Looking for Jack Kerouac

by Barbara Shoup

  The stupid name irritated me, again, but at the same time I felt weirdly unbalanced knowing that Rocco would be banished from his imagination as he moved on to the next story. Who was I without Duke to imagine me into a new life?

  Who was I without my wallet? If I had to prove I was Paul Carpetti, I couldn’t do it, which was scary enough without the realization that having no ID also meant I didn’t have to be Paul Carpetti anymore, if I didn’t want to be—which got me moving, feeling like a balloon that had been blown up and set wild.

  I walked randomly for a long time, up one street and down another, not noticing anything until I found myself back at Morris Park, where my mind cranked into panic at the sight of the bums who’d been chased from their sleeping places at sunrise and had returned to sit on the benches, smoking, reading newspapers or battered paperbacks, the trappings of their portable lives sitting at their feet.

  I’d have prayed, if prayer made sense to me anymore. But all I could think of was Mom with her rosary beads, her bald head bent, whispering prayer after prayer asking God to make her better—and He didn’t. Why would He help me now?

  I headed for the library, thinking it would calm me down. But when I got there, I couldn’t sit still. I took a book about the ocean from the shelf, leafed through it, set it aside, and got another one. Before long, I had a whole stack of them on the table beside me, the sight of them which so overwhelmed me that I went from not being able to sit still to sitting slumped in my chair, staring at a picture of a live sea scallop with its two rows of beady little eyes.

  My whole body ached from the roughing up I’d gotten the night before; I could feel my pulse in the long nasty scrape on my arm. My eyes felt scratchy inside, and I had to fight not to close them. Sleeping was not allowed in the library. The last thing I wanted to do was risk getting kicked out of the one place that felt even a little bit like home to me, so I left and went back to the Y, where I slept like the dead until Chuck knocked on my door around five.

  “I’m thinking about going to a movie,” he said, when I opened it. “You want—” He stepped back. “Jesus, Paul. What happened to you?”

  “Long story,” I said.

  “Involving Duke?”

  “Yep.”

  “Figures,” he said. “Short version, then a movie?”

  “There’s no short version to anything that Duke’s involved in.”

  Chuck sat down on what had been Duke’s bed. “Okay, hit me with it,” he said.

  I still hadn’t told him that Duke and I had been looking for Jack Kerouac, I was too embarrassed, but now I told him the whole story—from finding On the Road in Greenwich Village to getting to know Duke at the mill—the Eddies, how Kathy hated him at first sight, how he showed up at work that night with the newspaper story about Kerouac’s sister’s death, the two of us ditching our jobs to find him down here.

  “Which we did,” I said. “Last night. At the Tic Toc. He was drunk, spouting all this prejudiced crap—though we didn’t know it was him at the time—and Duke got pissed and went off. Then Kerouac’s friends threw us out of the bar. Literally. Plus, somewhere along the line, I lost my goddamn wallet. It was pathetic. We ended up sleeping in Morris Park.”

  “So where’s Duke now?” he asked.

  “He took off for California this morning.”

  Chuck shook his head. “Everyone knows you guys were looking for Kerouac, by the way. Want to know something funny? Duke didn’t ask me about Kerouac because he figured, being the square I am, what would I know about someone like that, right?”

  I had to admit it was true.

  Chuck grinned. “Well, I know Jack. He’s a friend of mine,” he said.

  “You know Jack?” I asked.

  “Yeah. He’s a baseball fanatic, and I sat next to him at a Cards game during last year’s spring training. We struck up a conversation, somehow got to talking about being into baseball when we were kids and I told him how I’d made up this game I played with baseball cards and dice. It took up the whole floor of my room. I made dugouts from shoeboxes; the bases were potholders. I kept stats. I wrote a sports column after every game. I still have the notebooks. I’d play for hours at a time, giving a running commentary on the game. It drove my mom crazy. She’d make me go outside, but I’d set the whole thing up in the driveway and play there.”

  “We played a version of that, too. Me and my brother.”

