Looking for Jack Kerouac Read online

  In the first inning, Brock singled with one out—and went to third when Groat singled to right. Mantle didn’t even make a throw.

  “Yes, yes,” Jack said.

  He got up and did a little dance when Mike Shannon came up in the sixth, with two guys on base, and hit the ball so hard it bounced off the “B” in the Budweiser sign.

  Not long after, Al Downing replaced Whitey Ford on the mound. “Man, oh, man,” Jack crowed, when Ford loped painfully off the field. “What do you want to bet we just saw Whitey’s last pitch?”

  “Ever?” Chuck asked.

  “Ever!” Jack raised his glass.

  When it was over and the Cards had won, he passed the bottle of Johnny Walker to Chuck, who took a swig and passed it to me. The whiskey burned going down, and my eyes watered.

  Mamère brought more sandwiches. We drank a few more beers. After a while, I got up the nerve to say I really liked On the Road, and Jack ducked his head a little, like a kid will do if you embarrass him. Then he invited me to come and see the bookcase in his room where he kept the translations of On the Road and his other books. French, Spanish, German, Italian. Some languages I didn’t even recognize.

  His room was small, neat as a pin. The bookcase, a narrow bed, a dresser, a desk under the window. A bedside table with a radio on it, playing a jazz station, and another one with a small record player on it, a stack of LPs on the shelf beneath.

  There was a diagram of a baseball field on one wall, marked with differently shaded circles, which Jack explained stood for different kinds of hits in his fantasy baseball game. Still in a magnanimous mood from the Cards’ win, he opened a battered wood box and showed me the hand-drawn index cards, maybe two hundred of them.

  On each there was a complicated grid with fielding options and a coded set of possibilities for every aspect of play. You could play it on the board, tossing an eraser at the chart to establish the hit, or you could play with the cards alone. Bigger cards, one for each team in the league, showed a diagram of the field with the first-string players’ names at their positions and the other players listed in corner boxes.

  “Every team: forty games a season,” he said. “Since—what? 1929?”

  He showed me the notebooks where he kept the statistics of each game, along with comments on the play. Other notebooks tracked the business end of the league: salaries, injuries, trades, disputes. He told me about the players, their personal lives and histories in the league, and it was as if he was talking about real people. El Negro, Wino Love, Zagg Parker.

  He and Chuck offered to play an inning to show me how the game worked.

  Jack motioned me to sit down on his desk chair to watch. I was so close to his typewriter that I could have reached out and touched the keys—the very typewriter he’d used to write On the Road, for all I knew. I thought of Duke, wondered where he was by now and what he’d think if he could see me here in Jack’s bedroom. Barely two days had passed since he left, though it seemed like longer. I didn’t think he’d have gotten to San Francisco yet, and I wondered if he’d stopped off to watch the game in a bar someplace, or whether he was still on the bus, listening to it on his transistor radio. Wherever he was, though, I knew he’d be royally pissed off about the Yankees losing.

  “Figures he’d be a Yankee fan,” Chuck said, when I mentioned this later. “But I bet he’d be even more pissed that a guy like me knows Jack Kerouac.”

  “No doubt,” I said.

  He laughed. “Guys like that take all the air out of a room, you know?”

  “I didn’t realize how much energy it took just to be with Duke till he was gone,” I said. “Kind of like how the noise in the mill always seemed the worst when I walked out in the morning and it was suddenly so quiet. I’ve got to say, I don’t miss him.”

  “I hear you,” Chuck said. “Still, it’s too bad when a friendship doesn’t work out. You have some good times, you think you’re on the same track, then—”

  He shrugged. “You change, they change, or something happens and you realize you didn’t really know who they were.”

  “I never really had a lot of friends,” I said. “Partly because I was always with Kathy, but mainly because my brother and I are so close in age we always hung out together. We didn’t really need anybody else.”

  “You miss him?”

  “Yeah. I feel bad for ditching out on him, too, for not being able to go to his games. He’s good—quarterback. If he plays as well as he did last year, he’s likely to get a scholarship. Small school, probably. Still.”

