Channeling The Ghost Of
Ti Jean Kerouac- In Honor Of the 60th Anniversary Of The Publication
Of “On The Road” (1957)
By Gordon Gleason
Even Phil Larkin could
not remember when he first heard the name Jack Kerouac mentioned in his
presence. Jack, his muse since early adult days in the late 1960s, was like a
book sealed with seven seals in the Larkin household in the early 1960s when
Rose Larkin prohibited any talk of atheist rabble commie unwashed beatniks in
the house (the latter not the least in the list of Rose sins although atheist
in the high holy Roman Catholic Larkin household where Jack apostate had some
consideration). So it must have been sometime before that. Maybe name heard on
a vagrant television show, The Steve
Allen Show, which he sneak watched at midnight hours to see what was what
and which Phil in perusing YouTube has noticed that hipster in exile Steve and
“king of the beats” Jack bantered around many subjects of mutual interest under
the sign of cool ass jazz and word play aficionado-hood. (One such clip of the
show showed Jack reading the famous last page of his On The Road where he and Dean Moriarty are searching, endlessly
searching, for the father they never just like Phil looked for literary father
Jack when the time came among other things but that clip did not ring a bell
when he tried to date that first heard name question ringing in his brain one
Jack October in the railroad dream night.)
Phil, never much for deep
introspection although overloaded with surface introspection like any
half-arsed speculator writer (Irish expression check James Joyce if you please),
in any case abandoned that endless thought, that father, literary father
remember thought, as he tried to place Jack’s name in his head. A thought which
was triggered once he read in a small
publication magazine that the year 2017 would be the 60th
anniversary of the publication of the sensational On The Road which would get many a young man and some young women
on the road, on the car highway, bus sweat, freight train hobo, hitchhike thumb
road, no question.
He guessed not having
any success at pinpointing some exact event or date that the first time would
have had to be about 1962 when his old high school friend from his growing up
town, the Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville, Peter Paul Markin always known
since junior high school as “Scribe” forced all the corner boys to read the
damn thing under penalty that he would read it to them on those forlorn Friday
and Saturday nights when without money, without a car to flee the burg, without
some girl willing to go on a date via public transportation or walking and
maybe willing to do the “dutch treat” number (and thus no hope, no fucking hope
for testosterone-hammered boys, of coping feels, snatch, blowjobs since any
girl who consented under those conditions saw the guy, saw Phil before he
became known as Foul-Mouthed Phil which is a whole story for another time since
is about father Jack time not Phil schemes for those feels, snatches, blowjobs)
they would be huddled against the wall in front of Tonio’s Pizza Parlor. Hoping,
endlessly cold-nosed hoping when first starting out in late freshman year that
some girl (or girls) would come by and maybe go into Tonio’s and play the
jukebox and that would get things started. At worst start the “con,” low con
for sure about what songs those chicks played which was an art-form first
perfected by shy-boy Scribe as his “come on” to the girls when he was too
nervous to sweet baby talk them like any other guy, like Phil when he found out
that some girls, some social butterfly girls and not just the school sluts
liked to hear what in “polite” society would be considered vulgar language
worthy if you were a Catholic boy, a Rose Larkin Catholic boy confession worthy
and a hell of a lot of hail marys and acts of contrition.
On those nights when
that low slung prospect did not look promising, Jesus were times that bad that
some sweet thing come Friday night didn’t at least risk a fucking slice of
pizza and iced Coke to at least tempt their fates and keep the Scribe from his
altar, say around 10 PM, maybe a little later, which meant that whatever girls
were going out had gone out for the night or were down Squaw Rock freely
parting with feel, snatches and blowjobs and not just the school sluts either
remember those social butterflies, the Scribe would take out his tattered and
well-worn copy of the book and start reading. A book which he in high holy
Roman Catholic Delores Markin household had to sneak buy over in Harvard Square
at some dimly-lit bookstore (a bookstore that a couple of years later would be
a place like lemmings to the sea where shy-boy Scribe would find the slightly
neurotic, slim, okay skinny, black-attired girls that drove him wild and
provide him with those freely given feels, snatches, blowjobs that he longed
for in hometown high school).
