Looking for Jack Kerouac Read online

  I removed the speaker box from the window, put the car in gear and drove slowly down the long lane of cars with their steamed-up windows and out into the street, to our place by the river, where we climbed into the backseat and fell into each other’s arms. At first, it felt urgent, like it used to. Then, when it was time, when I felt like I couldn’t wait one more second, Kathy pulled away.

  “Tell me you love me,” she said.

  “Kath,” I said. “For Christ’s sake, don’t talk. Not now.”

  “Paul. I need you to tell me you love me.”

  “Okay. I love you,” I said. “I love you.”

  And we went on, but it didn’t feel right. We didn’t talk on the way to her house. I didn’t look at her; I was afraid to, because I was pretty sure she was crying. When we got to her house, she opened the door, got out of the car.

  “Kath,” I said.

  But she closed the door, hurried up the sidewalk.

  Maybe if I’d followed her—what? We’d have made up and I’d probably still have been on my best behavior Saturday night, at the football game. Right now I’d be getting home from my shift, getting ready to hit the sack—instead of sitting in Lorelei’s pink cottage, drinking the cup of coffee she’d poured before blowing me a kiss and disappearing down the path to get ready for the first show. Where I felt good about having sex, because Lorelei made me feel good about it.

  “Beautiful boy,” she’d said, running her hand along my body. “Look at you.”

  I hadn’t been embarrassed. I’d felt—alive. Like I was my body and my body had been made to do whatever pleased me—and Lorelei. I’d never thought sex could be like that: just pure physical pleasure.

  Mid-morning, when it was nearly time for the show, I sneaked out and took the path through the woods to the theater, where I picked up the ticket she’d left me at the box office. Watching her perform, her dark hair floating in a cloud around her face, her glittery tail swaying, I half-believed she really was a mermaid, and I wanted to keep it that way. I wanted the night we’d spent together in her pink cottage to remain pure: a single amazing experience, uncluttered with the kind of conflicted feelings I knew would come of trying to make it anything else.

  Afterward, Lorelei came out, her hair still wet, gave me one last kiss, and introduced me to George, one of the salesmen, who she’d talked into giving us a ride into St. Petersburg. Then she waved and disappeared back into the dressing room. I hoisted my stuff into the backseat of the car—then Duke’s. He and Bev were still making out. He finally climbed in beside me, kissing her one last time through the window, promising he’d be back.

  “Oh, man,” he said, as we pulled away. “Was that a wild night, or what?” He grinned, gave me a little punch on the arm. “So what about Lorelei. Did you two sneak over to good old Lou’s and do it in the T-Bird?”

  “Like I’d tell you,” I said.

  If George heard, he didn’t comment. He was a middle aged-sales rep for the company that kept the souvenir shop stocked. “Your mermaid salt and pepper shakes,” he said, when I asked about it. “Your mermaid spoons and plates and coffee cups. Swizzle sticks. Key chains and charm bracelets. Miniature mermaid tails for the little ones. Everybody wants to take a memory home from Mermaid Springs, or a little something for the folks they left behind.

  “In fact, ‘Weeki Wachee’ is Seminole for ‘small gift,’” he went on. “I’ll bet you boys didn’t know that.”

  “No, sir,” I said. “I didn’t.” And got him talking about the Seminoles to avoid any trouble about Duke and whatever gifts he’d gotten from Bev the night before.

  “The Unconquered,” Duke said later, walking up the stairs to our room at the Y.M.C.A. “The Seminoles. That’s what they call themselves, because you know what? We never did actually conquer them. Plus, when Florida was still part of Spain, slaves used to escape down here and the Seminoles would protect them. Suppose old George knows about that?”

  “Beats me,” I said. “But thanks for not bringing it up.”

  “No point,” Duke said. “Too many cowboy and Indian movies, you know? Nobody gives a damn about the way it really was.”

  The trip into St. Petersburg had taken only an hour or so—me listening to George go on and on about the Seminoles, as boring as a history teacher, and Duke writing in his notebook. Now, settling into our room at the Y, he started in on Bev again.

