Looking for Jack Kerouac

by Barbara Shoup

  He laughed. “Head for a beach. Any beach. Sounds like a plan to me.”

  I didn’t mention Kerouac. The fact that Chuck wasn’t that much older than I was and had a real plan for his life made our quest to find Kerouac seem pathetic. So I just played tourist and asked him about where things were happening around town.

  “Got an ID?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Cool.” Chuck took the map back, opened it, and marked some places. The Chatterbox, the Tic Toc Lounge, the Twilight. There was a place called the Shipdeck out at Treasure Island.

  And the Wild Boar, if we wanted to hitch into Tampa. That was where a lot of the college kids hung out. He also told me about some cafeterias and diners in St. Petersburg—“St. Pete,” he called it—where you could get a good, cheap meal.

  “There’s a great bookstore,” he said. “Haslam’s. If you’re into that.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said.

  It turned out we like some of the same books. Catch-22, The Catcher in the Rye. He was reading this crazy book now, he said, Cat’s Cradle. He’d lend it to me when he finished it; he’d like to know what I thought.

  Just then, Duke appeared, all puffed up: the Great American Novelist.

  “Paulie,” he said. “Let’s get some grub. I’m starving.”

  I introduced him to Chuck, told him Chuck had been giving me the lay of the land.

  He grunted in what passed as a greeting. “Any decent diners around here?” he asked.

  “Bessie’s.” Chuck folded the map he’d marked up and handed it back to me. “Not exactly the Ritz, but it’s nearby. Go out the front door, turn right. Then turn left at the first stoplight. It’s down the street a ways. You’ll see it. Just don’t forget I have to lock the door at midnight.”

  Duke looked at me, cocked an eyebrow.

  “Prick,” he said, once we got outside. “Man, you know those guys right off. ‘Don’t forget, I have to lock the door at midnight.’ He probably gave you an earful of that shit. Rules. I am done with all that.”

  “Actually, he probably said it because I’d been asking about night spots. He’s a nice guy. He’s working nights here, going to college.”

  Duke snorted. “Figures. College boy.”

  We walked the rest of the way to the diner in silence. When we got there and the waitress had taken our order, I opened the map and spread it out on the table between us.

  “Give me your pen,” I said.

  He unclipped it from his shirt pocket and handed it over.

  I divided the map into eight squares, using the edge of the menu as a ruler.

  “Okay.” I gave the pen back. “We’re not going to get anywhere just wandering around asking people if they know Kerouac. So we’re going to walk these areas, street-by-street, talk to people, and make a list of places we think he might go.”

  “Is this Dudley Do-Right’s idea?”

  “I didn’t tell Chuck we came here to look for Kerouac.”

  “Good. He’d probably call the F.B.I.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” I said. “What’s your problem? He only told us about the midnight thing so we wouldn’t get locked out.”

  Duke shrugged, started looking around, jotting stuff down in his notebook. Probably details of the diner: the booths with cracked red leather seats, the scuffed floors, the pink neon coffee cup in the window. The smell of coffee and bacon, the grit of sugar not quite cleaned off of our table. The down-and-outs lined up at the counter, nowhere else to go; the pasty, heavyset waitress with big bags under her eyes, old enough to be somebody’s grandmother.

  He was probably writing down stuff about Chuck, too. When he got to the part in his novel about St. Petersburg, he’d probably work Chuck in, give him some awful name that set him up as a total drag. Milton. Ernie. Floyd.

  He could be such a pain in the ass sometimes, so full of himself. But then he left the waitress a five-dollar tip for his two-dollar meal.

  “Man, that old lady’s a sad case,” he said, back out on the street. “Can you imagine living like that?”

  THIRTEEN

  We were both in a better mood the next morning, considerably more rational.

  We grabbed coffee and a couple of donuts at a little bakery, then checked the book at a nearby phone booth to see if Kerouac was listed. He wasn’t, so Duke called information and tried to wheedle the unlisted address out of the operator, who finally just disconnected him.