Before long he would be
stopped, usually by the naturally selected leader of this motley crew, Frankie
Riley, who threatened murder and mayhem if the Scribe continued. Those guys
were no surplus literary bums or wannabe dharma bums of some later Phil dream
but hard-nosed corner denizens who were as likely to jack-roll some “faggy”
guy, some punk kid or some father/uncle/older brother drunken sot paycheck
fresh (and short) from Irish Grille/Dublin Pub/ Johnny Murphy’s and you don’t
have to consult Mister James Joyce as look at you. Whatever short-comings the
Scribe had in the manly prowess province the long and short of it was that at
some point Phil and almost every other guy on the stoop read the book if only
to see what the Scribe was talking about or just to keep him quiet on those
depressing empty nights.
It took a long time for
Phil to realize that what drew the Scribe to Jack Kerouac (the Scribe would
always call him Ti Jean once he heard somebody in school who knew French call
out John name that way) was that there were many affinities between the way
Jack grew up a generation before them in factory-strewn Merrimack River textile
heavy from Frenchie/ Irish/ Hungary/Italy Lowell about sixty miles away and
working-class ship-building North Adamsville. Knew want and hungry a bit, knew
more importantly “wanting habits” which drove a lot of the Scribe’s (and the
rest of the Tonio corner boys) baser instincts. Knew that same craving for
privacy that never came in cold water flats above vacant stores with mother
hectoring and crying out one venial and about seven mortals sins per hour
24/7/365. No room to breathe. Knew that desire to break out from the tedium of
what was to be scheduled fate wrapped in a big fat package box unless the
break-out came and soon.
(Prelude to Jack
breakout aside from vivid memory black and white film Majestic Theater Saturday
afternoon haunts and hanging with the boys cool daddy jazz, big swing jazz big
bad ass bands led by guys named Duke, Count, Earl, hell, maybe Emperor with
some snow white song-bird fronting except when black as coal Billie fronted and
blown them snowbirds all away even before the “fixer” man came calling around
midnight and later, late 1940s later cool as a cucumber jazz with plenty of
variations and riffs, riff to blow that high white note out to the Frisco Bay
China seas like happened one night in North Beach by some unknown cat who just
blew and blew and maybe is still blowing
that one time high white note and is dead ass dead having run himself raged and
culled looking for that sequel in some dead night fog horn freighter of the
world. Prelude to Tonio boys breakout aside from vivid memory black and white
film Strand Theater Saturday afternoon matinees double-features and hanging
with the boys hot off the presses big daddy rock and roll music any old way you
use it proclaimed by the President, President of rock and roll Chuck Berry that
one Mister Mozart and his crew (Bach, Brahms, that Russian guy) that they had
best leave town because a new high sheriff was in town to shake, rattle and
roll and later when the sniff of Jack dope, tea-head dope turned to modern
Moloch chemical madness cloud-covered French curves and swirls acid rock.)
The funny thing about
the Scribe’s crazed campaign was that Phil, beside his lack of deep
introspection then, was not any kind of bookworm-then (a pejorative term on the Tonio corner which
would usually have banned a guy like the Scribe from that place except he had a
double-heart, had as well as that literary funk an exceptionally larcenous
heart and produced in quality well-thought out plans to grab dough, grab it any
way they could although nobody in their right mind would let him carry out
those plans that was left to the clever Frankie Riley already mentioned). The
funny part was that later, several years later when he was in the Army and
confined to the base for disciplinary reasons, he ambled into the base library
one afternoon and noticed that On The
Road and several other books by Kerouac were on a bookshelf he was perusing
looking for something by sci-fi writer Kenneth Koch. And that was that. That
was that being he re-read Road and
scampered through such Jack works as Dharma
Bum and Desolation Angels (and in
the end much more than that but check some Jack bibliography and you will have
pretty much encompassed what Phil read before the fall).
