I’d stand all the way to Jamaica Station, then finally settle into a seat and snooze ’til we rolled into Penn Station. Then up the escalators, across a bunch of crowded scary streets, with newspaper vendors and doughnut men all for me, then workwork-workwork but easy work with pencils and frowns rather than sinew and bread-and-beer-fueled sweat. Forty hours for fifty weeks for forty years shuttling across turd island, but the kids would save me, they’d inspire me, they’d make me immortal as the stars. Little Jacques and Jan, Sunday dinner of pasta and bottled wine—I’d never drink from a box or a wrinkled bag again.
They were in my mind, the slick green tentacles of the Sending, tearing up memories, feeding doubt and misery, prodding me to join the mass, the hive mind. Animals, humans are just animals, wheedling and baring their teeth for food, cringing from fear of the dark, setting up their clockwork sciences and groaning agricultural faiths, just to keep from looking down. I looked up at the sky, at the sacré bleu and was afraid. So massive, so empty, except for one thing. It. The Great Dreamer in The Dark did not fill the sky, It was the sky. The moon was gone, those few stars were gone—I couldn’t feel the rhythm of the train anymore, or whatever had been poking me in the back from under the tarp; It was all I saw, all I experienced; It was the world and far beyond it. The atman, all that is, It is.
I turned away. Mémère, living in a faraway anthill, trudging about with the other drones, moving underground in pre-cut paths. But humans aren’t ants, there’s an order there, a serenity, a determination. People are worse in some ways, full of explosive passions ready to pop like cheap champagne, only a cross word away from fangs or just shitting themselves from the fear of it all. Mémère, I couldn’t even think of my own mother anymore—not without seeing her as the rutting sow she was, eating and sweating and fucking in the shit of the world, scratching at fleas, finally falling into the rot useless and dead. Animals! And to the Dreamer Of The Deep, dead Cthulhu risen again to bring the world under his sway, we were the fleas on Its back, the shit on Its heel. Jed was wrong, the train wasn’t evil. It was that sky that was evil, the vault of heaven stretched over this great country just to mock us all. Hopes, dreams, poetry, the open road, the divine fool Neal, just specks of time and flesh. God damn the sky, God damn the depth of it. I cried deep salty tears, but that wasn’t the only salt on my cheeks and tongue. The train was nearing the bay, finally. Sweet, sweet Frisco, Jack is back. The old crew of beat-pigs would surely gather around the pushole metropolis to pay tribute to me, the King Flea, Head Speck Of Flesh In Charge, Bard of the Reeking Shitheap.
I rolled off the tarps before the train even stopped, and I wasn’t the only one with that bright idea. The flatbed exploded into a flood of black, red-eyed rats—they tore through the tarpaulin and ran out past the train yard and into the streets, all wiry hair and hot muscle up to my ankles. I ran too. I wasn’t sure where I was, what neighborhood. There were hills, crazy-painted houses, palms, empty streets and empty buzzing buses. My lungs were empty husks but I ran, and my hot tongue tasted of day-old beer. I veered right, then left, cutting across streets, legs pumped full of my dead blood. I couldn’t see anything but starry lamppost lights for a long time. My feet slapped pavement like Gene Krupa.
Nothing looked familiar until I finally hit the curving streets of North Beach. I ran past Larry’s bookstore, didn’t even care that it was still open, and barreled into Vesuvio’s. The few patrons, all at the counter, turned to look at me. I’d been running for maybe forty minutes and was soaked in sweat, I probably looked like a junky who’d spent a week taking pissy showers and jumping out windows.
I slowed down to a casual swagger of a walk and reached into my pocket, just in time to remember that I’d blown most of my money in San Santo.
So I told them. “I’m Jack Kerouac, the famous Beat author, and everyone here has to buy me a round, or I’ll die.”
Five rounds later, I was feeling a little better. Someone sent for Larry, someone sent for Allen, a few girls wormed their way into the booth and fitted themselves under my arms, all warm and alive. They were good girls too, moral and clean. I wiped my face with a towel and let the spirits settle me down. They told me later that I mumbled for a bit in some crazy holy roller language and then slept heavily. They even swept and closed around me, and left a Guiness for me to wake up to.
CHAPTER THREE
NEAL. NEAL is . . . Neal is the smile on Buddha’s lips. Neal is not free. Neal is freedom. Running around and writing and loving and drinking and even sleeping. He’s a man who can sleep the hell out of a day if he chooses to. I’d watch him wile away an hour on a couch and I’d be the one who felt well-rested afterwards. Neal is truly free; it doesn’t matter if he’s doing time or doing shots, breaking rocks or making time. A childhood spent suckling the poison teat of the state in juvenile halls and reform schools did everything but reform him. The roar of a motorbike, that’s Neal. The steam over soup on a cold winter’s day, that’s Neal. The ball-choked squeal of a maniac undergoing the shock treatment, and the wise old glare afterwards, that’s Neal too. And walking away from it all afterwards, that’s Neal too; every girl, every drug, every desert wind or smelly city block, the senses lie when they promise either agony or ecstasy, and Neal knows that too and in his starry wisdom he can just walk away from it all.
It had been years since we criss-crossed the country, blessing it like an old woman making the sign three times on Sunday. I was just the midwife for this whole beatnik thing. Neal was both Madonna and Child. If there was anyone who could shake America by the shoulders, and wake it up to the threat it faced, it’d be Neal. He was a bodhisattva himself, I was sure of it then, the one man left who had something to teach me. Neal, sweet Neal who spent two years in prison for marihuana, Neal who had wife now and kids so I heard last night at the bar (or I heard something like that), the last thing you’d expect would be the first thing he’d do. Riding the rumble of the absurdity contraption, the good ol’ U S of A, Neal was the one who could do that. All I had to do was find him.
CHAPTER FOUR
I WAS in the john, my head leaning against the cool tile. I had a good night’s sleep on a hard wooden table, but the hangover was still outboxing an evening of rest and sweet camaraderie. I had a mind to call Mémère, long distance even, or at least sit down and write her a letter when I heard a disembodied voice calling my name. Jack, Jack it said, an echoed whisper in the small room at first, then it got louder Jack! and happier, a ghost glad to haunt me. I turned, zipped up my pants and looked around quickly for a heatwave apparition or a pink elephant, but saw nothing but grimy tile, myself (that startled me, a flash of my hair in a warped mirror looked like a shoggoth to my bleary eyes), and the firmly shut door.
Jack! The sound was coming from the floor. I looked into the small drain stamped into the floor and saw the glint of glasses. “It’s Allen!” Allen said and then he giggled, “Hahahaha, fancy meeting you here.” I blushed, then frowned; Allen liked flaunting it sometimes. I reached down, stuck a finger in one of the holes in the drain and lifted the drain cover up. “Just reliving some old glory,” Allen said, offering me a toothy woodchuck smile. “Come on in, the water’s fine! Hahahaha!” His beard was dry.
“How am I supposed to fit down the drain?” I was still a little woozy. Reality had been giving me the silent treatment for months now, since my breakdown, and the unblinking stare of the Great Old One had done away with the rest of what I thought of as the present actual now. I put my foot against the drain, but Allen smacked my shoe away. “Oh Jack, you’re such a card!