Looking for Jack Kerouac

by Barbara Shoup

  And, suddenly, that part of my body just stopped working.

  Believe me, this had never happened before.

  Kathy lay beneath me, naked, her face blank with desire.

  “Paul?” she said, when I curled away from her. “Paul?” She touched my shoulder, but I shrugged her hand away. “Paul, are you crying?”

  I wasn’t. But I was breathing hard, trying not to.

  “What’s the matter?”

  The matter was, I’d been kidding myself: I didn’t love her anymore. I hadn’t since before Mom got sick, since New York, for that matter. I didn’t want to marry her. Ever.

  A wild mix of rage and sorrow bubbled up inside me. I felt tricked. By Kathy, who even from the beginning probably had sex with me at least partly because of the promise it implied. By Dad, for leaving us alone on Saturday afternoons—didn’t he know she’d end up in my bed? Even by Mom, for getting sick and dying, for making me need Kathy just when I’d begun to see that I might not want what she wanted, that I might not want to be with her forever.

  The rage drained away, leaving only sorrow—and though I knew the impulse to hold Kathy again was a dangerous one, I turned to her anyway and, for a long time, the two of us lay in the bed I’d slept in since I was a child, tangled in each other’s arms. We didn’t make love. I didn’t want to, but I let Kathy believe it was because I still couldn’t.

  “Don’t worry, Paul. It’s okay,” she said, like a good wife.

  I should have told her right then; instead, I let it fester in me all day so that by the time we got to the game that night, I felt like an engine maxed out in first gear. I made the trip to the locker room and let everybody razz me about how I was one of the old guys now, then climbed up into the stands carrying a bag of popcorn and a couple of Cokes. Along the top row, a bunch of guys were yelling, “Blood! Blood! Blood makes the grass grow,” a time-honored tradition among former players, alums, and dateless malcontents. They waved at me to come up and join them, which might have helped me blow off some steam, but Kathy was waving at me, too, and I veered in her direction.

  It did not improve my state of mind to see her work friend Judy and Judy’s boyfriend Doug sitting beside her. Kathy reminded me that they had gone to the school we were playing tonight. “I forgot to tell you, Judy and I decided to double at work yesterday,” she said. “I had to talk them into sitting on our side, though.”

  I didn’t say anything, just looked at her. The last thing I wanted to do was sit through the game with the three of them, the girls talking about Judy’s upcoming wedding like they always did, Doug being the green-ass he was. Once the game started, he criticized practically every play we made, like he’d been Mr. Football Hero himself, when I knew he’d never even played the game. It pissed me off for Bobby’s sake and made me tired.

  At least I don’t have to go to work tonight, I told myself. I sat there, shoveling in popcorn, thinking about how after I took Kathy home I could hit the sack like a normal person, sleep as long as I wanted to, and get up when it was still morning.

  Pathetic, I thought. This is my idea of a something to look forward to now?

  The smack of equipment as the plays came down on the field made me miss the way it felt to hit someone, the rush of it, the satisfaction. What could you do in real life where it was a good thing, commendable, to hit someone—and as hard as you could, too?

  I glanced over to the parents’ section, where Dad sat—and it happened again. This time, I remembered Bobby and me escorting Mom out onto the field last year on parents’ night, Dad trailing proudly after us. How, heading back to the bleachers when the little ceremony was over, her arms linked in ours, Bobby and I had looked at each other, grinned, and lifted her just enough so that her feet came off the ground.

  “Paul! Bobby!” she said. “You boys put me down. I mean it!”

  We just laughed. And she couldn’t help laughing, too.

  Then, six weeks later, helping her to the car the night Dad took her to the hospital, we had held her arms exactly the same way—because, suddenly, her legs didn’t work any more.

  The roar of the crowd brought me back to the game, everyone rising.

  “Paul!” Kathy screamed. “Oh, my gosh! Paul! Look!”

  She grabbed my arm and pulled me up beside her to watch Bobby make a long run from the forty-yard line to score. I yelled my head off with everyone else, remembering the feel of running like that, missing it. And started thinking about Duke and me on the road again.