  “Eleven on the Duke-O-Meter,” he said. “And it only goes to ten. Seriously, man. Those girls in Nashville? Bev was like at least three of them all at once. I kid you not.”

  I ignored him—took my stuff out of my duffel and crammed it into two drawers of the rickety dresser, not daring a glimpse at the snapshot of Mom that I’d brought. The room was gross: two iron beds with lumpy mattresses, a battered wicker table between them with a coconut lamp on it and a Gideon Bible on the shelf beneath. There was a scummy sink in one corner, two threadbare towels on a towel rack. No closet, just hooks on the walls for our jackets and whatever other clothes wouldn’t fit into the drawers. No rug, just a plain wood floor, with leftover streaks from once being painted white. No chairs.

  “So, Paulie.” Duke wiggled his eyebrows. “Lorelei?”

  “I don’t talk about what happens between me and girls.”

  He snorted. “Right. All two of them?”

  Which, I couldn’t help it, made me laugh.

  “Come on,” Duke said. “‘What are you thinking, Pops?’”

  “I am thinking that Lorelei was amazing. End of story.”

  “Okay, okay. Good enough.” He nodded toward the window, through which we could see a tiny slice of ocean. “Surf’s up, man. Let’s book.”

  TWELVE

  It was a hot, muggy day, with just a hint of a breeze coming in from the water. There weren’t many people on the streets, mostly tourists, like us, and some old people in straw hats, doddering along. Duke and I kept up a good pace, passing them at a clip. It wasn’t much of a downtown—a dime store, a department store, a couple of hotels, some restaurants and diners, some clothing stores. But it was clean, with low buildings painted in pastel colors, the sidewalks shaded by awnings and lined with palm trees. Every block or so, you approached what looked like just another building entrance, but when you got to it you’d see that it opened into a long, cool tunnel of shops, a glare of sun at the far end of the stucco passageway. We passed an open-air post office, where people were buying stamps and mailing letters beneath a long arcade.

  I thought I was walking toward my first Florida beach—girls in bikinis lounging under striped umbrellas, guys playing volleyball or badminton, kids building sandcastles. But when we got to the water’s edge, there was just a long pier with a raggedy strip of sand on either side of it. There were a few sunbathers stretched out on towels, a couple of small speedboats pulled up onto the sand. And more old people, sitting on the benches under the shade trees that dotted the grassy area between the sand and the street.

  “What’s with the geezers?” Duke said. “Man. We need a Plan B here.”

  “Right.” I say. “After we eat.”

  We headed toward Jimmy’s Crab Shack at the end of the pier, which was packed with more old people—mostly leathery men wearing battered fishing hats. Regulars. You could tell by the way they joked with the waitress and she joked back at them.

  We slid into a booth. “We just got into town,” Duke said, when she brought us menus. “Hitchhiked from Indiana and headed straight for the beach—or so we thought.” He grinned and gestured toward the end of the pier. “What’s with the sand box out there? Where’s the real beach, man?”

  She didn’t roll her eyes, but she might as well have. “This is Tampa Bay,” she said. “The beaches are on a barrier island. St. Pete, Indian Rocks, Madeira, Treasure Island. You can get a bus out there every half hour or so.”

  “What’s the best one?” Duke asked. “Where do you go?”

  She ignored the question, set the menus in front of us. “Be right back to take you
r order,” she said and went to pick up two plates the cook had just set out.

  “Cute chick,” Duke said, just loud enough for her to hear. He didn’t mean it. I’d seen the girls he went out with, and she was completely not his type.

  She was skinny and suntanned, freckles everywhere, with blue eyes the color of the ocean outside the window and short white-blond hair cut in little spikes that framed her face. I got a kick out of watching her zoom up and down the counter, setting down plates of food, refilling coffee cups, scooping ice cream, cutting pieces of pie—all the while shooting the breeze with the old fishermen. She called them by name and knew exactly what each one wanted. Coca-Cola, full up to the brim, no ice. Fish and chips, a shrimp cocktail, oysters on the half shell. A double order of fried clams for one guy—along with the promise not to mention it next time he came in with his wife.

