I exchanged a glance with Ricky Keen. The place was as quiet as a mortuary, some kind of tacky Hawaiian design painted on the walls, a couple of plastic palms so deep in dust they might have been snowed on, and it was nearly as dark inside as out. The bartender, startled by Jack’s joyous full-throated proclamation of Beat uplift and infectious Dionysian spirit, glanced up from the flickering blue trance of the TV like a man whose last stay of execution has just been denied. He was heavy in the jowls, favoring a dirty white dress shirt and a little bow tie pinned like a dead insect to his collar. He winced when Jack brought his Beat fist down on the countertop and boomed, “Some of everything for everybody!”
Ricky Keen and I followed in Jack’s wake, lit by our proximity to the centrifuge of Beatdom and the wine, marijuana and speed coursing through our gone adolescent veins. We blinked in the dim light and saw that the everybody Jack was referring to comprised a group of three: a sad mystical powerfully made-up cocktail waitress in a black tutu and fishnet stockings and a pair of crewcut Teamster types in blue workshirts and chinos. The larger of the two, a man with a face like a side of beef, squinted up briefly from his cigarette and growled, “Pipe down, asshole — can’t you see we’re trying to concentrate here?” Then the big rippled neck rotated and the head swung back round to refixate on the tube.
Up on the screen, which was perched between gallon jars of pickled eggs and Polish sausage, Red Skelton was mugging in a Santa Claus hat for all the dead vacant mindless living rooms of America, and I knew, with a deep sinking gulf of overwhelming un-Beat sadness, that my own triple-square parents, all the way out in Oxnard, were huddled round the console watching this same rubbery face go through its contortions and wondering where their pride and joy had got himself to. Ricky Keen might have been thinking along similar lines, so sad and stricken did she look at that moment, and I wanted to put my arms around her and stroke her hair and feel the heat of her Beat little lost body against my own. Only Jack seemed unaffected. “Beers all around,” he insisted, tattooing the bar with his fist, and even before the bartender could heave himself up off his stool to comply Jack was waking up Benny Goodman on the jukebox and we were pooling our change as the Teamsters sat stoically beside their fresh Jack-bought beers and the cocktail waitress regarded us out of a pair of black staved-in eyes. Of course, Jack was broke and my eighty-three cents didn’t take us far, but fortunately Ricky Keen produced a wad of crumpled dollar bills from a little purse tucked away in her boot and the beer flowed like bitter honey.
It was sometime during our third or fourth round that the burlier of the two Teamster types erupted from his barstool with the words “Communist” and “faggot” on his lips and flattened Jack, Ricky and me beneath a windmill of punches, kicks and elbow chops. We went down in a marijuana-weakened puddle, laughing like madmen, not even attempting to resist as the other Teamster, the bartender and even the waitress joined in. Half a purple-bruised minute later the three of us were out on the icy street in a jumble of limbs and my hand accidentally wandered to Ricky Keen’s hard little half-formed breast and for the first time I wondered what was going to become of me, and, more immediately, where I was going to spend the night.
But Jack, heroically Beat and muttering under his breath about squares and philistines, anticipated me. Staggering to his feet and reaching down a Tokay-cradling spontaneous-prose-generating railroad-callused hand first to Ricky and then to me, he said, “Fellow seekers and punching bags, the road to Enlightenment is a rocky one, but tonight, tonight you sleep with big Jack Kerouac.”
I woke the next afternoon on the sofa in the living room of the pad Jack shared with his Mémère. The sofa was grueling terrain, pocked and scoured by random dips and high hard draft-buffeted plateaus, but my stringy impervious seventeen-year-old form had become one with it in a way that approached bliss. It was, after all, a sofa, and not the cramped front seat of an A & P produce truck or road-hopping Dodge, and it had the rugged book-thumbing late-night-crashing bongo-thumping joint-rolling aura of Jack to recommend and sanctify it. So what if my head was big as a weather balloon and the rest of me felt like so many pounds and ounces of beef jerky? So what if I was nauseous from cheap wine and tea and Benzedrine and my tongue was stuck like Velcro to the roof of my mouth and Ricky Keen was snoring on the floor instead of sharing the sofa with me? So what if Bing Crosby and Mario Lanza were blaring square Christmas carols from the radio in the kitchen and Jack’s big hunkering soul of a mother maneuvered her shouldery bulk into the room every five seconds to give me a look of radiant hatred and motherly impatience? So what? I was at Jack’s. Nirvana attained.
When finally I threw back the odd fuzzy Canuck-knitted detergent-smelling fully Beat afghan some kind soul — Jack? — had draped over me in the dim hours of the early morning, I became aware that Ricky and I were not alone in the room. A stranger was fixed like a totem pole in the armchair across from me, a skinny rangy long-nosed Brahmin-looking character with a hundred-mile stare and a dull brown Beat suit that might have come off the back of an insurance salesman from Hartford, Connecticut. He barely breathed, squinting glassy-eyed into some dark unfathomable vision like a man trying to see his way to the end of a tunnel, as lizardlike a human as I’d ever seen. And who could this be, I wondered, perched here rigid-backed in Jack’s gone Beat pad on the day before Christmas and communing with a whole other reality? Ricky Keen snored lightly from her nest on the floor. I studied the man in the chair like he was a science project or something, until all at once it hit me: this was none other than Bill himself, the marksman, freighted all the way across the Beat heaving blue-cold Atlantic from Tangier to wish Jack and his Beat Madonna a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
“Bill!” I cried, leaping up from the sofa to pump his dead wooden hand, “this is…I mean, I can’t tell you what an honor,” and I went on in that gone worshipful vein for what must have been ten minutes, some vestige of the Benzedrine come up on me suddenly, and Ricky Keen snapped open her pure golden eyes like two pats of butter melting into a pile of pancakes and I knew I was hungry and transported and headachy and Bill never blinked an eye or uttered a word.
“Who’s that?” Ricky Keen breathed in her scratchy cracked throat-cancery rasp that I’d begun to find incredibly sexy.
“‘Who’s that?”’ I echoed in disbelief. “Why, it’s Bill.”
Ricky Keen stretched, yawned, readjusted her beret. “Who’s Bill?”
“You mean you don’t know who Bill is?” I yelped, and all the while Bill sat there like a corpse, his irises drying out and his lips clamped tight round the little nugget of his mouth.
Ricky Keen ignored the question. “Did we eat anything last night?” she rasped. “I’m so hungry I could puke.”
At that moment I became aware of a sharp gland-stimulating gone wild smell wafting in from the kitchen on the very same Beat airwaves that carried the corny vocalizations of Bing and Mario: somebody was making flapjacks!
Despite our deep soul brother- and sisterhood with Jack and his Mémère, Ricky and I were nonetheless a little sketchy about just bursting into the kitchen and ingratiating our way into a plate of those flapjacks, so we paused to knock on the hinge-swinging slab of the kitchen door. There was no response. We heard Mario Lanza, the sizzle of grease in the pan and voices, talking or chanting. One of them seemed to be Jack’s, so we knocked again and boldly pushed open the door.