  I didn’t have any vacation time coming to me yet and I’d never heard of guys taking time off without pay; I didn’t even know if they let you do that. But sitting there on the bleachers that night, a has-been at eighteen, watching my kid brother bask in the cheers of the crowd, I started cooking up this scheme to take a week off, barrel down to Florida with Duke, find Kerouac, then hit the road for home. Kind of like touching base in Hide and Seek.

  I only wanted to see him. If we took off on a Saturday morning right after work and drove straight through, we could be there early the next morning. A famous writer like Kerouac: How hard could it be to find him? Three or four days, tops. It was totally possible.

  Later, when Kathy and I were alone, and I casually mentioned that I was thinking about driving down to Florida for a few days—of course, not saying why—she sat straight up in the backseat of the car, pulled her sweater down over her bare breasts, and glared at me. “Paul, you can’t take time off work to do that!” she said. “It’s totally irresponsible.”

  Like she was my mother, except Mom was never bossy like that. If she didn’t want me to do something, she’d figure out a way to talk to me so I’d end up thinking I didn’t really want to do whatever it was, anyway. Surprising the hell out of both of us, I said, “Yeah? Well, I’m going.”

  “You’re not. I mean it. You can’t.”

  “Well, I am.”

  She gave me this X-ray look. “With who?” she asked. “Because you’re not planning to go alone, are you? You’re going with Duke Walczek. I knew you’d been hanging out with him.”

  “I have not been hanging out with him,” I lied. “For Christ’s sake, when would I hang out with anybody, working the goddamn third shift? When I’m not there, I’m with you—or I’m sleeping.”

  She kept looking at me.

  Finally, I shrugged. “Okay, I’m going with Duke. So what?”

  “Here’s what,” she said. “You can choose. And if you choose Duke Walczek, don’t think I’ll be waiting here when you get back. Because I won’t.”

  “Fine,” I said. “I don’t give a shit what you do. I really don’t.”

  She started crying then, which normally would have made me feel guilty. But it didn’t this time. It pissed me off, and made me feel cold and mean inside.

  We’d never fought over anything important and didn’t know how. We both just clammed up after that and, when we got to her house, she got out of the car, slamming the door behind her. She didn’t even look back at me.

  It was eleven o’clock by then, exactly when I’d be clocking in most nights. I’d been tired before, but I was bug-eyed now. I couldn’t have slept if I tried—and I didn’t want to sleep because I knew I’d wake up in the same stupid life. So I didn’t let myself think, just pulled out of Kathy’s driveway and headed over to East Chicago to find Duke.

  It’s weird there, like a city on the moon: rows of gargantuan petroleum tanks, like big space ships, as far as you can see; tall watch towers that look like they were made from an Erector set—and everything surrounded by high cyclone fences, everything in shades of gray, except for dozens of orange flames burning in smoky haloes beneath the dingy sky.

  There was a White Castle on Indianapolis Boulevard, where I knew Duke hung out, and that’s where I found him, a half-dozen of the greasy little sliders in a pile in front of him and in the booth beside him, a cute Mexican girl with hair ratted a mile high and pale pink lipstick, her head on his shoulder.

  He grinned. �
�Paul Carpetti,” he said. “‘The one and only indispensible’ Paul Carpetti.”

  “I’m in, man. Let’s hit it.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “Don’t ask,” I said.

  “No problem. I don’t want to know.” He turned to the girl. “Paul and I are hitching to Florida,” he said. “We’re going to find this guy, this writer. Drive us out to Route Thirty?”

  Startled, she asked, “You’re coming back, though. Right?”

  “Absolutely. Yeah.”

  He kissed her. She sighed.

  Ten minutes later, Duke was sneaking into his house to pack a duffel bag with the basics. Then he and the girl, Carmen, followed me home so I could do the same. They parked down the street from my house and waited while I went in through the open window in my bedroom to keep from waking my dad.