  “How’s that gall bladder?” she asked.

  “How was the trip up north for your daughter’s wedding?”

  “Catch anything worth keeping this morning?”

  The old guys chatted away, basking in her attention.

  “Where you from?” Duke asked, when she took our orders.

  “Here.”

  “You grew up here?”

  She nodded, turned to ask the man in the next booth about his grandson’s new puppy.

  Duke wouldn’t give it up. He introduced himself, then me, when she brought our food. “Hey, you ever heard of Jack Kerouac?” he asked.

  She did roll her eyes that time.

  “What?” Duke asked.

  She just shook her head.

  “He’s this great writer,” Duke said. “He lives here. In St. Petersburg.”

  “I’m aware of that,” she said.

  “Well, we’re looking for him.” Duke nodded toward me. “Paulie and me are. That’s why we hitched down here: to find him. On the road, man—like in the book, you know? Like I said, we just got here this morning.”

  “And—?”

  Before he could reply, a guy a couple of seats down called, “Hon, could you bring me a little extra mayo?” She slapped our check onto the counter and headed in his direction.

  “Jeez,” Duke said. “What’s her problem?”

  “Maybe she just doesn’t like you,” I said. “Though that’s hard to imagine.”

  “Ha,” he muttered. “Like she’s some prom queen who can afford to turn guys away.”

  A guy at the counter turned and looked at us.

  “Duke,” I said, in a low voice. “Buddy. Would you please just shut up and eat before one of these guys has a goddamn heart attack? And, while we’re at it, remember why we’re here? How about if you forget about girls for two minutes and we make a plan.”

  “I say we ask the waitress about Jack,” he said. “He might come in here all the time, for all we know.”

  “He might. But in case you didn’t notice, you totally pissed her off. If she does know anything about him, what do you think the odds are that she’s going to tell us?”

  He looked wounded, then put the smile back on his face and glanced toward the waitress, who was obviously ignoring us.

  “Don’t even think about asking her,” I said.

  “Okay, all right,” he said. “I won’t.”

  “Excellent. Now, eat—so we can get the hell out of here.”

  Back out on the pier, Duke said we needed to go back to the dime store we’d passed so he could buy a supply of Big Chief writing pads and some new pens. Those in hand, he said what we needed next was cigars. To celebrate our arrival in St. Petersburg, to aid us in considering how best to proceed. Kerouac himself had smoked cigars on special occasions, Duke reminded me, and smoking one now would be our small tribute to him. So we stopped at a grungy, hole-in-the wall tobacco shop, where the ancient proprietor with slicked-back gray hair brought out two allegedly genuine Cuban cigars from a secret place behind the green curtain that separated the front of the shop from the back.

  “Fidel Castro, he smoke this kind cigar,” he said, in heavily accented English, which, of course, sold Duke on the deal. The cigars were five bucks each, but I shelled it out. I still had more than a hundred dollars in my wallet. What did I care?

  We walked over to the park, sat on a bench, and lit up. I smoked maybe a quarter of mine before I started feeling light-headed and a little woozy. I dropped it on the ground, stubbed it out with my shoe, then closed my eyes and let the little bit of breeze there was wash over my face until the world stopped spinning.

  “Wuss,” Duke said. Though he looked a little green at the gills himself, and stubbed his own cigar out not long afterward.

  We sat slumped on the bench awhile, taking in the sunshine. Then Duke sat up. He tapped the notebook in his shirt pocket, tapped his head.

  “It’s all there, ready to be made into the Great American Novel,” he said. The main character, Duke himself, was going to be named Jack Bliss, he said—Jack, of course. I was in it, too. Rocco Minetti.

  “Rocco Minetti?” I said. “That’s idiotic. Jesus. Don’t name me that.”

  “Rocco Minetti,” Duke repeated, firmly. “My book. My characters. You’ll like it just fine when you get famous because of it. Like Kerouac’s buddies did.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said.

