Looking for Jack Kerouac

by Barbara Shoup

  We were in the middle of nowhere, dead corn as bronze as a penny stretching out on either side of the road and nothing on the horizon but a broken-down barn with SEE BEAUTIFUL ROCK CITY peeling off the side of it.

  Duke stopped when he got to it and waited for me to catch up. I took my time.

  “Who the hell would want to go to that tourist trap?” he said, when I got there.

  Like we’d never argued.

  “I bet Carmen would,” I said. “You can take her there on your honeymoon.”

  “Chuck you, Farley.” Duke laughed and punched me on the arm. “Reminds me of something my brother said to me. He said, ‘You fall for some girl and swear you’ll go through hell to get her. Then you marry her and you’re there.’”

  I barely smiled.

  “Besides, you’re the one who’s supposed to be going on a honeymoon,” Duke said. “Not me.”

  “Yeah, well. Not anymore.”

  The huge wave of relief that washed over me just saying those words set me off running. Duke followed me. He passed me. I caught up and passed him, then in two seconds he elbowed me out of the way and surged ahead. I’d probably slept eight hours since we left, what with constantly drifting off during the conversations Duke carried on with Hank and Bud. Duke claimed he hadn’t slept a wink since Thursday; he’d been too wound up to sleep on Friday, after finding the Kerouac story in the newspaper. But if he was feeling the effect of it, you sure couldn’t tell.

  We stopped, gasping, at the sight of a little motel—neat as a pin: an office, eight units, and a postage-stamp swimming pool shaded by a stand of oak trees, blue and glittering in the last of the afternoon sun. Then took off running again, toward it.

  Duke got there before I did, dropped his duffel on the grass, kicked off his shoes, and shouting “Who-hoo,” threw himself into the pool. I followed. The two of us wallowed around like a couple of porpoises until an old lady burst from the office and chased us out with a broom.

  “You boys scat now,” she yelled. “Scat!”

  We climbed out, shaking the water from our clothes.

  “We’re real sorry, ma’am,” Duke said. “My buddy and me, we just saw the pool and we were so hot from hitchhiking all day and we just—”

  “I said, scat.” She took a step toward us, broom raised.

  And we did.

  SEVEN

  We half-ran, half-hopped on the hot asphalt in our bare feet, laughing and swearing, until we got out of sight of the motel and could stop to put our shoes back on. We walked on for the better part of an hour, thumbs out, our clothes drying as we went, and eventually an old boat of a Pontiac careened to a stop a hundred yards in front of us.

  It was a bunch of guys who’d just graduated from jump school at Fort Campbell, on leave and heading for Music Row in Nashville. They made room, saying their names—Travis, Don, Kent, and the driver, Ed. Then Travis tossed us each a Budweiser from the cooler on the floor of the front seat.

  The cold beer felt good going down. I finished mine, crushed the can, and Travis handed me another one. They were on their last leave before heading for Vietnam, he said.

  “Yeah,” Don said. “We’re fixing to kick their yellow asses.”

  They looked like they could do it, too. Hard as rock, everything about them pared down for action—even their hair, which was buzzed so close that you could see the shape of their skulls beneath the skin, the vulnerable little hollow at the base of the neck where the spine attached.

  “You guys should enlist, join the party,” Travis said. “Beats getting drafted, that’s for sure. Ending up a grunt.”

  I was afraid Duke would go into his spiel on Vietnam, how the Domino Theory was bullshit, the Gulf of Tonkin incident nothing but a big scam to crank things up over there, and there was no way he was going to be cannon fodder for asshole politicians who didn’t give a damn what happened to real people, no matter what side they were on. He’d head for Canada first.

  But he just said, “No thanks, we’ll take our chances.”

  I said nothing at all. I knew I’d be living on borrowed time when I decided to go to work at the mill instead of going to college. I tried not to think about it. I didn’t want to think about getting drafted right now.

  “So, where are you guys headed?” Travis asked.

  “Florida,” Duke said. “Beaches, women. Plus, have you guys ever hear of this book, On the Road?”

  Nobody answered.

