“No surprise it looks like a whitewash,” Chuck said. “KGB, Castro, the Mafia. The CIA. Shit, LBJ might have set it up for all we’ll ever know.” He shrugged. “A lot of people hated him, you know? My own parents hated him. I actually heard my dad tell someone that the assassination was a blessing. No shit. He seriously believed Satan had sent Kennedy to integrate the schools. Or maybe Kennedy was Satan.” He rolled his eyes. “He never was quite clear about that. I disagreed, but I kept my mouth shut—about everything. Until last spring when a bunch of protesters showed up when I was standing in line to see a movie. This one colored guy had a sign that said, ‘My brother died defending democracy abroad—and for what? Theater segregation?’
“I told my dad about it. He’d been in the war, too, and I said I thought the guy had a damn good point. We got into the first serious argument we ever had over it. He really flipped when I started demonstrating myself. It’s the reason I’m putting myself through school, living at the Y.”
“My mom was nuts about Kennedy,” I said. “Like I told you before, she was in surgery when he was assassinated—and I remember my dad making Bobby and me promise we wouldn’t tell her when she woke up. He said she couldn’t handle it; she shouldn’t have to. But when she came out of surgery, she wasn’t herself, she was never really herself again, and the assassination didn’t seem to register with her at all. Which, I don’t know, I guess was a good thing.
“It didn’t register for me, either. I mean, sure, I was upset. It was awful. But it seemed small balanced against what was happening to my mom. To tell the truth, it pissed me off how the whole world just shut down because JFK was dead, all that weeping and wailing, and who besides us even gave a shit about my mom, really? Like her life didn’t matter as much as his did.
“I never told this to anyone before,” I said.
“I see why,” Chuck said. “But it makes perfect sense to me you’d feel that way.”
He always seemed to say something that made me feel better, or at least see things in a different way. When I told him about feeling guilty about treating Kathy so badly, he said, “Yeah, well, for what it’s worth, I had a girlfriend like that once. I bought the ring, we set the date. I broke up with her in the nicest way I could when I realized I didn’t want to go through with it, and she hates me anyway.
“It is what it is,” he concluded. “Over—which is a good thing, right? At least good enough.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Good enough.”
If Duke came in while we were talking, he’d head for our room without saying a word—then needle me, if he hadn’t passed out by the time I came upstairs.
“How’s college boy?”
“What’s your merit point count with Dudley Do-Right these days?”
The first time he stayed out past curfew, Chuck and I were watching the late movie in the rec room. He was only five minutes late, and Chuck let him in—but told him he couldn’t do it again. He’d lose his job if anyone found out.
Maybe Duke didn’t believe this, or maybe he wanted Chuck to refuse to let him in, like this would prove his point about Chuck being a drag. In any case, Chuck hadn’t let him in the next time he was late, or any time after that, either. I don’t know where Duke slept those nights. If I had asked him, he’d have leered at me, implying he’d been with a girl. Maybe it was true. More likely, he slept on a bench in Morris Park.
“Are you even looking for Jack anymore?” I asked him one night.
“Hey! I’m living Jack,” he said.
“Yeah, well, you should have saved yourself a trip then,” I said. “You could be a goddamn drunk in East Chicago.”
He flipped me the bird. “Get bent, Paulie,” he said.
I didn’t want what Duke wanted anymore. I wanted a real life.
The thing was, though, for better or worse, On the Road had changed me. I shouldn’t say this, being a Catholic and all, but I believed that book was holy. A voice in it had spoken to me when I picked it up and read the first few pages in the Greenwich Village bookstore and it kept speaking to me as I read and re-read the book in my hotel room, on tour buses, on a bench near the Washington Monument, while all the others climbed to the top. On the train all the way home. Quiet at first, then louder and louder until Mom got sick and, for a time, it went completely silent. Then Duke had brought it back, spouting off at the Eddies that night at the mill. Afterwards, I began to hear it everywhere: in the roar of the machinery; in Kathy’s talk, talk, talk about getting married; in the very rhythm of our bodies making love. But if it hadn’t been for Duke’s crazy idea to look for Jack Kerouac, it was pretty much a done deal that I would have stayed with her.