  “You think that won’t happen? Hey! Put your money on it, man. It’s been ‘mutely and beautifully and purely decided.’ What I’m going to write in those Big Chiefs, starting today, will make Jack Kerouac look like old news.”

  “If you think that, how come you’re so hot to find him?” I asked.

  “To pay homage, man,” he said, indignantly. “To stand before him and, you know, get his blessing to carry the torch.”

  He took out his notebook, waved his free arm to take in the whole park. “And now the true search begins. Look at all these down-and-outs lounging around here, Paulie. Are they not exactly the kind of guys likely to hang out in bars where Jack might go?” He stood up. “Let’s see what we can find.”

  “You go,” I said, still aggravated about the stupid name he’d given me. “I’ll just stay here and pretend I’m an old coot enjoying the weather.”

  I watched him saunter over to a guy sitting under a nearby tree. “Hey, man,” he said. “I’m wondering. Have you ever heard of Jack Kerouac?”

  The guy barely opened his eyes, took one look at Duke, and closed them again.

  “Jack Kerouac,” Duke repeated. “He’s a writer. You ever heard of him?”

  Most guys ignored him, a few swore at him.

  “I’m a reporter,” I heard him say to one. “Yep. Doing a story about the writer, Jack Kerouac. Can you help me?”

  He looked surprised when the guy got up and walked away.

  You dumb shit, I thought.

  He was convinced that if we just kept asking, we’d eventually find someone who’d lead us right to Jack Kerouac’s door. We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around, Duke in reporter mode—though it started seeming to me that he was more interested in seeing how many different kinds of people he could ask about Jack.

  An old guy at a bus stop, for example:

  “Sir?”

  “What? Speak up, young man. I can’t hear you.”

  “Sir?” Duke yelled. “Do you know Jack Kerouac?”

  “Jack who?”

  “Jack Kerouac. The writer. He lives here, in St. Petersburg. Me and my buddy here, we’re looking for him.”

  “Writer. No, I don’t know any writers. G.D. Reds, most of them.”

  Lady in a grocery store:

  “Jack Kerouac? No, I don’t believe I’ve ever met him.”

  “Have you ever heard of On the Road? He wrote it.”

  “Honey, I got six kids. I never go anywhere. Even if I had time to read, why would I read a travel book? It would only make me feel bad.”

  Back at the Y, Duke took out one of the new Big Chiefs and made a big ceremony of opening it, clicking his new ball point pen a couple of times—like checking f
or bullets in a gun.

  “Here goes, Paulie,” he said. “Some day you can say you were there when Duke Walczek began Beat Highway.”

  “Gee,” I said. “I can hardly wait. Meanwhile, I’ll go see if I can find a map of St. Petersburg.”

  There was a different guy in the office, and when I asked where I could find a map of the city he handed me one from the stack on his desk.

  “Compliments of your Y.M.C.A.” he said. He glanced down at the register. “You must be one of the new guys. Room 18? Paul Carpetti, right?”

  “Yeah. I am.”

  “I figured you were Paul,” he said. “You don’t look like a Duke.”

  I laughed. “You’re right about that.”

  His name was Chuck Reilly. He was a student at Gulf Coast College, he told me—thus, the open textbook on the desk. He had a room here, too, and when his night shift ended he’d go up and sleep a few hours. Then head for class—and the second job he had there, in the library.

  I told him about working third shift at the mill all summer, and we commiserated about how weird it was being awake in the middle of the night, how your whole life got out of whack and you got to where you didn’t even know what time it was—or what day it was, for that matter—and didn’t even care.

  “I keep telling myself it’s worth it,” Chuck said. “I’m halfway through. Journalism. After I get my degree I’m going to spend my whole life watching sports and writing about them. I figure that’s worth killing myself over now.”

  I envied him. It would be nice to know exactly what you wanted to do. To feel like every step you took was a step forward—even though taking it might make you so tired you felt like you were going to die.

  “What about you?” Chuck asked. “What brings you to Florida?”

  I shrugged. “Not working third shift anymore. Not having a girlfriend anymore.”