  “Man, you should read it. Seriously. It’s about this guy who just takes off and hitchhikes all over the place. The guy who wrote it lives in Florida now. We’re going to find him. He’s a beatnik, a real cool head.”

  “Those guys are commies,” said Travis.

  “Nah,” Duke said. “They’re just like you guys. They’re cool. They didn’t want to get some crap job and have a bunch of kids, so they blew. Seriously, what’s the big difference? You guys are jumping out of planes, they’re driving like maniacs all over the map.” He shrugged, splayed his hands. “You get the girls, too, right?”

  Travis grinned then. “Yeah, we get the girls,” he said.

  Of which there were plenty in Nashville, they all agreed.

  We hadn’t planned to spend the night there; we hadn’t planned anything. But the more they talked, the cooler it sounded. They knew of a hotel just off Music Row, where you could get a room cheap. No problem to drop us off there.

  “Let’s do it, man!” Duke said.

  “What the hell,” I said. “I’m in.”

  The hotel lobby smelled like cigarette smoke and other stuff I figured it was better not to try to identify. The guy at the reception desk wore a grimy white shirt and a thin black tie, his hair slicked back in a ducktail. Rooms are five bucks, he said. No liquor. No girls. No loud music. Pay up front.

  “Sure,” Duke said.

  We shelled out the money, got our key, and took the rickety elevator to the fourth floor. The corridor was poorly lit, the red carpet stained and ragged at the edges. The room was tiny, two twin beds crammed into it. The window overlooked an alley.

  Duke beamed. “What a dump,” he said.

  We showered, changed clothes and headed for Tootsies, which the jump guys had told us was the place to be. The front was painted purple, music rolled out through the open front door—a Patsy Cline song belted out by a girl in a cowgirl outfit, framed by the big front window. We grabbed hot dogs from a street vendor, wolfed them down, then flashed our fake IDs and walked inside, where we bought a couple of beers.

  The place was packed—apparently, one big happy inebriated family because we hadn’t been there ten minutes when a fat red-faced guy waved us over to his table and, before we knew it, refilled our mugs from their pitcher and introduced us to all of his friends. I was done feeling guilty about having a little fun, I decided. Seriously. I was so frigging tired of doing the right thing. Where had it gotten me? Where did it get my mom? Or my dad, for that matter? He was nuts about Mom, he treated her like a queen, and all he got was a broken heart.

  I drained my glass of beer, then chugged another—and when the guy’s girlfriend grabbed my hand and dragged me off the barstool to dance, I followed. The band played one of those slow, grinding blues songs. Kay-Lynn, her name was, got all over me and John Wesley and his buddies at the table whooped it up when I came right back at her.

  She was a little heavyset, but cute. Kathy was the only girl I’d danced with since junior high—plus, she’d had never danced like this. John Wesley kept handing me beers. I kept drinking them. Kay-Lynn had her share, too, and before it was all over we were dancing so wild and dirty that people gathered in a circle to watch us.

  “Do it, son,” the lead guitar yelled, and everybody laughed.

  When the band’s set was over and they’d passed the hat, John Wesley invited us to join them for dinner, but Duke said thanks, but no. We were going up to the back bar for a while, then on down Music Row to catch some other acts. We shook hands all round. Kay-Lynn threw her arms ar
ound me and kissed me, giving me just the tip of her tongue, which made me so dizzy I thought I might faint.

  She winked at me. “Honey, you be good now,” she said.

  “You’re blasted, pal,” Duke said when they’re gone. “That chick Kay-Lynn, she’d have had you down on the floor in the restaurant, doing the deed, you know? You ought to thank me for saving your ass.”

  I tried saying, yeah, thanks a lot, but the words turned to mush in my mouth. I couldn’t walk very well, either. Duke helped me up the stairs to the back bar, where I leaned against a wall near the door Travis had told us the Grand Old Opry stars used, coming into Tootsies after a show. But the only person who came in while I was standing there was a drunk guy who stood in the open doorway for about a minute, with this look on his face like he thought he’d just landed on Mars, and then backed out, into the alley. Duke brought me another beer. I drank it. I had no idea how many I’d had by then. I’d gone from feeling crazy to feeling kind of numb. Every move I made felt like slow motion.