  I didn’t wait for Chuck to ask me about Bobby, but launched into this story about playing baseball in Joey Bucko’s back yard when we were kids and how Joey’s crabby next-door neighbor, Mrs. Bober, would keep any ball that crossed into her yard

  “Then one evening around suppertime, a car lost control, veered off the superhighway that ran behind our subdivision, and crashed through the fence, right into the back of Mrs. Bober’s house,” I said. “It was wild! Within two minutes, practically everyone in the neighborhood was standing in the Buckos’ yard.

  “The Bobers were all outside; Mrs. Bober, wailing. A cheer went up, not the Bobers, when the car door opened and the driver staggered out and raised his hands to show he was okay. Then there were sirens—an ambulance got there, a fire truck, the police.

  “Meanwhile, my brother is cracking us all up, even some of the parents, giving a play-by-play of what was going on, like a sports announcer. So. The fire truck leaves, the ambulance leaves, the policeman heads back to the squad car—at which point, Bobby yells, ‘Hey, Mrs. Bober! Since that car landed in your yard, do you get to keep it?’

  “Man, it was dead quiet. Then everybody started cracking up—except my dad. He grabbed Bobby by the arm, marched him out of the Buckos’ yard and over to the Bobers’ and made him apologize. Then marched him toward home, hollering for me to follow.

  “He grounded Bobby from baseball for the rest of the week. I had to stay in the rest of that evening, for laughing at his rude behavior. Which was totally unfair, because later, when they thought we were asleep, I heard them laughing.

  “Dad kept saying it. ‘Hey, Mrs. Bober! Since that car landed in your yard, do you get to keep it?’ And every time, they’d crack up again. That kind of laughing that hurts your stomach, but you can’t stop even if you try.”

  Chuck smiled. “I like your brother already,” he says. “You’re lucky to have a family like that, you know?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

  I changed the subject to Jack’s baseball game, asking about some of the more intricate rules. We moved from there to Chuck telling me about how cool it was to be in St. Pete when the Cards were in town for spring training, how Ginny’s Uncle Bud had taken Lou Burdette and some of his friends deep-sea fishing last year and Burdette sent him a huge team picture that each player signed—which, in spite of his wife’s protests, he’d framed and hung in the living room.

  Jack was cranky and agitated when we got to his house to watch game two the next day. His mood darkened with a Yankee win and still hadn’t lifted when we came back Saturday for game three. It was tight, both Bouton and Simmons pitching hard. The Yankees scored in the second inning, the Cards evened it up in the fifth and it stayed that way through the eighth. All the while, Jack kept drinking, smoked even more than usual, swore at the television—and squabbled with Mamére when he finished the Johnny Walker, demanding that she bring him his bottle of Thunderbird.

  Mantle was one home run away from beating Babe Ruth’s World Series record, and when he hammered a pitch from Shultz, Jack left the room without a word, taking the bottle of wine with him. He didn’t come back.

  “He’s a hard guy to be friends with sometimes,” Chuck said, driving back to the Y. “Trouble is, you never know which Jack you’re going to get. Not to mention, whatever Jack he is at any given moment is likely to do a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde on you. The thing I really can’t stand, though, is when he starts in on
the bleeding heart of Jesus and the crown of thorns. That’s just too damn weird for me. Or when he gets on one of his tirades about Jewish people or coloreds. You know how ugly that one is.”

  “But he wasn’t always like that, was he? On the Road isn’t like that.”

  “No,” Chuck said. “But it’s what he grew up hearing at home—and the truth is, he never really left. He hung out in New York, but most of the time he was living with Mamère. He’d take off for California or Morocco or Mexico, which she paid for—working in a factory, for Christ’s sake. Listen to her sometime; she’s worse than he is. And together—”

  Chuck shook his head. “It’s pathetic. I know you really love that book,” he added. “But I’ve got to admit, I don’t like it that much myself. I mean, what’s the point? Bouncing from one place to another, drunk all the time—or high.”