  We’d hit the library, we decided; some of the librarians might actually know him. Plus, it seemed symbolic. So we set out, Duke now and then stopping random people to ask them if they knew Jack, which seemed funny to me this time. I couldn’t have said why.

  The library was a low pink building, with palm trees surrounding it, nothing like any library I’d ever seen before. But it felt like a library inside: the rich quiet made of millions of words. There were big rooms divided by high arched windows framed in dark wood. The bookshelves and chairs and tables were the same dark color—and the desk where the librarian sat, a gray-haired lady with glasses on a chain around her neck.

  I felt grounded for the first time since I left home on Saturday night. I remembered how Mom used to take me and Bobby to the library when we were little, how she’d kneel down with us in the children’s section looking through the picture books, deciding which ones we wanted to borrow—and then we’d sit in the grown-up section and look at them while she made her own choices. I remembered how proud she was to take me to get my own library card on my sixth birthday, how proud I was of myself when the librarian stamped that first little box on it and wrote down the number of books I’d taken out. How, when I was old enough, I’d ride my bike to the library and then back home again, with the books in the basket on my handlebars.

  The librarian looked up. “May I help you boys?”

  Duke opened his mouth—

  “Could you please tell us where the fiction section is?” I asked.

  She directed us to the area behind the arches.

  “The books first,” I said to Duke. “We need to touch the books first. You’re the one who said this was a sacred mission.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said.

  But when we looked on the “K” shelf, there were no books by Kerouac there.

  “Shit,” Duke said. “They’re all checked out.”

  A guy at a nearby table glanced up from the newspaper he was reading. Disheveled, unshaven, not quite clean, he looked a lot like the guys we’d seen in Morris Park the day before. There were others, too, their heads bent over books or newspapers, their dirty green army surplus duffels at their feet—and it occurred to me that whatever had deposited them in this place, rootless, without purpose, might have seemed like a grand adventure at the start.

  Suddenly, the grounding I’d felt entering the library dissolved. I headed for the exit so fast I almost knocked over a chair, burst out into the muggy air, and sat down on the library steps, sweat pouring down my face.

  “Hey,” Duke said catching up with me. “Don’t you think we ought to ask the librarian about Jack? He might come in here. If we could get her to look up his library card, we could find out where he lives.”

  “You ask,” I said. “Go ahead. I’ll wait out here for you.”

  I sat with my eyes closed, taking deep breaths until he came back.

  “Old bat! She wouldn’t tell me anything, just looked over her glasses at me. You know how librarians do. Like if she did know Jack, she didn’t approve of him. Then went back to her stamping.” He looked at me. “Paulie? Are you okay?”

  “I guess.”

  But I wasn’t. The day passed, then another, and I kept having that weird feeling I’d had at the library. I’d be doing whatever I was doing and, suddenly, I was floating. Nobody, nowhere. And when I came back, which took maybe a few seconds but seemed like forever, I was sweating and scared—though I didn’t know exactly what I was scared of.

  It didn’t go away.

  I felt weighed down by a
kind of darkness that had descended on me that first day at the library. It let up only in moments when, suddenly, in my mind’s eye, I saw my mom, alive, doing little things like cooking or pruning her roses or kissing Dad goodbye in the morning and I felt a rush of pure happiness.

  Followed by wild sorrow that shot through my body, every single part of it. Like physical pain, like something breaking inside me. If you had looked at my cells through a microscope, I swear you could have seen its glittering sharp edges. When it went away, I was back in the dark place again.

  It made me think about this physics theory we studied last spring. Our teacher, Mr. Switzer, was crazy about the weirdness of quantum physics, and was always saying things like, “Every breath you take contains an atom breathed out by Elvis Presley.” Or, “The entire human race would fit in the volume of a sugar cube.” Or, “Time travel is not forbidden by the laws of physics.” Then one day we got to class and he was so pumped up you’d have thought he was about to give us all keys to brand new Corvettes.

  “Okay,” he said, when the bell rang. “So. A cat is placed in a sealed box. Attached to the box is an apparatus containing a radioactive atomic nucleus and a canister of poison gas.”

  “That’s terrible,” one of the girls said.