The Scribe and Jack connection
would intersect Phil’s life several times before The Scribe’s early violent
death down in Mexico from still unknown and uninvestigated by the Federales
causes around a busted drug deal. Probably the most dramatic connection driven
by Jack hitchhike road dreams in the late 1940s before Interstate Route 66
car-hopping night had been Phil’s involvement through the Scribe in the
westward trek to what has been called the Summer of Love out mainly in San
Francisco in 1967 (although some action happened in Monterey at the first Pops
Festival but that was before Phil headed out and in Todo el Mundo south of Big
Sur when he/they hitched a ride from a moving house of a converted yellow
school bus). The Scribe, partially influenced by Jack’s book and partially by
his own endless predictions that things were going to go through a sea-change
especially among the young in this country and had dropped out of college in
Boston his sophomore year to see what was what out west. A couple of months
later the Scribe came back and practically force-marched all the corner boys
still around to head west as soon as they could. Phil under the Jack spell (and
having no money a la Jack most of the time as well and no permission a la Rose
Larkin who had a bloody fit when she found out where he was and had Father Lally
say about ten prayers for Phil’s already damned soul) hitchhiked out with
Frankie Riley in a spasm of high adventure. Phil, not in school, no money,
working at some madness Robert Hall men’s clothing store to kill time and make
some college-bound dough, at the height
of the madness in foreign country Vietnam would only stay out there a couple of
months since he received a draft notice in late August to report for a physical
in September. But while he was out west he imbibed in all the dope, music, sex
and whatnot available that Mother Larkin had railed against citing one John
Kerouac, lapsed Catholic sweet cherib big tubby Buddha in his brain now as
correspondent. Even went to Jack beat down, beat around beatitude if you want
to call it that spots in North Beach like Eddy’s and Big Max’s (where that
skinny kid blew the high white note out into the Frisco Bay China seas and
never looked back) to see what that earlier cultural scene had been all
about.
This year’s (2017) 50th
anniversary commemoration of the Summer of Love out again mainly in San
Francisco which Phil had not been aware of until Alex James, one of his old
corner confederates, had been out there and seen an art exhibition all about
the music, fashion, poster art (advertising upcoming concerts in Golden Gate
Park, the Avalon, Fillmore and so on) and photography and when he came back to
Boston had gathered all the remaining
corner boys who had gone out in ’67 together to write their memoirs for a small
Scribe tribute book had sparked some remembrances beyond that event. Got him
thinking about how much Jack Kerouac, his dog-ear short life (Kerouac had died
at 47), had influenced him. How episodes in Jack’s life had some meaning. One
night Phil was sitting with Alex in Jimmy’s Irish Pub in downtown Adamsville
(an old haunt of theirs where the drinks were cheap for no money boys when they
came of drinking age just like their fathers, uncles and older brothers before
them) ostensibly to talk the talk about the mad monk Scribe when he laid out to
Alex what he was thinking about. Mainly thinking about from having in the
subsequent years read most of Jack’s books (and remember check out some Jack
bibliography and you will have an idea of how cuckoo Phil Jacked).
Phil, a fairly
well-known writer himself for a while for alternative newspapers when they were
in vogue and small literary magazines when they were not, startled Alex by
saying that most of what he wrote, had written in the past, sketches and
articles for magazines and journals about his early youth and young adulthood,
had been fired in his imagination by Jack. He then began a long screed (that
was Alex’s expression when he mentioned it to a couple of guys later reflecting
that Phil had gon eon about two hours without stop) about Jack starting from
some mystical river (the Merrimack) which gave Jack life and which he compared
with his own river experience at the local Adamsville River. Talked of Jack
boyhood Tom Sawyer-like river adventures up among the Dracut woods, about those
boyhood bonding experiences and visions and about Sampas, the ghost of Sampas,
the holy goof who was to do so much in
the literary world but who laid his head down in World War II. Saw the Scribe
as such a kindred holy goof also laid low as a result of war.
It was at that point,
after Alex had flipped out over what Phil had been blasting into his head for a
couple of hours, that Phil went into cruise control about the nodal points of
Jack’s life as related through books and what others had grabbed onto about
him. Some of it commonplace, working class 1930s commonplace, where want and
hunger had a field day and wanting habits got great gobs of reinforcement from
that want and hunger, made a small-time, small-town mill boy reach up
big-handed for the stars, took notes in dime-store notebooks (Woolworth’s on
Merrimack Street remember, or Hancock Street in North Adamsville where hungry
boys waited on lunch counter waitresses to cook up melted chesses sandwiches
the cheapest thing on the menu and later downtown Boston the scene of picket
lines by young white people mainly supporting the right, Jesus yes, the right
of black people down South and not just down South to have that same melted
cheese sandwiches at those same lunch counters cooked by those same waitresses the
cheapest thing on the menu). Thought long and hard from early on about
redemption and mystery of life, of birth and of dead and older brother passed
to the heavens and why. Mentioned cannibal mother who nose-dived him every
chance she could get yet he in the end, get this, could never cut that string
that bound the two generations like some naughty Greek myth, mentioned not fit
for work father (no, not the father searched for and never known he died in
some abandoned freight yard bludgeoned by some railroad bull or from an
overdose of sterno can take your pick of the accumulated legends of the road) who
died young from misery and his own small-hood hubris.