  “Yeah. There’s some truth to that, I said. “I just didn’t see it before—”

  “Before you actually met him,” Chuck finished. “Remember that part in The Catcher in the Rye, when Holden says that thing about how, when you get knocked out by a book, you wish the author was a friend you could call up on the phone?”

  I nodded.

  “Be careful what you ask for, huh?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “On the other hand, I guess it’s good to know what’s real.”

  “Like you have the option to go back and not know it now,” Chuck said. “In any case, I think we could both use a break from the real Jack Kerouac, at least for a little while. I’m glad we’re going to Pass-a-Grille to watch the game tomorrow.”

  NINETEEN

  Ginny’s whole family was at The Palms when we got there: uncles, aunts, cousins, cousins’ kids—and her grandparents, who sat on arm chairs brought out from the lobby, shaded by one of the yellow and white striped umbrellas, drinking Bloody Marys. The console television from the lobby had been brought out, too, and set in a corner of the pool deck so you could see it from any angle. Ginny introduced me to everyone, including her Uncle Jimmy, who owned the Crab Shack. An ex-Navy guy, his blond hair was cut in a military buzz, his khaki pants had sharp creases, and his Hawaiian shirt looked like it had just been pressed. He was freckled, like Ginny, but stocky and strong.

  He cocked his head and looked at me. “Play?” he asked, when we shook hands.

  “Center.”

  “Any good?”

  “Not bad. My brother’s better, though.”

  Jimmy had played football in high school, too, and we talked about the game a little bit.

  “You miss it?” he asked.

  “Yeah. I’d probably miss it more if I were at home, though. It doesn’t feel like fall here, so I don’t think about it much. Palm trees just don’t bring football to mind, you know?”

  Jimmy laughed. “Ginny told me you might be sticking around St. Pete a while,” he said. “I need a dishwasher. Morning shift. Early. You want a job, come see me.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I said. “I might just do that.”

  “Jimmy.” He nodded toward Ginny’s grandparents. “‘Sir’ would be my father.”

  When I’d gotten through all the introductions, Chuck brought me a beer. “So when do you start the job?”

  “I don’t have a job,” I said.

  Chuck grinned. “That’s you what you think.”

  We helped Ginny haul a bunch of stuff down to the beach, where she planned to take the little kids when the game started.

  “Not a baseball fan?” I asked.

  “I hate watching any kind of game.”

  “Do you even know who’s playing?” Chuck asked.

  She shot him a withering glance.

  “Okay, who?”

  “The Yankees and the Cardinals,” she said. “And I’m for the Cardinals, though I’m pretty sure my life won’t be wrecked if it doesn’t work out that way. Honest to God, it amazes me how you people get so rabid about baseball. Even if I could make myself really, truly care about…any team, why would I want to set myself up for that kind of disappointment?”

  “The ocean will never let you down,” Chuck said.

  “Exactly,” Ginny said. “Give me any two options of where to be and there’s a ninety-nine percent chance the beach is going to be my choice.”

  “Where’s the one percent?” I asked.

  She looked surprised by the question. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never really thought about that.”

  Near game time, everyone loaded up their plates with shrimp and fries and coleslaw that Jimmy had brought over from the Crab Shack. They took their places on an assortment of lounge chairs, lawn chairs, kitchen chairs, and card-table chairs on the pool deck. Some ate in the pool, using the edge like a table. The uncles and cousins who weren’t eating watched the game in the pool, floating on rubber rafts.

  The uncles and most of the cousins were blond and freckled, like Ginny—like the picture of Ginny’s dad I’d seen the last time I visited; even her tiny grandmother had freckles, though they’d faded over time. And while the aunts didn’t look like the Benedict family and didn’t look alike, either, they all had short, lacquered, beauty-shop hair and wore similar pastel slacks outfits, which made them seem interchangeable.

  When Ginny left for the beach with the children at her heels, jockeying for her attention, the conversation turned to how she’d shortened her hours on Shell Key so she could help out at the Crab Shack after her Aunt Mary’s surgery and how Jimmy and Mary could not imagine how they’d have managed without her. How you could always count on Ginny to help out. If you needed something, she was right there.

