Looking for Jack Kerouac Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Half Title

  Also by Barbara Shoup

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Looking

  for

  Jack

  Kerouac

  Also by Barbara Shoup

  Young Adult Books

  Wish You Were Here

  Vermeer’s Daughter

  Stranded in Harmony

  Everything You Want

  Adult Books

  Night Watch

  Faithful Women

  An American Tune

  Looking for Jack Kerouac

  a novel

  Barbara Shoup

  Lacewing Books

  Indianapolis

  Lacewing Books

  an imprint of Engine Books

  PO Box 44167

  Indianapolis, IN 46244

  lacewingbooks.org

  Copyright © 2014 by Barbara Shoup

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are

  either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

  The Brain Flower typeface, created by Denise Bentulan, is licensed for commercial use with her permission.

  Also available in eBook formats from Lacewing Books.

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN: 978-1-938126-67-3

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014944273

  For Sam and David

  Jackie’s Boys

  ONE

  It wasn’t Duke Walczak’s fault that I took off for Florida, like Kathy thought. The truth is, we started getting sideways with each other on our class trip to New York and Washington D.C. nearly a year earlier—which, looking back, is ironic since she was the one dead set on going.

  Not that I wouldn’t have loved to go…anywhere, especially New York, if I could have gone on my own and just wandered, searching for the places I’d read about in books. But I didn’t like hanging out with big groups of kids at home, so why would I want to hang out with them in New York? And, believe me, two days of lockstep sightseeing once we got there didn’t change my mind about that. Not to mention our tour guide talking us senseless, determined to tell us every single thing she knew.

  The Empire State Building, the U.N., Wall Street, the Statue of Liberty.

  Kathy was thrilled. She “adored” the touristy nightclub with its sad, made-up girls in sequins and feathers; she was enthralled by Chinatown and the tour of NBC Studios; she went nuts over the Rockettes. Over and over again: Kathy being rapturous about whatever there was to be rapturous about, then the perfectly posed snapshot, the mind-numbing search for the perfect postcard for her scrapbook and the perfect souvenir.

  On our last day in the city, we had a few free hours in the morning, and what Kathy wanted to do was have breakfast at Tiffany’s, like in the movie. So we bought a bag of donuts and walked over to Fifth Avenue so she could eat one, gazing at the diamonds in the window, standing exactly where Audrey Hepburn had stood.

  When we got there, she handed me her camera. She posed. I framed her in the lens, clicked: Kathy in her pleated skirt and matching sweater, the circle pin with the pearl on it that I’d gotten her for her birthday at the collar, her brown hair in a perfect flip. She’s holding up a donut in one hand, her other hand is gesturing toward the window of sparkling jewelry behind her. She’s smiling.

  In the picture she took of me next, I’m not. I was tired of eating crappy food, tired of sleeping in a roll-away bed in our crappy hotel, tired of being talked to death by tour guides, tired of my moronic classmates and of Kathy herself—and dreading three more days of it in Washington D.C. The Fugitive was on TV that night, and I’d have been perfectly happy to stay in and watch it. But Kathy wanted to go to Greenwich Village with some friends—a place I’d read about and would have been high on my list if I could have gone alone. But I didn’t want to go with Kathy because I figured there was no way she was ready for it.

  Sure enough, she was grossed out from the second we stepped off the subway. First by the smell of urine in the station, then the trash skittering along the street, the bums passed out in shadowy doorways. There were galleries with paintings of naked women in the windows.

  The others agreed: We should leave, go back to our hotel, stay safe. But I felt a weird electric buzz from the moment I stepped off the subway and came up into the street. The white, shining arch at the foot of Washington Square, coffeehouses swirling with smoke, strains of folk music pouring into the night. People talking, arguing as they hurried past—beatniks, some of them! Guys with pointy beards, pale girls with long, straight hair—wearing jeans and black sweaters, battered green Army jackets buttoned up against the chilly October evening. Plus, I’d read The Catcher in the Rye not all that long before and I was getting a kick out of thinking about Holden Caulfield taking the cab down here to Ernie’s Jazz Club after dancing with the tacky girls in the Lavender Room.

  “I don’t want to go back yet,” I said to Kathy. “But go ahead, if you want to.”

  “Without you?”

  “Sure. Don’t worry, I’ll be back by curfew.”

  She folded her arms across her chest and glared at me.

  “What?” I said.

  “You’re going to leave me alone?”

  “I’m not leaving you alone,” I said. “For Pete’s sake, what’s the big deal? If you want to go back to the hotel, just get on the subway and go with everyone else.”

  “Paul,” she said.

  “I’m staying, okay? You can stay with me if you want, or you can go.”

  She didn’t answer.

  Then I did something I’d never done before. I turned and walked away from her.