  He raised his hand like a traffic cop. “Never fear. This is just a thought exercise invented by a guy named Shrodinger. No actual cat is going to be sacrificed here.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “Anyway. This apparatus is separated from the cat in such a way that it’s impossible for the cat to interfere with it and set up so there’s exactly a 50% chance of the nucleus decaying in one hour. If the nucleus decays, it emits a particle that triggers the apparatus, which opens the canister and kills the cat. If the nucleus does not decay, the cat remains alive.

  “But here’s the really neat thing, here’s why the theory matters. According to quantum mechanics, the unobserved nucleus exists partly and simultaneously as both the decayed nucleus and the undecayed nucleus…”

  He paused. “Until the box is opened—at which point the experimenter sees either a decayed nucleus, i.e. a dead cat, or the undecayed nucleus, a live one.”

  He surveyed us expectantly. “So, what is Shrodinger saying here?” he asked. “What does Shrodinger’s Cat tell us?”

  Silence.

  “I know!” he said, beaming. “It seems impossible! Until the box is opened the cat is both alive and dead. Quantum physics tells us that there can be two states at the same time.”

  He’d gone on to lecture about what this meant in terms of our understanding of the universe, but I couldn’t get the box with the cat in it out of my mind and, before I knew it, what I was seeing was Mom’s closed casket.

  What I wanted to ask Mr. Switzer was, “So according, to Shrodinger’s theory, if I hadn’t watched my mom die, if they’d closed the lid of the casket before I saw her in it, she’d still be alive, right?”

  What I’d like to have been able to ask him now was, “Could you call up Shrodinger and ask him how he explains the fact that someone can be both alive and dead after you open the box?”

  And, while I was at it, how could I be alive in the “now” and at the same time feel equally, maybe more, alive in the past?

  FOURTEEN

  Over the next couple of weeks, Duke and I walked the sections I’d marked off on the map, Duke forging ahead in the idiotic Hawaiian shirt and RayBans he’d taken to wearing wherever he went; me tagging along, feeling weirder and weirder every day.

  We cruised the bars at night, getting back to the Y just under the wire. I’d fall into bed, exhausted, but Duke would get out the Big Chief and work on Beat Highway. He went through one notebook, then another. He was Jack Bliss. I was Rocco Minetti. That’s all I knew. Sometimes he’d stop, pen poised, beatific.

  “I’ve got to say, this shit is brilliant, Paulie. Seriously. You won’t believe it.”

  “So let me read it,” I’d say.

  But he always refused—and I couldn’t sneak a peek at what he’d written, either. He kept the Big Chiefs, along with all the little notebooks he’d filled up, in a metal lock box he bought at the dime store and wore the key on a chain around his neck. He slept with the frigging thing under his pillow.

  He was so obnoxious sometimes. He knew everything; he had an opinion about everything. Those summer nights, on break at the mill, we discussed things. Mostly, we agreed; sometimes, though, we’d argue in a friendly, spirited way. Now he didn’t want to have a discussion, he just wanted to impress whoever he was talking to with what he knew.

  At least I’m not getting married, I’d tell myself. That’s something to feel good about.

  Well, for about two seconds. Because my next thought always was, I also wouldn’t be getting married if I’d had the balls to tell Kathy the truth about how I felt. When she started in on the wedding plans, all I’d have had to do—once—was tell her no.

  Eventually, we began to catch some trail of Jack, mostly during our nightly cruise of the St. Petersburg bars and pool halls. He’d been seen at the Chatterbox, the Twilite Lounge. Somebody had played pool with him at the Tic Toc. A guy who worked at Haslam’s Books told us he came in now and then and moved his books from the bottom shelf where the “K’s” were and put them, cover out, at chest level so you couldn’t help but see them.

  He drank shots with beer chasers, we also found out. Duke kept track of all this in his notebook. He started drinking shots with beer chasers every night, in honor of Jack, until he got so drunk he forgot all about looking for him and started trying to make it with some girl, telling her the increasingly dramatic story about hitchhiking down here—which was my only clue about what the novel he was writing in the Big Chiefs might be like.

