novels, including Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels.

Wagner says Blake has a good claim against Sampas and deserves a piece of the empire. The will, he says, is a forgery. A witness to Gabrielle's will later said he did not see her sign it.

Blake used to play a baseball board game his uncle invented, a game he says his uncle promised him. Sampas won't give it.

Sampas said he would have helped the struggling nephew earlier, but Blake never asked. Now, Sampas said, he doesn't want to fund litigation against himself.

Blake gets by with handouts. "My uncle would have thought all this a bunch of balderdash", he said. "He would straighten this out real quick. He wouldn't want to see me living out of a truck".

"My complete archive en bloc I'm going to hang on to for old age poverty."

From a letter Kerouac wrote in 1968 to friend Al Ginsberg.

Nicosia blames Sampas for many things: negative publicity, archive sales, plotting to hurt Memory Babe. He said Sampas even threatened to have someone cut him into little pieces. He said he reported it to the FBI.

Sampas said he made no such threat. "They're trying to demonize me". he said. 'What their saying about me selling off the archive is just all baloney. There's no fire sale. There never has been. I'm a nobody. They make me out to be some powerful Mafia character. I'm just Jack Kerouac's brother-in-law".

An Oakland writer's group honored Nicosia's persistent efforts to aid Jan in freeing her father's archives from Sampas.

Nicosia said he never crossed the line from impartial biographer to partisan in this bare-fisted Kerouac family fight. "These were separate roles from my role as a biographer", he said.

In August 2001, Sampas sold most of the Kerouac archive to the New York Public Library for an undisclosed sum. He said it now has "99.9 percent" of Kerouac's letters, journals, notebooks and manuscripts. The Sampas family has a deal with writer and historian Douglas Brinkley, allowing him exclusive access to parts of the archive until 2005, when his Kerouac biography is to be finished.

Binkley said the Kerouac archive is mostly intact: "Once John Sampas recognized his sales weren't good protocol, he stopped. He didn't know better".

Nicosia isn't buying it. "Here is Jack Kerouac, the most populist American author, a man who identified with the common man, a writer for all the people, and now you have to go through John Sampas to look at stuff. It's a travesty".

More than 33 years after Kerouac's death, his house in St. Petersburg is a must-see for devotees who make the pilgrimage here.

The Sampas family still owns the house. No Kerouac materials remain. No manuscripts, No paintings, No desk.

When Kerouac liked here, in poor health, trying to make his finances work, he brooded over his letters and literary materials. He knew they were worth something.

He sold some letters for $6,000.00, then worried in a letter to a friend that people would think he was selling out. He said he wasn't, he was just desperate.

A year before he died, he wrote a former editor to ask him to return the manuscript to On the Road, a 120-foot roll of taped paper. "I'll be needing this", Kerouac wrote, "to tide me over middle age in a very surprisingly unlucky literary career, from a financial standpoint".

Bryson never did find out how Jack Kerouac got his business card 33 years ago...

Times researchers...Kitty Bennett, Cathy Wos and Caryn Baird contributed to this report, which draws on Memory Babe, by Gerald Nicosia and Jack Kerouac Selected Letters 1957-1969, edited by Ann Charters.