  If she’d come after me, I probably would have done the decent thing and taken her back to the hotel. But she didn’t come after me and, the truth was, once I reached the end of block and turned the corner without having felt the touch of her hand on my shoulder or heard her voice call out to me, I didn’t think about her the rest of the evening.

  I walked the streets of the Village, my shoulders hunched, feeling like the Indiana rube I was. I had on khakis and the maroon cardigan sweater with gray stripes up the front that my mom bought me for the trip. A white tab-collar shirt. My navy blue London Fog jacket. I had the regulation team crew cut. Nobody seemed to notice me, though, and after a while I straightened up and walked more like I belonged there. I walked down MacDougal Street, over on Bleecker, back up toward Washington Square, where bums shared benches with kids my own age who were smoking, laughing, making out.

  I could liv
e here, I thought—which shocked the shit out of me. Emboldened, I walked into a tavern, sat down on a barstool.

  “Pabst on draft,” I said. What my dad always ordered.

  The drinking age was eighteen in New York, and I guess I looked close enough because the bartender drew the beer and set a foaming mug before me.

  It was good. Ice cold, prickly in my throat.

  I liked breaking the rule. I liked thinking there were other rules I could break, too. I was alone in New York City. I knew nobody. Nobody knew me. There was nothing to stop me from doing anything I wanted to do. But I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t going to risk doing something really stupid. So I had one more beer, and with a nice little buzz on I stepped out into the city again, satisfied to wander.

  I found a battered copy of On the Road in a secondhand bookshop that night. There was a dark-haired guy on the cover, his hands in the pockets of his khaki pants, staring out at whoever might pick up the book, with this look on his face like, I dare you to buy it. There were images surrounding him, like a dream—people drinking, dancing, kissing, fighting. A car, a cactus, the shadow of a guy playing a sax.

  The bottom of the cover said: “This is the bible of the ‘beat generation.’”

  I bought the book, stuck it my jacket pocket, and headed toward the subway station. I started reading it on the train, stayed up half the night in the hotel lobby reading. I read during breakfast and on the train to Washington, D.C., only half aware that Kathy was punishing me for the night before by sitting with her girlfriends. When I finished it, I went back to the beginning and read it straight through again.

  It was so wild and beautiful. Weirdly familiar, too. Like Sal in the book, I saw things. I was moved by them. I remembered, for example, standing on the front porch of our house one summer night when some petroleum tanks at Standard Oil caught fire. I was maybe eight. The fire was miles away, in Whiting, but we could see smoke billowing and orange flames shooting into the sky. Neighbors were slack-jawed on their porches. Some crying. My own parents murmuring anxiously about how many people might be hurt or lose their jobs or even die.

  I was dazzled by the fire, my heart beating so hard I thought it would burst right out of my chest. Looking, looking—as if I were somehow responsible for capturing the spectacle of it forever.

  I wanted like Sal wanted, too—I didn’t even know what I wanted. I just wanted. Maybe everything. It was like an ache sometimes, that wanting. I never mentioned it. There wasn’t a single person in my life who’d have understood, even if I had been able to explain it—and I doubted I could. But lost in the pages of On the Road, I felt like…myself. Like the book knew who I was, knew what I wanted, and was speaking back to me somehow.

  I took it with me wherever I went. I read while I was supposed to be appreciative of our American government in action, the Smithsonian, the Lincoln Memorial. I finished it, then read it again. And again. All the way back to Indiana, glancing up sometimes to see whole chunks of Pennsylvania and Ohio glide by outside the window, roads running along the track, winding out toward the horizon, and thinking how cool it would be to set out to explore America the way Sal Paradise did in that book. Put out my thumb out and see where life might take me.

  During this time, Kathy went from ignoring me to haranguing me to crying. She sent her girlfriends as envoys to walk past and give me the evil eye. She consulted with my friends, a few of whom came over and sat beside me for a while and asked stupid questions, like, “Hey, man, what are you reading?”

  As opposed to what they were actually thinking: “Hey, man, how come you suddenly stopped being so pussy-whipped?”

  Kathy and I had one conversation about On the Road. We were standing at my locker the first morning back at school, and she saw me take it from the pocket of my letter jacket and tuck it between my physics and English books.

  She said, “You know, Paul, that book is banned.”

  I said, “So what? It’s a great book. Maybe you ought to read it and decide for yourself.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t need to read it,” she said. “It’s on that list of books Father McNally said we’re not supposed to read, and that’s good enough for me.”

  She barely spoke to me the rest of the day.

  Mom had caught a bad cold while we were gone, and now she was in bed with an ear infection that made her so dizzy she couldn’t walk. So I used the fact that I was helping out at home as an excuse not to see Kathy in the evenings—not that she seemed to want to see me all that much. She went to a slumber party Friday night. We went to a movie Saturday night and got into a stupid argument about it at the Big Wheel afterward.