  “So did Kerouac,” Chuck said. “Only, being Kerouac, he made up his own league, he invented backgrounds for all the players, kept stats. He also made up a baseball newspaper, where he analyzed the games. He still has all this stuff. I gave him a ride home from the ballpark that day, and he showed it to me. Believe me, it’s not as simple as just throwing dice. He’s got this wild system of scoring based on years of hitting statistics. It’s amazing. I go over and play with him sometimes. It keeps his mind off things.”

  Chuck paused. “Well, you saw him. He drinks way too much; most of the time he’s either pissed off or sad. People drive him nuts. No kidding, I was over there one time and this whole gang of guys showed up on their motorcycles, all of them wearing jackets with “Dharma Bums” on the back, wanting to take him for a ride.”

  He shook his head. “The thing is, if he ever really was the guy in On the Road, he’s sure as hell not now. He lives in this little house with his mom. They drink together; she treats him like he’s about nine. When the kooks show up, she’s the one who scares them away. If it makes you feel any better, he probably doesn’t even remember what happened last night.”

  “Yeah, but I remember,” I said. “Plus, we never should have been chasing after him in the first place. We found out he was down here because his sister died, for Pete’s sake. Of all people, I should have had some respect for that.”

  We were quiet a while, just sitting in my crappy little room. The window was open, but there was no breeze and the air inside was warmer and more humid than the air on the street. The logical thing to do would be to pack up and take the first bus home. Chalk up the past month or so as a stupid, misguided interlude in my real life.

  Then Chuck said, “Forget the movie. I haven’t talked to Jack since the middle of the Phillies losing streak and, with the Cards taking the pennant, I’ve been thinking about going over to see him. You want to come along?”

  “I don’t know man. I—”

  “We’ll play it by ear. If he recognizes you from last night, you apologize; if not—” He grinned. “You’re Catholic. You just go to confession and the priest lets you off the hook, right?”

  I laughed. “Right,” I said.

  Chuck knew the guy who owned the Tic Toc, too, so we stopped there on the way to Jack’s, and he produced my wallet from behind the bar, minus my fake ID. But Mom’s picture was there, no worse for the wear. He apologized for the night before. The guys who roughed us up had been way out of line, he said, even though Duke was really obnoxious. I was welcome to come back any time—after I turned twenty-one.

  “Jack okay?” Chuck asked.

  “Tom had to haul his ass out to the car. But he does that a lot of nights, you know?”

  “Yeah,” Chuck said. “I know.”

  Tom was Jack’s driver, he told me when we got back to the car. Not officially, or anything like that. It was just that Kerouac didn’t drive—which was kind of funny, considering he was the guy who wrote On the Road—and Tom somehow ended up being the person who took him pretty much everywhere he wanted to go.

  Chuck grinned. “Mamère—that’s what Jack calls his mom—she can’t stand Tom, she won’t let him come anywhere near the house. She’s convinced that if it weren’t for Tom, Jack would be the good Catholic boy he’s supposed to be. Me, she’s crazy about. You’ll see.”

  It was true. Her weathered face lit up when she opened the door and saw him. “Chuck,” she said, with some kind of accent so it sounded like, “Chook.”

  He leaned down and gave her a hug, then introduced me.

  “Ti-Jean
,” Mrs. Kerouac called, opening the door wider to let us in. “Ti-Jean! Here is Chuck to see you. And his friend.”

  “It’s okay,” Chuck said. “We’ll come back another time if he’s busy.”

  “You boys wait.” She started toward the little hallway, calling out again. “Ti-Jean.”

  “It’s what she calls Jack,” Chuck said quietly. “It’s French. Well, French Canadian, for—I don’t exactly know what.”

  Moments later, she returned with Jack in tow, a can of beer in his hand, a cigarette between his fingers—wearing the same flannel shirt and baggy unpressed pants he’d worn the night before. His thick black hair was standing straight up, like he’d been running his fingers through it.

  He nodded, when Chuck introduced me. If I looked familiar to him, he didn’t mention it.