  I packed some clothes, my copy of On the Road, my catcher’s mitt and the ball tucked into it. I tucked a snapshot of my mom, laughing, a silly “Happy New Year 1960!” hat perched on her head, into my wallet. I started to take the picture Kathy had taken of all of us in Mom’s hospital room the night of the Winter Formal, the last picture of us together: me slicked out in Dad’s suit, Bobby in a ratty football jersey, Dad in the plaid wool shirt Mom had bought him for Christmas before she got sick, Mom in the new robe Kathy had helped us pick out for her, her head still bandaged from the surgery. Smiling. Bobby had said something stupid to make us smile. I didn’t remember what.

  But I put it back. If I took it I also took the memory of Kathy that night, her sparkly red dress and how pretty she looked in it. How after dancing the last dance with her, a slow dance, I couldn’t quite let her go and kissed her, right there in front of everyone, and she couldn’t help kissing me back and how a little cheer went up all around us.

  I lifted my mattress and retrieved the secret stash I had there, not quite a hundred bucks. Between that and the paycheck I cashed yesterday afternoon I’d have plenty to get by for a while. I just scribbled a note and left it on my pillow: Dad—Taking off on a road trip. I’m okay. Don’t worry.

  Then I was out of the window, heading for Carmen’s car. I opened the door, tossed my stuff into the backseat and started to climb in after it, but Duke said, “You drive.” He grabbed Carmen, setting her on his lap as he slid over to the window on the passenger’s side.

  I knew right where to go. When we were little, Mom would point to the sign on Indianapolis Boulevard that said “Highway 41” and say, “Do you boys know that if you followed this road and just kept on going, you’d get all the way to Florida?” Then she’d tell us all about what it was like there. Warm, even in the winter! Palm trees and orange groves, the ocean with its waves crashing onto the sandy beach, goofy little birds scurrying along the lacy froth they left at the edge and seagulls swooping and shrieking above. She and Dad had gone there on their honeymoon, and she’d always hoped, someday, we could all go together. But we never did.

  I took Indianapolis Boulevard south, through Highland where there were still cars parked at the Blue Top, the car hops in their short skirts still busy clipping trays full of burgers and fries and Cokes onto half-rolled-down windows, toward the place where the lights of the Calumet Region would end and the dark road would roll out before us. Duke and Carmen made out in the seat beside me, which left me listening to the music on the radio: WLS blasting out from the Loop in Chicago—the Beatles, the Animals, the Beach Boys, the Supremes—and I remembered Kathy and me taking the train into Chicago a year or so ago, walking up Michigan Avenue and coming upon the WLS studio. It was so cool, I thought. In the car by the river with Kathy; alone in my room, thinking or dreaming; on the beach on summer afternoons, transistors propped up on blankets all around us: this is where the music begins.

  That day, we watched Art Roberts put a record on the turntable, then heard it—“Louie, Louie”—through the speakers on either side of the big picture window. He glanced up, waved, and Kathy did some dance moves that made him grin at her. I laughed. Kathy dancing like that, right on Michigan Avenue! I pulled her close, which made Art Roberts grin at me.

  It was nuts how happy that dumb little moment made me. A high school kid in love with his girlfriend, wanting her and knowing she wanted me.

  But that was a whole other time. Driving Carmen’s beater toward the junction of Highways 41 and 30, about to leave my whole life behind me, I felt half like I was in a movie playing myself doing something I’d never really do and half like the person I’d been meant to be all along. When I got to the junction, I pulled into a gas station, Duke extricated himself from Carmen, and we got out, grabbed our bags.

  “Write me,” she said. “Promise.”

  “Yeah, babe,” he said. “You know I will.”

  One more long, passionate kiss.

  “‘It’s the world,’” he shouted, as she pulled away. “Paulie! ‘My God!...It’s the world! Think of it! Son-of-a-bitch! Gawd-damn!’”

  FIVE

  We were wearing our letter jackets, even though it was barely chilly. Duke’s idea. We’d be more likely to get picked up that way, he said. Who doesn’t trust a guy wearing a letter jacket? I guess he was right because we hadn’t walked a mile before a Ford Fairlane slowed down, then pulled over. We took off running toward it. The driver, a guy about my dad’s age, leaned over, opened the passenger door, and Duke climbed inside. I climbed in back, amid a clutter of sample cases.

  “Thanks for picking us up, sir,” Duke said.