  Duke was in pretty much the same shape. We listened to the band for a while, then lurched downstairs, making our way through wall-to-wall people out to the street. There was a new band in the front window, the skinny singer wearing tight jeans and cowboy boots, a white hat like the Lone Ranger’s perched on his head. He was wailing one of those twangy hillbilly songs that sounded like crying. The air was warm and sticky. No breeze. It had grown dark while we were in Tootsies, and my blurred vision made the streetlamps lining Broadway fuzzy, like haloes. Duke started up the street, but I felt rooted there, invisible to the people swarming around me, laughing and talking. I could see him, but couldn’t make my feet move to catch up.

  Suddenly, I was bent over puking in the street.

  A man stopped and put his hand on my shoulder. “You okay, son?” he asked.

  “He is not okay,” the woman with him said. “Honey, you need to sit down on the curb right now. Hear?”

  I sat. They sat beside me.

  “You are knee-walkin’ drunk,” she said. “You ever been drunk before?”

  I just sat there, my head spinning, trying not to throw up again.

  “Welcome to Nashville,” the man drawled, and they both laughed—though not unkindly.

  I don’t know how much time passed, the three of us sitting on the curb, like it was the most natural thing in the world. Maybe it was, there. The couple didn’t seem in any big hurry. They had two boys of their own, the woman told me. Good boys, but prone to get themselves in trouble now and then.

  “I’d want someone to stop and watch over them,” she said. “Like I know your mama would want someone to watch over you.”

  She put her arm around my shoulders, told her husband to go get me a Coke. “You drink this, baby,” she said when he came back. “It’ll settle your stomach. You find someplace to sit for a spell.”

  “If you’re smart, you’re done for the night,” the man said, just as my dad would have.

  “I’m definitely done,” I said. “Seriously. Thanks for helping me.”

  And they walked off, hand in hand.

  How I could be thirsty after all that beer, I didn’t know. But I was. The Coke was icy cold and tasted great, but I only let myself take little sips. I was afraid if I drank it down too fast I’d be sick again. My stomach settled a little, enough to walk up Broadway in Duke’s direction, but he was nowhere to be seen. I walked slowly, weaving a little, stopping to look in the window of a souvenir shop or listen to music drifting out from the other honkey-tonks. The bars were mostly set up like Tootsies, with a band in the front window. Framed by the open doorways, people writhed in the neon light, looking weirdly like the pictures of hell the nuns showed us in grade school to scare us straight.

  There was a phone booth down by the river and, when I saw it, I knew I had to call my dad. So I went in, dialed “0,” and placed a collect call before I lost my nerve. Bobby answered, accepted the charges.

  “Paul,” he said. “Jeez. Where the heck are you? Dad’s—”

  “Never mind,” I said. “Let me talk to him.”

  “Dad, I’m sorry,” was the first thing I said when I heard his voice.

  “Son,” he said. “Are you all right? Where are you?”

  “It doesn’t matter where I am. The thing is, I—”

  “Paul, where are you?”

  “Tennessee.”

  He waited, then when I didn’t offer any more information, he said, “Kathy thinks you might be with that boy you’ve gotten to know at work—”

  “Duke Walczek. Yeah. I am. We hitchhiked.”

  “She said you had an argument last night, after the game. Paul, she told me the two of you are planning to get married.”

  “She’s planning to get married,” I said. “Ever since graduation, that’s all she’s been talking about.”

  “And that’s why you left?”

  “Yeah, that. I don’t know. Everything.”

  Dad sighed, blowing his breath out audibly. I pictured him in the kitchen, his shoulders slumped, trying to figure out what to say next.

  When he finally spoke, his voice was wobbly. “I haven’t been myself since your mom—”

  He paused. He still couldn’t say it: died.