I figured I owed him something for that. The two of us had set out on this mission together, and I wanted us to finish it before we parted ways. I still wanted to find Kerouac. Maybe shake his hand and say, “Thanks for On the Road. It gave me the guts to try to figure out what I want to be.” Maybe not, if it seemed like saying it might embarrass or annoy him.
If I could just see him, it would be like reaching a door. He might open it for me; but if he didn’t, the door would be right there in front of me, and eventually I’d figure out a way to open it myself.
FIFTEEN
When Chuck invited me to spend a Saturday at the beach at Pass-a-Grille, I jumped at the chance. He’d grown up there, he told me. His friend, Ginny, still lived there—next door to one of the beach motels owned by her mom. We headed out in his old red Crosley convertible, which he kept waxed to a high shine, stopping only to grab a box of chocolate donuts and a couple of cartons of milk, which we devoured along the way. The streets were deserted. The pastel storefronts along Central Avenue looked like a movie set, and the palm trees, which still didn’t seem real to me, added to the effect.
It was a beautiful day, another in a long string of beautiful days—sunny, in the low eighties. According to Chuck, early October was the absolute best time of the year to live in Florida. Great weather—and, better yet, the summer vacationers were gone and the snowbirds hadn’t begun to arrive yet.
“You think there are old people here now?” he said. “Just wait. A month from now, Highway 19 will be crawling with them, every single one of them driving about ten miles an hour.” He grinned. “It’s a whole different show on the beach, I’ll tell you that.”
Chuck turned the radio up loud, pounded his fist on the steering wheel in time to the music—and when a live recording of Little Stevie Wonder came on, we both sang along. Wailed, really. “Fingertips, Pt. 2.” We were pathetic. But, man, it felt so good, zipping along the highway, the sun shining in my face. Even when I’d been happy with Kathy, before Mom got sick and my whole life went to shit, I’d never felt good in quite the same way.
“Heads-up on Ginny,” he said as we neared Pass-a-Grille. “Her dad’s family has lived here basically forever, so we had the run of the place when we were kids. It was a blast. Her grandparents owned the marina and the general store. They had some motels, too—which Ginny’s mom had taken over after her dad died. Drowned in a boating accident, when Ginny was seven. Anyway, there were six boys in the family, so she had all these uncles looking out for her. There were aunts everywhere. I couldn’t keep them straight—except for Aunt Leeann, who ran the ice cream shop. I mean, how could it get any better than that? Honest to God, we hardly went inside from March to October. Sometimes we even slept on the beach when we got older.
“Not together,” he added. “Not that way. I’ve known Ginny since we were in kindergarten, and she’s been my best friend since we were eight. Sleeping with her would be like sleeping with my sister. Plus, believe me, Ginny has no time for anything like that. She’s had her whole life mapped out since she was twelve.
“How we got to be friends?” he went on. “This will tell you all you need to know. My grandparents were visiting and my grandma got into collecting sand dollars. It’s a tourist thing, you know? She’d get up early and go out to the sandbar, where they get stranded by the tide
, and put as many as she could find in this string bag she carried with her. Then she’d come back and dump them in a bucket of bleach she kept in the yard. So one day Ginny’s riding by on her bike and sees her getting ready to dump in her daily catch, plus she sees all the other sand dollars Grandma’s already bleached and has drying on the picnic table—and she skids to a stop and starts yelling, ‘Stop! Those sand dollars are alive! You’re killing them.’
“You should have seen my grandma,” Chuck said. “It was hilarious. This skinny, freckle-faced little girl yelling at this skinny, wrinkly old lady, who kept saying, ‘Oh, dear. Oh, dear.’ She was from Ohio. What did she know? The idea that sand dollars might be alive had never even occurred to her.
“At which point, she starts yelling, ‘Charles! Charles!’