  He made fun of our first ride—Hank, singing “Moon River”—and mimicked his spiel about how Barry Goldwater was going to save us from the Commies. Duke said, “When he dropped us off, I stood in the middle of the highway and yelled at the top of my lungs, ‘Fuck you, old man,’ as he drove away.”

  A flat-out lie.

  The old lady who chased us out of the swimming pool now had a shotgun. In Nashville, the girls who (supposedly) picked him up were country-singing sisters with a record coming out next spring. We spent the night in Georgia holed up in a trucker’s cab because Duke had created a major racial incident when he saved an old colored guy from getting beat up by a bunch of hillbillies.

  You can just imagine what he said about Lorelei and Bev.

  I’d just walk away when he started in on that bullshit version of our life on the road. It was kind of ridiculous, really. All the shitty things I’d done by then, and I drew the line at not lying about that? But I really couldn’t stand to listen to it.

  Finally, I quit going to the bars with him at all. I also quit waiting around for him to sleep off his hangover so we could make the rounds of daytime places. I got up, grabbed some breakfast, and headed out on my own. I finished walking the segments I’d marked off on the map that first night, drawing a red line down each street when I got to the end of it, noting any promising places I saw along the way. If I found myself close to Haslam’s, I checked in to see where Jack’s books were on the shelf. If I was in the neighborhood, I scoped out Al Lang Field, where some of the groundskeepers knew him, and see if maybe he’d been by to talk to them.

  At first, I pretended to be a tourist so that people wouldn’t be suspicious, then I got into it. I bought a cheap camera and snapped pictures wherever I went—things I knew Mom would have gotten a kick out of if we’d all been able to take the trip to Florida together. Houseplants grown as tall as bushes, orchids growing on tree trunks. Pelicans perching regally on pylons out in the water; fishermen lined up so closely along The Pier that you wondered why their lines weren’t constantly tangled together. Old guys playing shuffleboard over by the Coliseum; old ladies with their tanned, wrinkly skin and huge rhinestone sunglasses. And the huge, ancient banyan tree outside the library, like a nig
htmare tree, its multiple trunks twisting out and up, with a brown curtain of aerial roots that dripped from the high branches, making a cave-like shelter inside.

  I carried my mitt and my copy of On the Road in a rucksack I bought at the Army Surplus Store, grounding for when I needed to remember who I was—along with a jar of peanut butter, a loaf of bread, and a knife I’d swiped from a diner. When I got hungry, usually about the time it started getting really hot, I headed toward the little lake behind the library—Mirror Lake, it was called. When I got there, having stopped along the way to buy a bottle of milk and maybe a candy bar, I sat down under a shade tree and fixed myself a couple of sandwiches and had a picnic lunch.

  There was a high school across the street, and there were always kids outside, eating their lunches, screwing around. Guys tossing a football, girls in groups, talking and laughing. Couples off by themselves. I watched, thinking about how a year ago I was just like them. So full of myself, so cool. In a million years, I couldn’t have imagined the series of events that had landed me here, all by myself.

  I spent the afternoons in the library, where it was cool and I could sit as long as I wanted to, reading. I read a couple of newspapers cover-to-cover every day, caught up on the sports scores; leafed through magazines that caught my interest. There was a whole section of books about Florida, and I looked up the names of trees, plants, flowers, and birds I’d seen. I pored through books about the ocean, fascinated by the diversity of life beneath the surface, a whole world within itself.

  I didn’t know what Duke did when he got up. Wrote, I supposed. Sometimes we caught a meal together, but listening to him brag about how drunk he’d been the night before or how many girls he’d laid was about as dead boring as following him around, watching him in action. And he wouldn’t lay off Chuck, which pissed me off.

  I liked Chuck. Most evenings, I went down to the rec room and watched whatever was on TV until he finished studying, then we’d sit around and shoot the shit, sometimes for hours. By then it was just a week or so before the World Series—the White Sox duking it out for the pennant right up to the wire with the Yankees and Orioles—and we talked about that. Then the Warren Commission captured our attention.