Most Sundays the boy joined a handful of other students with a Catholic history in the cab ride to attend Mass at Concord Carmel—short for the Carmelite Sisters of the Monastery of Our Lady and St. Joseph—down Pleasant Street from St. Paul’s. They practiced silent prayer there and seemed to get the idea of a connecting Mind that we become more aware of when we stop talking and thinking, when we get away from reason and logic and go deeper into a still awareness of the divine Mind.
The boy was a natural-born Carmelite mystic, and sometimes also stopped by Carmel on Saturday afternoons on the way to Charlie’s Pool Hall in downtown Concord, which was about a three-mile walk. He liked the nuns a lot, and often spoke with the sisters when they were out on the grounds and not sequestered about how they experienced what they called the Mind of God in their quiet rooms.
He then would continue on to Charlie’s because he thought pool was Zen à la Kerouac, bumming cigarettes from the townies to look Bogart-cool in his old trench coat, even though he didn’t smoke them really. It was just to blend in at Charlie’s. They liked the boy because he tutored their little brothers and sisters at the Millville School, a red brick grade school across from St. Paul’s on Pleasant Street. The students were mostly poor and lived out in the country. In his last year the boy tutored math and reading most afternoons for a few hours and got to know a lot of the parents. He liked the Millville School and it felt like his kind of place, where he could be who he was. Giving was living. He felt a giver’s glow.
Then there was the mandatory Sunday mid-morning Mass in the school chapel, a thing of beauty to the boy, with sermons and music and common prayers that shaped him and made him who he was and would be.
Working with Rev. Welles, he had written his Sixth Form or senior paper on this infinite Mind and love that pervades the universe, and from which our individual minds at least mostly originate. That was a core belief for the New England Transcendentalists, who borrowed it from Hindu metaphysics. Our minds, wrote the boy, are more than matter; they have their origins in a Mind that preceded the universe and matter. Plato and Plotinus both thought so, and the boy agreed. “My mind,” he wrote, “is a very small part of the infinite Mind such that I have a separate identity and individual destiny, but without ever being separated from the wholeness of a universal Mind that includes all other minds as well. We are all small points of light in the endless field of divine luminosity.”
“Honors in Ancient History and Sacred Studies” was the sole distinction conferred on the boy at graduation, except for La Junta—the Spanish club—and cross-country. The other boys had a lot more items listed under their photos in the class yearbook because they were aiming high. The boy wasn’t aiming at all, which made all the difference. He was runner-up for the math prize. The boy kept it simple.
At graduation, when Rev. Welles asked the boy about his plans in life, he answered, “Well, Sir, I am supposed to go to Swarthmore College, as you know, and thanks for the letter of recommendation. Gerry Studds wrote a good one too for American History class. They let me in off the waiting list a week ago. But I really just am not sure I need college. Maybe there is some westward road. Sir, you have been the best, the best—and Julie too.”
Rev. Welles smiled, shook his head a bit, and raised his thick dark James Bond eyebrows a little pessimistically. “Well, keep us posted and stay in touch. Do some good, that’s all we can ask. And stay off Wall Street, Babylon.”
“Yes, Sir, I will. Thanks for everything. There’s a road out there somewhere.”
“All right, Babylon. It will find you.”
And the boy returned to Babylon, from whence he had come.
But now things get a little confessional. The wild side of life—including the mea culpa part—is always there waiting, and the boy was about to experience it in a way that would alter his path forever. He really was heading west.
Why the Boy Took the Car, the Big Argument, and the Journey West
Most boys who are honest and trustworthy have at least one big argument with their dads growing up. That doesn’t mean that they should seek it out, but if it finds them and involves defending their integrity, the confrontation must be accepted with courage. This doesn’t mean that dads are bad, or boys either. It’s just about growing up.
It was early July, and the boy was home in Babylon after graduation, thinking that college made no sense. One Saturday evening he drove out to Westhampton Beach, a seaside town filled with lively young people and quite a few St. Paul’s guys celebrating the end of school at a class graduation party. The boy felt so removed from the scene and the drinking that he walked away. It just seemed like such a waste of minds.
That evening did not find him struggling to escape from some dark valley of despair. But he saw no meaning in going to Swarthmore anymore, where he had in the end decided to go because it was supposedly more acceptable and East Coast than heading out west to Reed, where he had received an offer that he turned down.
After returning home late that night the boy was feeling claustrophobic, stuck on a too Long Island, and, thinking about his dream, determined that he just might journey to the west after all. Now, anyone who would follow a blue dream as though it were a direction sign is trusting the universe more than most, but the boy sort of wanted to do just that. He had no worldly goals, but he was open to surprises.
Anyway, St. Paul himself was always on the road, and so were Kerouac and Whitman, he thought. Sometimes that early July he would drive over to Huntington along the North Shore and stop at Whitman’s birthplace on Route 110, or to Northport, the next town over, to visit Gunther’s Tap Room where Kerouac spent years drinking heavily after he wrote On the Road. The boy would hang out there, ordering Cokes and asking the fishermen about Kerouac. Some remembered a guy jotting words down on napkins at a corner table while others just drew a blank. The bartender knew a lot about Kerouac and hung old news articles about him on the wall.
“After all,” said the bartender, “Kerouac coined the term ‘Beat Generation,’ so we give him most of the wall space on that side.”
It was heaven-sent that, in the middle of that July, the boy and his dad got into a fierce argument; otherwise he would never have had the audacity to follow the dream to the west in the way that he did. There had to be a push as well as a pull, and it really helps if the push is strong when the pull is as vague as a recurring dream. Why the argument? The boy had been offered a great summer job tutoring inner-city kids in the Bronx, building on his Millville experience. But his dad thought the location was dangerous. He said he’d had someone check it out, but the boy doubted it. The bottom line was that his folks did not have any sense for who the boy was, and anyway he was overshadowed by two superstar older siblings.
“It’s dangerous in the Bronx, and your mother is against it,” Dad said over his standard whiskey on the rocks. It was mostly Mom who’d pressured him to take a stand against the Bronx.
“Dad, this is something that I planned on and it means everything to me,” said the boy. “Rev. Welles pulled a few strings and set it up, and it is one thing I really want to do.”
“Look, you can’t do it. I won’t put up with it. That’s it. No further discussion.” The tone was terminal.
The boy managed a few words of defiance: “Look, folks, this just makes no sense. It confines me, and I am going to do this.”
“You will not,” said Mom, in a serious throaty tone, red lipstick covering her cigarette, martini in hand.
Dad stood up angrily and thundered, with all the strength of the WW II Navy Commander that he had been, “You are upsetting your mother!”
“I am not dropping this job, that’s it!” the boy repeated.
Then, Mom, having had her several drinks, and Dad too, raised the stakes. “I’m paying for Swarthmore, so either you drop this job or you’re paying on your own.”
He paused. “Okay, but I am not thinking of you as good parents. So what am I supposed to do this