“And I come running out—like I hadn’t been at the screen door all the time, listening.
“‘Honey, I need you to help me take the sand dollars back to the water,’ she says. “Right now. This little girl—’
“Ginny looks at me. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she says. ‘How come you didn’t tell her?’”
I laughed. “Accessory to murder,” I said.
“Exactly what Ginny would have said, if ‘accessory’ had been in her vocabulary then. Like I said, she was only eight. Anyway, now I’m in trouble with both of them, and they bully me into going along with this plan to take the possibly-still-alive sand dollars back to the water and then have a funeral for the ones that croaked in the bucket of bleach. This involves burying them on the beach and then building this huge monument out of sand. After which, we have to bow our heads, say a prayer, and sing ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus.’”
I was cracking up by this time, but Chuck held up his hand. “Then Ginny says we have to make a pact to save the sea animals. So we do that, hands raised, serious as a heart attack—and after that, Ginny starts showing up at my house every morning practically at daybreak so we can go do some good deed for…shrimp. Or whatever she decides needs saving.
“Shit, she’s still doing it. She’s majoring in marine biology so she can spend her whole life saving the ocean. She’s something else. When Ginny makes up her mind about something, do not get in her way!
“Here we are,” Chuck said. “Pass-a-Grille.”
We cruised down the main drag—two blocks of pastel houses, small motels, a general store, a diner, and a tavern on one side of the street—and across from them, a wide beach giving way to the ocean. Chuck pulled into a parking spot in front of The Palms, a yellow motel surrounded by palm trees. There was a small pool in the front, with lounge chairs and tables around it, shaded by yellow-and-white striped umbrellas. There was a yellow-and-white striped awning over the little outside bar. When Chuck turned off the engine, I heard Frank Sinatra singing.
There was a girl swimming laps and a couple of people stretched out on the lounges, taking in the sun. There were drinks on the tables next to them, with skewers of fruit and little umbrellas sticking out of them. There was a record player stacked with 45s—and when Frank stopped singing, Dean Martin dropped to the turntable.
“The party starts early at the Palms,” Chuck said, as we reached the wrought iron gate.
“Hey!” He opened his arms to the girl who climbed up out of the pool and came barreling toward him. “G! Whoa. You’re getting me all wet.”
“Tough.” She shook herself like a dog and got him even wetter.
“Ginny, this is Paul,” Chuck said. “Remember? I told you—”
She turned and looked at me—the waitress Duke pissed off our first day in St. Pete.
“Shit,” I said, before I could stop myself.
Ginny burst out laughing.
Chuck looked at her, then at me. “What the—?”
Ginny grinned. “You tell him,” she said.
“Well. We—uh...”
Ginny gestured for me to continue.
“We met at the Crab Shack. On the pier.”
“And you were with your friend,” she said, like she was talking to a kindergartner. “The Duke of Earl.”
“Look,” I said. “Ginny. I’m really sorry about that day. Duke being such—”
“A dipshit?” she finished for me.
“Yeah. That would be Duke,” I said.
She laughed some more, and filled Chuck in on what happened.
“I’m really sorry,” I said again. “Seriously. I am.”
“What did you do?” Ginny asked. “Except be dumb enough to hang out with him. I guess I can forgive you for that. Plus, you got him out of there before one of the old guys decided to try to defend my honor. Which would have been really ugly. So—”
She held out her hand. “Friends?”
“Friends,” I said.
We shook, then walked on across to The Palms, where one of the ladies lowered the fan magazine she was reading and pushed her big, rhinestone-studded sunglasses down on her nose to get a look at me. “Welcome to The Palms,” she said. “I’m Ginny’s mom—Loretta. But everybody calls me Lo.”
I wasn’t used to calling adults by their first name, my parents didn’t approve of it, which on top of the fact that I’d never have picked this woman as Ginny’s mom (or anyone’s mom, for that matter) made me stand there like a dope—again—until I finally worked myself up to at least repeating her name.
“Lo. Uh. Well. Thanks for having me.”