  “I should have realized it was a mistake to let Kathy take care of us the way she did,” he went on. “How having her here all the time, doing all she did for us, might—”

  “It’s not your fault,” I said. “I should have just told her I wasn’t ready to get married. But I tried to convince myself that if we were going to get married eventually, which I figured we would, why not now? If I loved her—but I don’t. That’s the real problem, Dad. I don’t love Kathy anymore. The truth is I haven’t for a long time, maybe since before Mom got sick. I can’t even explain why, suddenly, I just couldn’t—I can’t…”

  “You don’t have to explain,” Dad said. “Or you can explain later, if you want. Look, Paul, if you get on a bus first thing in the morning, there’s a good chance you could be home in time to go to work tomorrow night. You’re going to have to tell Kathy what you’ve decided, no matter what. There’s no sense losing a good job over it.”

  “But I don’t want the job, either,” I said. “I don’t know what I want, Dad. I need to figure that out. I can’t do that at home. I can’t come back, not right now.”

  “But Paul,” he said. “Where are you going?”

  I took a deep breath. “Florida,” I said, my voice cracking. “I really am okay, Dad. I’ll keep in touch. I promise.”

  Then I rested the receiver back in its cradle before he could talk me into coming home.

  EIGHT

  Back at our scummy hotel, I took a shower and passed out on the bed. When I woke at eleven the next morning, my head was pounding, my eyes were puffy, my mouth still tasted of vomit. I was starving. Duke had returned some time in the night and was snoring in the bed next to mine. Sunlight knifed across his face when I lifted the tattered window shade.

  He groaned. “Paulie. For Christ’s sake, put that frigging thing back down.”

  “I don’t feel any better than you do,” I said. “But we need to split, man. Get on the road. Remember? Jack waits.”

  He groaned again, but sat up. “Okay, okay,” he said. “What happened to you last night? All of a sudden you were gone. Too bad, man. Because I hooked up with a couple of fine, fine chicks, and you could’ve had one of them. Both blond, both knockouts.” He cupped his hands out from his chest to suggest the size of their breasts. “I shit you not. They were practically fighting over me. I said, ‘Girls, girls, we don’t have a problem here. There’s plenty of me to go around.’ Anyway. So the three of us go back to their apartment, I have no idea where it was—some crappy walk-up somewhere. Man, oh, man—”

  He got this look on his face, like he was remembering paradise.

  I’d figured out pretty much from the start that you always wanted to apply the bullshit factor to whatever Duke said, especially whe
n it had anything to do with girls. So I just let him talk, responding, “Cool!” or “Wow!” every so often, all the while prodding him out of bed and into the shower. He was still talking when we clattered down the stairs into the quiet street.

  We walked toward Broadway, where we found a diner with a handful of people in it, all of them looking as hung over as we were.

  “Coffee, boys?” the waitress asked, when we sat down at the counter.

  “Oh, yeah,” Duke said. “Black.”

  She poured two cups and set them in front of us. She’d been pretty once. Now heavy makeup couldn’t quite cover the lines in her face, and her stomach strained against the seams of her pink uniform. Her dark hair, ratted so high you could see right through it, was streaked with gray. Duke talked a mile a minute, telling her about Kerouac and how cool he was and how we were hitchhiking to Florida to find him—flirting with her like she was seventeen, which she ate up, leaning over as close to him as she could pouring a second cup of coffee, calling him, “Baby.”

  We ordered ham and eggs and pancakes, which we practically inhaled. Duke wrote her a little love note on the back of the bill, and when she came back with our change she slipped us a bag of sandwiches.

  “For the road,” she said, winking at Duke. “Y’all get to the beach, you think of me.” She pointed to the nametag pinned over her heart. “Peggy Ann Kelly. Write my name in the sand.”

  We promised. She wished us luck, and we were gone.

  We walked downtown, as Peggy Ann had suggested, and caught a city bus going south to the edge of town. It was past two and blistering hot by the time we got off and hitchhiked our way back to Route 41. Breakfast had helped, but my headache was holding on like an evil halo. And even though I’d slept like the dead, the headache made me want to keep my eyes closed, which was just as bad as being tired.

  We walked backwards, thumbs out, Duke moving on from the girls last night to fantasize about all the girls we were going to meet once we got to Florida. Cars hurtled past, nobody even giving us a glance.