  “Hank,” the guy said. “Call me Hank. Where you boys headed?”

  “Florida,” Duke answered.

  “I can take you as far as Evansville,” Hank said.

  Then he started right in, talking about being in the war.

  From what I could tell, guys who fought in World War II either talked about it all the time or they didn’t talk about it at all—my dad was among the latter. He’d been a hero in that war, according to my Uncle Johnny, who told Bobby and me that Dad was wounded trying to carry one of his buddies to safety during the Battle of the Bulge. We knew it was true because once, when we were little kids, rooting around Mom and Dad’s closet, looking for hidden Christmas presents, we found a shoebox with his medals in it, including the Medal of Honor.

  There was also a picture of Dad in uniform before he shipped out, grinning, looking a lot like I did now. He’d married my mom the day after their high school graduation, and enlisted a week after they came back from their honeymoon. There was a packet of letters, too, tied with a blue ribbon, addressed to Mom in Dad’s cramped handwriting. We didn’t open them. And nosing around in Mom and Dad’s room was off-limits, period, so we didn’t dare mention that we had found them—or anything else.

  Dad wouldn’t have told us about the medals, anyway. Like I said, he didn’t talk about the war. But after we found that stuff, the war games we played escalated, and we argued more vehemently than ever about who got to be Dad and who had to be the German soldier he hunted down and killed. As I got older, I read everything I could get my hands on about the war. Some books I’d read over and over, like Thirty Seconds over Tokyo and To Hell and Back, though I had to keep that one hidden because my mom didn’t like me reading a book with “Hell” in the title.

  Same with The Naked and the Dead, which I also discovered last fall—though if Mom had found that one, she’d have been upset by more than the title. Not to mention, Catch-22. I wasn’t even sure if I should be reading it. I didn’t know what to think about that character, Yossarian, faking sickness to get out of flying his required missions, or of the picture the book painted of the Air Force itself. The corruption, the way officers put their men’s lives at risk to further their own careers. But I kept reading anyway—and, in the end, it made an absurd, scary kind of sense to me.

  I read All Quiet on the Western Front, too; then Hiroshima—both of which hit me like a Mack truck. The German soldiers seemed as young and wrecked and sad to me as the American soldiers in Catch-22 and The Naked and the Dead. “Bombs a
way!” we kids used to shout, zooming around the yard, pretending we were the Air Force dropping the big ones. We had no idea what happened to real people when the bombs hit.

  This guy, though—our ride, Hank. “Best time of my life,” he said. He’d been stationed in England, he told Duke and me, a master sergeant in charge of supplies on an airbase, so he never saw any action at all, just did his job and hung out with airmen, who were all crazy. On leave, they’d take the train into London, go to the dance halls and listen to Swing. He saw all the greats: Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, the Dorsey Brothers.

  “I love that stuff,” Duke said.

  Which I knew was a lie.

  “I thought all you kids liked was that Top Forty crap.”

  “I like some of it,” Duke said.

  “Those Beatles? You listen to them? Boy, I don’t see what that’s all about.”

  “Girls love them,” Duke said. “You know, the hair. Me, I’m more of a Chuck Berry guy. Not that he makes the Top Forty anymore.”

  Hank glanced back at me. “You like them? The Beatles?”

  I started to say that my girlfriend was nuts about the Beatles, then remembered that, as of a few hours ago, I didn’t have a girlfriend anymore—and I was struck dumb by the thought. All I could do was shrug.

  “Johnny Mercer,” Hank said. “Now there’s a fellow who can write a song.” He sang a couple of bars of “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening.” He had a nice baritone, which kind of surprised me. “‘Moon River.’ That’s his. You like it?”

  “Yeah, it’s a good song,” Duke said. “Good for slow-dancing, if you know what I mean.”

  Hank laughed.

  The two of them fell quiet then and there was just sound of the radio tuned to the music they’d been talking about. It was music I knew, the backdrop to my parents’ lives, the music from when they were young. I used to hear it on the radio sometimes late at night, after they went to bed. I heard them. They were making love, I knew now. But when I was a kid, the sounds they made had seemed like part of the music to me.