I’ve got a bone to pick with Jack Kerouac. Over winter break, I read On the Road, the alcohol-drenched great American road trip novel/travelogue. Enamored by Kerouac’s romanticization of driving around and carousing across this great nation of ours, I jumped at the opportunity to embark on a road trip of my own this spring break when two of my roommates proposed the idea of hopping in a car (my car) and heading down to New Orleans for a few days.

I envisioned cruising through the South, reclining in the front passenger seat with my bare feet on the dashboard, and a bottle of bourbon in my lap (Fun fact: apparently you can still drink in a car in Tennessee so long as you’re not the one driving, although I think you can only drink beer and not liquor. If I were a journalist of any integrity and respectability I would have looked into this further to verify.), chewing on a long piece of straw as the warm Southern sunlight shined down on me through the open sunroof (in hindsight, the fact that I haven’t been able to open my sunroof since I punched it one day in a fit of rage, not unlike a temperamental twelve-year-old, should have served as foreshadowing that perhaps my actual journey would not measure up to my romantic vision).

I envisioned lazy, humid days and endless nights on Bourbon Street, and I saw myself walking home at the end of the night while thoroughly soused, with an apple-cheeked, ample-bosomed Southern belle on my arm who I spent the evening dancing with in some hip jazz club and who I charmed with my peculiar and exotic Northern ways, the two of us headed off to a secluded glade somewhere in the park off of Saint Charles Avenue to make sweet, passionate love in the cool grasses under the Louisiana moonlight.

You can imagine, then, my dismay when the realities of road tripping proved far less glamorous than Kerouac’s partially apocryphal portrayal makes it out to be. Kerouac left out many of the gritty details that constitute a road trip, those less attractive facets of the journey like kneeling on the passenger seat next to the driver, facing backwards with your pants around your ankles and trying to prevent getting your own urine all over yourself as you attempt to piss into the Gatorade bottle you’re clutching in one hand, providing quite the spectacle for passing truck drivers should they care to glance down into your vehicle from their elevated vantage point.

Certain things remain conspicuously absent from Kerouac’s tale, things like descriptions of sleeping in a seedy, cigarette-scented motel room on the outskirts of Chattanooga, Tennessee that looks eerily like the motel Josh Brolin checks into in No Country for Old Men, where you expect Anton Chigurh to come bursting in the door with a shotgun at any moment and mow down you and your two companions. It’s all glitz and glam in Kerouac’s account, all sugarcoated recollections of gallivanting across the continental U.S.

Kerouac would never take time to describe the pungent yellow liquid running into the gutters on Bourbon Street, a mixture of the runoff from strip clubs, the expulsions of inebriated tourists holding drinks in goofy plastic containers and the horse manure left behind by the hoofed animals pulling black carriages through the streets, the beasts straining under the burden of overweight tourists with gaudy Hawaiian shirts stretched tight against their bulging bellies stuffed with beignets and catfish po’ boys. All this combines into one fetid mixture that collects in long rivers on the side of the road just beside the curb, the visceral bile of Bourbon Street.

Kerouac’s novel is devoid of little vignettes like getting two slices of pizza in a combination pizza parlor and daiquiri purveyor on Bourbon Street and consuming them while you yell at one of your best friends for no other reason than that you’ve had too many cocktails and you’re frustrated because you lack the confidence and social skills to approach and talk to girls in bars, while your other friend waits out on the street standing forlornly with a goofy plastic drink in his hand, looking like a child torn between divorcing parents.

Kerouac would never include in his novel tales of late-night interactions with the mendicants and crack addicts who wander the warm streets of a Southern city, scratching you with their unclipped fingernails as you pass by them as they reach out and grab your arm, hoping to engage you in conversation and maybe extort a donation.

He leaves out discussion of the mind-numbing return leg of the road trip, when you’re no longer propelled by the thrill of progress—by the tantalizing carrot at the end of a stick of heading toward an exciting and uncharted destination—and instead face only the arduous duty of revisiting the endless miles of highway you’ve already trekked down, as conversation topics dwindle, communication with your fellow travelers reduces to monosyllables and even the song rotation on satellite radio grows repetitive.

He leaves out the scene that ensues when you stop at a 24-hour truck stop somewhere in Virginia at 2 a.m. and, delirious and dizzy from driving since 8 a.m. the previous morning, dig into a banal and unsatisfying $5 spaghetti dinner, and as you try to leave, the lonely nightshift waitress won’t let you go because she keeps talking to you and your fellow weary travelers about her daughter, who she says is a real wild child and who she says would get into lots of trouble down in New Orleans, and who’s only seventeen but already engaged to a guy studying to be a thoracic surgeon who laments the fact that he has to stay in and study while she goes out on the town to hang out with her friends and do God knows what. And then that tangent ends, but the waitress begins her meandering speech again as you try to turn to leave, now telling you about the proper etiquette involved in passing trucks on the road, how drivers hate it if you pass them and then pull in front of them and slow your speed because that means that then the truck driver is forced to reset his cruise control.

Maybe it’s my fault as a reader for not being sagacious enough to separate fact from fiction in Kerouac’s work, but the novel imbued in me such a strong sense of what my road trip would (and should) be like that when my actual experience differed from the expectations stoked by the story I felt cheated. I felt as if dear cirrhosis Jack lied to me.