  “Sorry, if we disturbed you, man,” Chuck said. “I told Mamère we could come back another time. But she said—”

  “Always do what Mamère says,” Jack interrupted. “I always do what she says. Mamère says, ‘You come see Chuck, he waits for you,’ I come.”

  She swatted him on the arm. A weird, flirty little swat, the kind Kathy used to give me when she was pretending to be annoyed with me. She spoke to him in French, and he answered in French.

  He invited us further in with a sweep of his hand, ashes from his lit cigarette scattering. “She said, ‘Tell the boys, sit.’”

  We sat. Chuck and I on the couch; Jack on a worn green armchair. He shook a cigarette from an open pack on the table beside him, lit it with the one he’d by now smoked down to almost nothing. He stubbed the old one out, took a long drag from the new one. A huge ginger cat appeared, purring, and leapt into his arms.

  Jack’s mom brought a Falstaff for Chuck and me, and two for Jack. I thanked her, calling her “Mrs. Kerouac,” but she beamed at me and said, no, no, I should call her “Mamère,” and that I looked like Ti-Jean when he was a boy. She’d brought a beer for herself, too, and sat down in a rocking chair, sipping it, watching over us.

  “Hey, man, what about those Cards taking the pennant?” Chuck asked.

  Jack grinned. His eyes were red-rimmed, his face was puffy, and you could see the broken blood vessels on his face—drinkers’ veins, I’d heard them called. But he was totally coherent on the subject of baseball. He drained one of the Falstaffs. Then, settling back in his chair, waving his lit cigarette, spouting statistics, he analyzed the run-up to the World Series and why it had come down like it did.

  His voice surprised me. So low, sometimes I had to lean forward a little to hear him. There was a hint of an accent: “wi-ah” he said for “wire.” “Far” was “fah.” He knew everything—league stats, team stats, each player’s stats and personal histories, trades, owners, managers, you name it—and what he knew made its way into his commentary naturally, just as it would in a story. In fact, if you could have heard only the sound and rhythm of what he was saying about the pennant race, you might have thought he was reading out loud from On the Road.

  “Man, what a season,” he concluded. He unscrewed the cap from a bottle of Johnny Walker Red that was tucked between the cushion and the side of his chair, and took a swig.

  “What’s your call, Chuck? Who’s going to take the Series?”

  “Cards,” Chuck said. “Ford’s shoulder’s wrecked. Mantle’s a gimp. Maris—”

  “Maris is not a factor,” Jack interrupted. “Not a factor. Paul?”

  “Hey, I’m a Sox fan,” I said. “But now that they’re out of the running, I like the Cards for the Series. I love Bob Gibson.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Jack said.

  I let the conversation between Chuck and Jack flow, weighing in now and then, taking in my surroundings. The house was small, crowded with shabby furniture. It was dark inside, the windows covered with heavy drapes—probably to keep people like me and Duke from snooping around. There was a crucifix on the wall above Jack’s chair, with dry palm leaves tucked behind it, left over from Lent—and a weird, modern art kind of painting of what I guessed, based on his red robe, the silver crucifix around his neck, and the wide-brimmed black hat he held in one hand, was a cardinal in the church. The place was spotless. Every wood surface shone in the yellow lamplight, there were starched white doilies on every table—except for the one next to Jack’s chair, which was cluttered with books and empty beer cans and held an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts.

  I sensed Mamère watching me, but I couldn’t help looking at the framed pictures of Jack arranged on a low table, almost like a shrine—one of which I figured was his high-school graduation picture. In it, his hair was neatly cropped; he wore a V-neck sweater, a shirt and tie under it; he gazed directly into the camera. He was not smiling, but he wasn’t exactly serious, either. He looked like he was thinking about something secret that pleased him, something inside himself that was totally his own and that he believed was absolutely invulnerable.

  Aside from being dark and stocky, I didn’t think I looked much like him. But I saw something of myself in the picture, and what I saw is that I was so young. If I could have looked at my own senior picture, I’m pretty sure I’d have seen Jack’s secret satisfaction in my expression, that same certainty. What happened to my mom had stripped me of the illusion of invulnerability—mine or anyone else’s. Something had stripped Jack of his belief that nothing in the world could hurt him, too. I wondered what it was.