I kept standing there like a dope—because I couldn’t make myself stop looking at her. A reaction that probably wasn’t unusual based on the way both Ginny and Chuck were watching me, clearly amused.
What can I say? Lo was tall and tanned and—stacked. She must have been a total knockout when she was younger, and she still looked good. Her dark hair was done up in a beehive. She wore a pair of white short-shorts and a yellow bikini top. Her toenails and long fingernails were painted blood red.
She smiled, slid her sunglasses back in place, fluttered her fingers in a little wave. “You kids have fun at the beach,” she said—and went back to reading her magazine.
“Gidget goes Pass-a-Grille,” Ginny said, once we were out of earshot. But with affection.
We walked over to the cottage next door to The Palms, where they lived. It was once a double, Ginny said. She and her mom lived in one side, and they rented the other for the season. But it was crowded, just two small bedrooms, and when she was twelve, she had convinced her grandfather to connect the two units by taking out the wall between the two kitchens. So she had what amounted to her own apartment.
“Including my own front door,” she said, opening it.
Stepping into the small living room was like stepping into the ocean. The walls were painted that light, but intense blue you see in the shallows—the color of Ginny’s eyes. The couch and two directors’ chairs were a darker color of ocean blue; the lamps, made from glass jars filled with shells, had white shades draped with blue scarves. There was a big, burbling aquarium on one wall with exotic, multicolored fish swimming around in it. The windows were covered with thick white fishing nets; there were framed drawings of shells on the walls—the kind you see in science books.
“Chambered nautilus, right?” I said, nodding toward the shell on the white wicker coffee table—the only thing, except for the drawings that you might have called a decoration.
“Right,” she said. “You don’t find them in Florida. My dad fought in the Pacific. He brought it back from there.”
I didn’t say that Chuck had told me about him dying, or that losing a parent was something we had in common. “Chuck said you really love the ocean.”
“There’s an understatement,” he said. “G, show him the inner sanctum.”
Her grandfather had also removed the wall between the two small bedrooms at her request, Ginny said, and painted the room the color of coral. There was a narrow bed tucked into one corner; a cozy little chair in front of the window, which overlooked the ocean; and a white wicker table next to it, neatly stacked with books. A bui
lt-in workspace, with drawers and cabinets above and below, took up one of the longer walls; the other walls were lined with shelves filled with books and shells.
“This is amazing,” I said.
“Paul,” Chuck said. “I’d cool it if I were you, or she’ll have you doing hard labor over at Shell Key—which, believe me, you want to avoid. I got suckered into it once and G had me slogging through the mud flats, collecting dead fiddler crabs. Then she’d get pissed off every time I found one, like I was killing them myself.”
“Hey!” Ginny gave him the evil eye.
Chuck raised his hands in surrender.
Ginny was still barefoot, wearing just her swimsuit, a faded red one-piece, the kind lifeguards wear. Kathy would have called her a tomboy—and thought it was strange for a girl to be studying science in college. Kathy, herself, was notable for having been the only student ever excused by our biology teacher Mr. Rasmussen from touching a frog—which he prided himself on having required every single student to do in his thirty-some years of teaching—after, finger poised above her assigned frog, she had burst into tears and fled the lab.
Maybe it was strange. But listening to Ginny name the specimens on her shelves, I couldn’t help but be impressed. I tried to impress her back.
“The golden olive is rare, isn’t it?” I asked.
She cast me a startled glance. “How do you know that?”
“Library,” I said. “I got into reading stuff about the ocean there. I’d never even seen it before I came here. I guess I figured it was like Lake Michigan, only bigger—and with salt and sharks.”
Ginny laughed.
“So where did you find the golden olive?” I asked.
“Scuba diving. I find all the best ones that way.”
One of her older cousins had a scuba shop and took people out diving, she told me. He’d started taking her out when she was fifteen. “Actually, pretty much anything you want to do around here, somebody in my family has a business doing it,” she said.
Looking for Jack Kerouac Page 10