  “Just take me home,” she said, when we got in the car to leave.

  So I did.

  I was this close to breaking up with her. I knew what Kathy wanted, ultimately: marriage, kids, a nice house—and the sooner the better. But I’d felt the whole world crack open in New York. I felt changed. I wanted to keep changing and see who I might turn out to be, which was not going to happen as long as I was Kathy’s boyfriend. I think I would have broken up with her if it had turned out that my mom was okay. But Sunday, she woke up with a terrible headache, so bad she didn’t go to mass. Any kind of light hurt her eyes, so she stayed in bed all day, the room as dark as we could make it. First thing Monday, Dad called the doctor, who changed the medicine she’d been on.

  It didn’t help much. She was still dizzy. The headache didn’t go away. Over the next few days she’d smile when Bobby and I came into the bedroom after school to sit with her or to see if there was anything she needed, but I could tell it hurt to move her face. She let out a quiet little sound sometimes, like a baby whimpering in its sleep. Dad called the doctor again, when her headache got so bad she was crying.

  “Bring her to the emergency room,” the doctor said; he’d take a look at her. Mom tried to reassure Bobby and me that she’d be all right, but she looked scared—and we had to help her to the car, because by then she could barely walk. Dad called an hour later to say they’d given her something for the pain and she was resting comfortably, but they’d decided to observe her overnight and do some testing in the morning. He’d stay there with her.

  Kathy was waiting by my locker when I got to school the next morning. Her mom had a friend who was a nurse and who’d called to tell her that my mom had been admitted to the hospital.

  “Is she going to be okay, Paul?” she asked.

  “They’re running tests today,” I said. “That’s all I know.”

  She put her arms around me, drew me close. “She’ll be okay, she will. I’m sorry I’ve been so awful lately,” she whispered. “I love you. I love you so much.”

  And we moved on into the day as if nothing had happened between us. She came to the hospital with me and Bobby after school, she was there when Dad returned from his conference with the doctors and said, “Your mom has a brain tumor,” in a voice I’d never have recognized if he hadn’t been standing right there in front of me.

  What can I say? Kathy was as stand-up as anyone could have been in the months my mom was sick. In the spring, after Mom died, she fixed dinner at our house every single night for me and Dad and Bobby. She wasn’t a great cook, but she tried—and she cleaned up after us like Mom never did. We’d leave the breakfast dishes in the sink, and she’d do them before starting to make the evening meal.

  I should have seen that she was practicing being my wife, that the fantasy wedding she’d been talking about ever since we’d started going steady in the eighth grade had become reality when we graduated and I took the job at the steel mill instead of going right to college like my mom had wanted me to do. I didn’t, though. I was on the road, all right—to Kathy’s idea of happily ever after. I barreled on a while, her apparently willing bridegroom, and there’s no doubt in my mind that if I hadn’t met Duke Walczek I’d be on it still.

  TWO

  Duke and I started at the mill the same night in June and, early on, we figured out we’d play
ed both football and baseball against each other in high school. That got us talking and we never stopped. He was Polish—stocky and blond, with big hammy hands and legs like tree-trunks—and okay, he was pretty wild. When he wasn’t out with one of his numerous girlfriends, he was hanging around the blues clubs in East Chicago and Gary. He was also the only guy I’d ever met who read as much as I did. Or was as big a baseball nut—we argued constantly about that, him being a Yankees fan and me for the White Sox.

  Kathy met him one time, in July, when we ran into him at the Big Wheel with one of his girlfriends—and instantly took against him, even though he couldn’t have been more polite. But I’d made the mistake of telling her about some of our conversations and she’d already concluded he was a bad influence on me. By which she meant he encouraged me to talk about ideas and try to puzzle out the way things are and not to settle for the boring kind of life most people had.

  “Would people say Cassius Clay is full of himself if he were white, if he hadn’t announced he was changing his slave name to Muhammad Ali the day after he trounced Sonny Liston?” Duke would ask, out of the blue. Or, “What if that Tonkin Incident was just trumped-up bullshit, an excuse to bomb the hell out of Vietnam?” And he was obsessed with the Kennedy assassination, convinced that Lee Harvey Oswald hadn’t killed the President alone.

  “Where were you when you found out?” he asked me one night.

  “At the hospital,” I said. “With my dad and brother. It was the day after my mom got diagnosed with a brain tumor. Talk about surreal. Sitting in the waiting room, watching it over and over on TV while she was in surgery. She died,” I added. “In the spring.”

  “Jeez. That’s awful,” Duke said.

  I nodded, grateful that he didn’t press me to say more.

  Every night we took our dinners out to the yard and ate them sitting on rusted oil drums underneath the stars, as far away as we could get from the college boys just there for the summer. “The Eddies” Duke called them, after Eddie Haskell, Beaver Cleaver’s brother’s ass-kiss friend.