Passed the passing time
of young boy Catholic schools at old Saint Joseph’s the church of good
immigrant clans from up north in the North Country over the border in Quebec
who came down a few generations back to get off of starvation farms and look
for work in noisy spinning mills until exhaustion set in. Transferred over to
Acre Bartlett school and all the miseries of junior high school boy and girl
hormone troubles from no give French-speaking girls whose no give made those
Irish Catholic girls up the street with a Bible tucked between their knees look
like street whores and so real miseries until high school track and football
hero times when some be-bop girl with a big band swing voice and a flaming red
dress which said come thither slaked his thirst. Then back to that Irish cunt
up the streets who wouldn’t give anything and she didn’t even have a Bible
between her knees. Hell he wrote a whole book about it, called it Mary Magdalen
or something like that whose sister knowing Jack value would have given
whatever she had to give if he looked her way once-thems the breaks.
Roll Columbia, roll on
all up in arms bigtime when Columbia New York City was big time and football
hero Saturday afternoon dreams which would make that famous Lawrence hero game
laughable but he couldn’t give up the time to pass some science test and then
he broke his fucking bones and so long big time Columbia when Columbia was big
time granite grey autumn afternoon gridiron exploits to make the Barnard co-ed
wet. Sorry Jack but Time Square hipsters, con men, fags, yes that is what they
called them then like now in hidden rooms fags, fairies, queens, queers, drags,
fixer man junkies, wide-eyed dope fiends sucking benny tablets from Rexall drug
store pharmacies, bent whores who for the price of once around the world would
take you for a ride, would later put you up in Mexico City junkie whorehouses
and leave you restless and broke howling at some ill-spent moon-some later day
pet king said that. Learned to navigate with the dime store junkies (not
Woolworth’s this time but some Bargain Basement hooker hang-out) and street
wise bandit gangster poets and Harvard-trained morphine madmen. Most
importantly maybe not recognized then but would play later when he was gone (at
freaking 47 just when his juices should have been flowing, when that great big
American anti-novel could have been written, hell, the material was there for
it all the way from Lowell town via Quebec provinces to Denver nights and San Fran
hump big high white note to the Japan seas swales) a faggy Jew boy who could croon
with the Molochs, knew the magic of medieval kabala, said high Kaddish when the
time came, could sing of the long gone Whitman night with that same sadness.
Howled at San Fran winds and blew his own high white note and drove everybody,
every square-assed poet bleeping about some bull to the showers-gone. Yes, he
would deliver the totem to a disbelieving world, a reckless dangerous world not
looking for second-coming Messiahs.
Skip a few our mother the
sea scenes and cabin fever pitches up in Artic waters and bring in the new world
a-borning. A time with acre lots and ranch house breezeways and dishwaters
coveted by men in grey flannel suits. And he, Jack he, looking for the meaning
of existence thinking that it was on some lame Robert Frost road less travelled
so crisscrossed the continent looking for what the Scribe called in his time
the great blue-pink American West night (strangely both city boys, both welded
Eastern city boys and so of the same mesh when all was said and done the Scribe
too done in by pitching his wanting habits to far above). A time when Jack tired
of same old, same old traversed and trailed around looking for some model father
Adonis Oedipus mother and wound up in a Latimer Street junkie wino hotel with
wheelman to the Gods Dean Moriarty and you know how that storied began (and
ended). Ended in balmy San Fran nights listening to the willows belch and cool daddies
take big brass and blow baby blow, benny, sister, brother, cousin high to make
tea-head moan and moan. Wrote about it on all those well-kept and organized notebooks
and blasted out in some speed demon time a paper roll of words and adventures.
Then hiatus, writing
ever writing but not hip enough to make the New York publishing industry cut
until the time of his time came (although he would always groan it was well
pass his time and he may have been right who knows) Known: Jack caught some
pregnant fever pitch among the young post-war maddened atomic bomb death
walk-outs who took up surfing, hot cars, wandering, outlaw motorcycles and to while
their times and forget those bomb shelter Horoshima dead. The rest would be history.
Strangely the rest would be played out in small coffeehouses and cabarets, out
in open air parks and other greenspaces by guys like now straight as an arrow
if not straighter Alex and bent out of shape Scribe seeking that newer world
that he never was able to catch up to. Sixty years later it still beats a heartbeat
to a sullen world. Thanks Ti Jean
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