  I knew what Duke would say. “All famous writers get wrecked, man. Too much fame, too much booze, too much pussy.” He’d provide a litany of wrecked writers to prove his point—in a tone of voice that gave you the idea he was looking forward to the opportunity to being wrecked himself. Adding, in this case, that no matter how rich and famous and wrecked he got, there was no way he’d end up living with his mother.

  If he’d been there, he’d have been taking in Mamère: a dumpy little woman, her hair dyed jet black, wearing a faded housedress and those clunky brown tie-shoes old ladies wear. Her apron with a saint’s medal pinned to it and a rosary in the pocket, which she took out from time to time, murmuring the black beads. He’d be itching to get it all in his notebook.

  Jack drained the second Falstaff; Mamère brought him two more. His eyelids began to droop, his voice slurred, his hands shook. The arms of his chair had little scorched holes all over them, probably from cigarette sparks. Suddenly, he rose and careened toward the back of the house.

  “You boys go now,” Mamère whispered, nodding toward the door. “Come back. Watch the game with Ti-Jean tomorrow.”

  “Is he always like that?” I asked Chuck, driving back to town.

  “Pretty much,” he said. “It’s sad.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “What do you think happened to him?”

  “On the Road happened,” Chuck said. “According to most people, anyway. But I don’t know. He gave me this book he wrote about his older brother, Gerard, who died when he was nine and Jack was four—and told me it was the best, most important thing he’d ever written. Man, I could hardly get through it. No kidding, it is seriously weird. There’s all this stuff in the book about Gerard talking to birds and animals and blessing people. I think Jack actually believes the kid was a saint.

  “He talks about him sometimes. Gerard. How he had these visions, how he suffered. What I think is, Jack was already wrecked when he wrote On the Road. Getting famous only made it worse. And ending up stuck here in the middle of nowhere with Mamére didn’t help, either. He told me his dad made him promise he’d take care of her when he was dying—though it’s hard to tell who’s taking care of who, since they’re both loaded about ninety percent of the time.

  “Listen,” he added. “If you don’t want to watch the game with him, don’t feel bad. He’s likely to be the same as he was this evening, maybe worse.”

  “I want to,” I said. “But don’t you have class?”

  “Cutting,” he said. “Thursday, too. I’ve got this girl set up to take notes for me. If the Series goes into next
week, I’ll cut then, too. I love college, you know? Nobody to tell me what to do, nobody constantly reminding me that baseball—or whatever—is the work of the devil.”

  The Animals came on the radio. “The House of the Rising Sun.”

  “Shit,” Chuck said. “The devil heard me say that.” He turned the volume up, loud—and the raw, defiant sound of the song filled the night. “I’m doomed,” he said. “Who cares?”

  I cracked up. “Join the club,” I said. “Who knew it would feel so good?”

  EIGHTEEN

  Wednesday afternoon, game time, the TV was on at Jack’s house, tuned to the pre-game program, and Chuck and I sat down in the same places we’d sat in before, Jack with the ginger cat in his lap. He tossed Chuck and me a Falstaff from the six-pack on the table beside him. Mamère brought in a plate of salami sandwiches, set it on the coffee table, then settled in her rocking chair with a beer of her own.

  Jack looked better today, more alert. He’d shaved; his black hair was still wet from a shower; his pants and shirt fresh from Mamère’s iron. He listened intently to what the sportscasters were saying, sometimes nodding in agreement, sometimes arguing as if they were right there in the room with us—leafing through a beat up spiral notebook full of statistics to prove his points.

  We all agreed that Mantle’s knees were a major factor—especially the right, which, rumor was, he couldn’t control unless it was wrapped because the cartilage had turned to jelly.

  “The Cards have got to run on him,” Jack said.

  Chuck nodded. “Absolutely. They’ve got to run on Mantle. They’ve got the speed; he can’t go after them.”