  “I wish she’d get out more with people her own age, though,” Lo said. “Have some fun.”

  “Hey,” Chuck said. “What am I?”

  “Family,” Lo said. “You know what I mean.”

  “Does that Cartwright boy still come around?” one of the aunts asked. “Good Lord, he’s been smitten with her since they were children.”

  “Jerry. He does. He tries to talk her into going to the dances out at the armory, or to a movie. But—”

  “He’s a good boy,” another of the aunts said. “And he comes from a nice family. You watch. She’ll open her eyes. For goodness sake, the way she is with the little ones, don’t you think she’s going to want kids of her own someday?”

  Lo rolled her eyes. “Ask her, if you don’t mind getting your head bitten off. She’ll tell you the same thing she tells me, ‘I’m not interested in any of that.’”

  The aunts clucked over this for a while, then turned to other family matters, the ebb and flow of their conversation a counterpoint to the hype of the voices calling the game. If they even noticed that things weren’t going so well for the Cards in the first five innings, they didn’t mention it, except to chide one of the uncles, maybe Dale, for swearing too much.

  Spirits lifted when Carl Warwick got a single, followed by another by Flood, and then an error put Groat on first, the bases loaded. Boyer was up. He took the bat from the batboy, swung it a few times—and cracked a grand slam.

  The uncles went wild. Chuck, however, didn’t say a word, just stood and threw himself into the pool, fully dressed. The rest of the uncles followed, creating a tidal wave that set the women scrambling. I went in, too—thinking about how Dad and Bobby would love this extreme display of happiness and how it turned into a huge melée, everyone splashing and dunking everyone else like a bunch of little kids.

  I hadn’t talked to my dad since I called him from Nashville, just sent a postcard letting him know I’d made it to Florida and I was okay. Like a postcard would make him stop worrying. I should call home tonight, I thought. It would be easy. “How about that game?” I’d say when Dad or Bobby answered. We’d talk about Boyer’s grand slam, I’d tell them about the scene at The Palms. But when my mind got to where I’d go from there, it closed down and I got the same panicky feeling I always got when I thought about calling home, knowing that eventually the conversation would turn to when I was co
ming home and I’d have to say I wasn’t—at least not any time soon.

  We got out of the pool, our clothes dripping, the uncles arguing about what the Cards’ strategy in game five should be. Chuck and I went down to the beach to find Ginny, who was helping the kids build an entire sand village, each castle and bridge and tower elaborately decorated with shells they’d collected. One skinny little blond boy, maybe six, kept running back and forth from the town to the ocean to fill his bucket for the ever-draining moat. Clete. This was always his job, Ginny told us. Because he always needed wearing down.

  Chuck picked up a bucket and challenged him to a race, which was so totally unfair that it was funny, and pretty soon all the kids abandoned the sand village and pitched in to help their cousin, circling Chuck and hanging on to his knees, finally knocking him over in the sand. It clung to his skin, to his wet clothes and hair.

  “You look like a sugar cookie,” Ginny said.

  At which point, the kids were on him again, trampling the sand village in their pretend-effort to devour him—except for one little girl who burst into tears.

  “They ruined it,” she wailed, throwing herself into Ginny’s arms. “I hate them. I hate them. Why did they have to ruin it?”

  Ginny let her cry awhile, cradling her, rubbing her back, repeating her name. Annie, Annie, Annie. “Remember what we say,” she said, when the little girl calmed down.

  “But—”

  “Remember?” Ginny said again.

  Annie nodded, hiccoughing.

  “Things go away. We live near the ocean, so we have to get used to that.”

  Annie nodded again.

  “Okay, then.” Ginny let her loose, patted her on the bottom and set her moving. “Go get them now!” Annie burst toward the others and threw herself into the fray.

  Ginny plopped down on one of the wrinkled beach blankets and signaled me to sit down beside her. “I thought about your question,” she said. “The one-percent thing?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I realized that when I said ‘the ocean’ I meant right here: this beach. Or Shell Key. Which made the one-percent question easy: the only other place I’d want to be is…some other beach. Which I guess makes me pretty boring.”