I stopped knocking. My mouth fell open and the snot froze in my nostrils. “Jack Kerouac,” I said.
He let a grin slide down one side of his mouth and back up the other. “Nobody else,” he said.
The wind shot down my collar, I caught a glimpse of colored lights blinking on and off in the room behind him, and suddenly it was all gushing out of me like something I’d been chewing over and digesting all my life: “I hitched all the way from Oxnard and my name’s Wallace Pinto but you can call me Buzz and I just wanted to say, I just wanted to tell you—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” he said, waving a hand in dismissal, and he seemed unsteady on his muscatel-impaired feet, the smoke curling up to snatch at his cracked blue squinting eyes, the words slow on his lips, heavy, weighted and freighted with the deep everlasting bardic wisdom of the road, the cathouse and the seaman’s bar, “but I tell you, kid, you keep drumming on the door like that you’re going to end up in the hospital”—a pause—“or maybe a jazz combo.” I just stood there in a kind of trance until I felt his hand — his Dharma Bum Subterranean On the Road Bop-master’s gone Mexican-chick-digging hand — take hold of my shoulder and tug me forward, over the threshold and into the house. “You ever been introduced to a true and veritable set of tight-skinned bongos?” he asked, throwing an arm over my shoulder as the door slammed behind us.
Two hours later we were sitting there in the front room by this totally gone Christmas tree bedecked with cherubim and little Christs and the like, indulging in a poor boy and a joint or two of Miss Green, my Charlie Parker record whizzing and popping on the record player and a whole big pile of red and green construction-paper strips growing at our feet. We were making a chain to drape over the Beatest tree you ever saw and the music was a cool breeze fluttering full of Yardbird breath and the smell of ambrosia and manna crept in from the kitchen where Mémère, the Beat Madonna herself, was cooking up some first-rate mouthwatering Canuck-style two-days-before-Christmas chow. I hadn’t eaten since New Jersey, the morning before, and that was only some pretty piss-poor diner hash fries and a runny solitary egg, and I was cutting up little strips of colored paper and pasting them in little circles as Jack’s chain grew and my head spun from the wine and the weed.
That big old lady in the Christmas dress just kind of vanished and the food appeared, and we ate, Jack and I, side by side, left our Beat plates on the sofa, threw our chain on the tree and were just pawing through the coats in the front hallway for another poor boy of sweet Tokay wine when there was a knock at the door. This knock wasn’t like my knock. Not at all. This was a delicate knock, understated and minimalistic, but with a whole deep continent of passion and expectation implicit in it — in short, a feminine knock. “Well,” Jack said, his face lit with the Beatest joy at discovering the slim vessel of a pint bottle in the inside pocket of his seaman’s pea coat, “aren’t you going to answer it?”
“Me?” I said, grinning my Beatest grin. I was in, I was part of it all, I was Jack’s confidant and compatriot, and we were in the front hallway of his pad in Northport, Long Island, a fine hot steaming mother-of-Jack-prepared meal in our gone Beat guts, and he was asking me to answer the door, me, seventeen years old and nobody. “You mean it?” and my grin widened till I could feel the creeping seeping East Coast chill all the way back to my suburban-dentist-filled molars.
Jack, uncapping, tipping back, passing the bottle: “That’s a chick knock, Buzz.”
Me: “I love chicks.”
Jack: “A gone lovely spring flower of a beret-wearing flipped long-legged coltish retroussé-nosed run-away-from-home-to-big-Jack-Kerouac chick knock.”
Me: “I am crazy for gone lovely spring flower beret-wearing flipped long-legged coltish retroussé-nosed run-away-from-home-to-big-Jack-Kerouac chicks.”
Jack: “Then answer it.”
I pulled open the door and there she was, all the above and more, sixteen years old with big ungulate eyes and Mary Travers hair. She gave me a gaping openmouthed look, taking in my loden-green beret, the frizzed wildness of my hair sticking out from under it, my Beat Levi’s jacket and jeans and my tea-reddened joyous hitching-all-the-way-from-Oxnard eyes. “I was looking for Jack,” she said, and her voice was cracked and scratchy and low. She dropped her gaze.
I looked to Jack, who stood behind me, out of her line of vision, and asked a question with my eyebrows. Jack gave me his hooded smoldering dust-jacket-from-hell look, then stepped forward, took the poor boy from me and loomed over the now-eye-lifting chick and chucked her chin with a gone Beat curling index finger. “Coochie-coochie-coo,” he said.
Her name was Ricky Keen (Richarda Kinkowski, actually, but that’s how she introduced herself), she’d hitchhiked all the way down from Plattsburgh and she was as full of hero-worship and inarticulate praise as I was. “Dean Moriarty,” she said at the end of a long rambling speech that alluded to nearly every line Jack had written and half the Zoot Sims catalogue, “he’s the coolest. I mean, that’s who I want to make babies with, absolutely.”
There we were, standing in the front hallway listening to this crack-voiced ungulate-eyed long gone Beat-haired sixteen-year-old chick talk about making babies with Charlie Parker riffing in the background and the Christmas lights winking on and off and it was strange and poignant. All I could say was “Wow,” over and over, but Jack knew just what to do. He threw one arm over my shoulder and the other over the chick’s and he thrust his already-bloating and booze-inflamed but quintessentially Beat face into ours and said, low and nimbly, “What we need, the three of us hepsters, cats and chicks alike, is a consciousness-raising all-night bull session at the indubitable pinnacle of all neighborhood Bodhisattva centers and bar and grills, the Peroration Pub, or, as the fellaheen know it, Ziggy’s Clam House. What do you say?”
What did we say? We were speechless — stunned, amazed, moved almost to tears. The man himself, he who had practically invented the mug, the jug and the highball and lifted the art of getting sloshed to its Beat apotheosis, was asking us, the skinny underage bedraggled runaways, to go out on the town for a night of wild and prodigious Kerouackian drinking. All I could manage was a nod of assent, Ricky Keen said, “Yeah, sure, like wow,” and then we were out in the frozen rain, the three of us, the streets all crusted with ugly East Coast ice, Ricky on one side of Jack, me on the other, Jack’s arms uniting us. We tasted freedom on those frozen streets, passing the bottle, our minds elevated and feverish with the fat spike of Mary Jane that appeared magically between Jack’s thumb and forefinger and the little strips of Benzedrine-soaked felt he made us swallow like a sacrament. The wind sang a dirge. Ice clattered down out of the sky. We didn’t care. We walked eight blocks, our Beat jackets open to the elements, and we didn’t feel a thing.
Ziggy’s Clam House loomed up out of the frozen black wastes of the Long Island night like a ziggurat, a holy temple of Beat enlightenment and deep soul truths, lit only by the thin neon braids of the beer signs in the windows. Ricky Keen giggled. My heart was pounding against my ribs. I’d never been in a bar before and I was afraid I’d make an ass of myself. But not to worry: we were with Jack, and Jack never hesitated. He hit the door of Ziggy’s Clam House like a fullback bursting through the line, the door lurched back on its hinges and embedded itself in the wall, and even as I clutched reflexively at the eighty-three cents in my pocket Jack stormed the bar with a roar: “Set up the house, barkeep, and all you sleepy fellaheen, the Beat Generation has arrived!”