T.C. Boyle Stories by T. Coraghessan Boyle
There. There was the waitress, giving him an odd look—a blend of hopefulness and horror—and the thicket of heads bent over plates and glasses, the air heavy as water, the bartender looking up sharply. Ever hopeful, Lester lurched out onto the floor.
This time he got lucky: Gina was sitting at a table just around the corner of the bar, the farthest table out on the veranda, her legs crossed at the knee, one shoe dangling from her toes. There was music playing somewhere, a faint hum of it leaking in out of the night, Mexican music, shot full of saccharine trumpets and weeping violins. It was a romantic moment, or it could have been. But Gina didn’t see him coming—she was turned the other way, in profile, the sea crashing behind her, her hair hanging limp to her shoulders—and it wasn’t till he’d rounded the end of the bar that he saw she wasn’t alone. There was a man sitting across from her, a drink in one hand, cigarette in the other. Lester saw a dangle of red hair, muscles under a Lollapalooza T-shirt, the narrow face of an insect.
In the next instant he loomed up on the table, pulled out a chair and dropped into it with a thump that reverberated the length of the dining room. “Gina, listen,” he said, as if they were right in the middle of a conversation and the man with the insect face didn’t exist, “about last night, and you’re not going to believe this, but it was—”
And then he faltered. Gina’s mouth was hanging open—and this was a mouth that could cushion any blow, a mouth that knew the taste of leather and the shock of the punch that came out of nowhere. “Christ, Les,” she said, “what happened to you—you’re a mess. Have you looked in the mirror?”
He watched her exchange a glance with the man across the table, and then he was talking again, trying to get it out, the night, the way they’d come at him, and they weren’t just your average muggers, they were the law for Christ’s sake and how could anybody expect him to defend her from that?
“Les,” she was saying, “Les, I think you’ve had too much to drink—”
“I’m trying to tell you something,” he said, and his own voice sounded strange to him, distant and whining, the voice of a loser, a fat man, the maker of bad guesses and worse decisions.
That was when the red-haired man spoke up, his eyes twitching in his head. “Who is this jerk, anyway?”
Gina—Gina the Cheetah—gave him a look that was like a left jab. “Shut up, Jerry,” she said. And then, turning back to Lester, “Les, this is Jerry—my manager?” She tried to inject a little air into her voice, though he could see she wasn’t up to it: “Seems like he can’t live without his meal ticket, even for three days.”
Jerry slouched in his chair. He had nothing to say.
Lester looked from Gina to Jerry and back again. He was very far gone, he knew that, but still, even through his haze, he was beginning to see something in those two faces that shut him out, that slammed the door with a bang and turned the key in the lock. He had no right to Gina or this table or this hotel either. He was nothing. He couldn’t even make it through the first round.
Gina’s voice came to him as if from a great distance—“Les, really, maybe you ought to go and lay down for a while”—and then he was on his feet. He didn’t say Yes or No or even See you later—he just turned away from the table, wove his way through the restaurant, down the stairs, and back out into the night.
It was fully dark now, black dark, and the shadows had settled under the skeletons of the trees. He wasn’t thinking about Gina or Jerry or the empty apartment on 24th Street or even April and the kid in the Suburban. There was no justice, no revenge, no reason—there was just this, just the beach and the night and the criminal elements. And when he got to the place by the lagoon and the stink of decay rose to his nostrils, he went straight for the blackest clot of shadow and the rasping murmur at the center of it. “You!” he shouted, all the air raging in his lungs. “Hey, you!”
(1997)
III
And Everything in Between
BEAT
Yeah, I was Beat. We were all Beat. Hell, I’m Beat now—is, was, and always will be. I mean, how do you stop? But this isn’t about me—I’m nobody, really, just window-dressing on the whole mother of Bop freight-train-hopping holy higher than Tokay Beat trip into the heart of the American night. No, what I wanted to tell you about is Jack. And Neal and Allen and Bill and all the rest, too, and how it all went down, because I was there, I was on the scene, and there was nobody Beater than me.
Picture this: seventeen years old, hair an unholy mess and a little loden-green beret perched up on top to keep it in place, eighty-three cents in my pocket and a finger-greased copy of The Subterraneans in my rucksack along with a Charlie Parker disc with enough pops, scratches and white noise worked into the grooves to fill out the soundtrack of a sci-fi flick, hitched all the way from Oxnard, California, and there I am on Jack’s front porch in Northport, Long Island, December twenty-three, nineteen fifty-eight. It’s cold. Bleak. The town full of paint-peeling old monster houses, gray and worn and just plain old, like the whole horse-blindered tired-out East Coast locked in its gloom from October to April with no time off for good behavior. I’m wearing three sweaters under my Levi’s jacket and still I’m holding on to my ribs and I can feel the snot crusting round my nostrils and these mittens I bummed from an old lady at the Omaha bus station are stiff with it, and I knock, wondering if there’s an officially cool way to knock, a hipster’s way, a kind of secret Dharma Bums code-knock I don’t know about.
Knock-knock. Knockata-knockata, knock-knock-knock.
My first surprise was in store: it wasn’t Jack, the gone hep satori-seeking poet god of the rails and two-lane blacktop, who answered the door, but a big blocky old lady with a face like the bottom of a hiking boot. She was wearing a dress the size of something you’d drape over a car to keep the dust off it, and it was composed of a thousand little red and green triangles with gold trumpets and silver angels squeezed inside of them. She gave me the kind of look that could peel the tread off a recapped tire, the door held just ajar. I shuddered: she looked like somebody’s mother.
My own mother was three thousand miles away and so square she was cubed; my dog, the one I’d had since childhood, was dead, flattened out by a big rig the week earlier; and I’d flunked English, History, Calculus, Art, Phys. Ed., Music and Lunch. I wanted adventure, the life of the road, freewheeling chicks in berets and tea and bongos and long Benzedrine-inflected bullshit sessions that ran on into morning, I wanted Jack and everything he stood for, and here was this old lady. “Uh,” I stammered, fighting to control my voice, which was just then deepening from the adolescent squeak I’d had to live with since consciousness had hit, “does, uh, Jack Kerouac live here, I mean, by any chance?”
“Go back where you came from,” the old lady said. “My Jacky don’t have time for no more of this nonsense.” And that was it: she shut the door in my face.
My Jacky!
It came to me then: this was none other than Jack’s mother, the Bop-nurturing freewheeling wild Madonna herself, the woman who’d raised up the guru and given him form, mother of us all. And she’d locked me out. I’d come three thousand miles, her Jacky was my Jack, and I was cold through to the bone, stone broke, scared, heartsick and just about a lungful of O2 away from throwing myself down in the slush and sobbing till somebody came out and shot me. I knocked again.
“Hey, Ma,” I heard from somewhere deep inside the house, and it was like the rutting call of some dangerous beast, a muted angry threatening Bop-benny-and-jug-wine roar, the voice of the man himself, “what the hell is this, I’m trying to concentrate in here.”
And then the old lady: “It ain’t nothing, Jacky.”
Knock-knock. Knockata-knockata, knock-knock-knock. I paradiddled that door, knocked it and socked it, beat on it like it was the bald flat-topped dome of my uptight pencil-pushing drudge of a bourgeois father himself, or maybe Mr. Detwinder, the principal at Oxnard High. I knocked till my knuckles bled, a virtuoso of knocking, so caught up in
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 retrousse-nosed and 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 retrousse-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 hitchmg-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 rumbly, “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!”
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 bartend
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 Skeleton 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.