Jack's Book. Barry Gifford

shoe factory. Aside from his duties at the social club Leo had a more or less regular income from his job in a printshop owned by an Irish family. Roland Salvas had dropped out of school to work in the Boston Navy Yard. George Apostolos had enrolled in the Civilian Conservation Corps and was in Colorado, helping to build Estes National Park.

      “I wanted to go to college and somehow knew my father would never be able to earn the tuition,” Jack wrote. Football offered a way. Despite his swiftness and his solidity Jack was smaller than his compatriots on the Lowell varsity, boys who had played against one another in the sandlot games in Dracut Woods. The coach had held Jack on the bench for most of the 1937 season, and Jack’s jealousy of the starters was intense. But in the fall of 1938 he made a series of brilliant, last-quarter appearances that caught the attention of the Boston sportswriters—and of scouts for Boston College, Duke, and Columbia.

      In one game Jack ignored the coach’s direct order, and attempted his flashy, one-handed carry. He fumbled, and his conscience was stung. But in the game that really counted, the Thanksgiving Day meeting with Lawrence, Jack scored the only touchdown. From that moment his college scholarship was secure. The question was, which offer to accept?

      Leo’s bosses at the printshop were enlisted by the recruiters from Boston College to help them get Kerouac for their team. Jack resisted. He didn’t want to be taught by Jesuits, and Boston wasn’t far enough away. He was in love with the New York City of the movies, and the visions of high life there that he had shared with Sammy Sampas. Gabrielle sided with Jack, sketching a fantasy of the whole family following him to New York. Jack chose Columbia. Soon afterward Leo was fired from the printshop, and ever after, Jack believed he had been responsible for Leo’s misfortune by refusing to go to Boston College.

      The Lowell High School yearbook for 1939 shows Jack in his track uniform: dark, clear eyes; a tangle of black hair; powerful legs that permitted him to elude all but the craftiest defensive players. That spring he began to cut classes one day a week, spending the morning in the library looking at chess books and whatever else caught his attention: “Goethe, Hugo, of all things the Maxims of William Penn, just reading to show off to myself that I was reading.” Afternoons he went to the Rialto to “study the old 1930s movies in detail.” To Jack the Manhattan that Don Ameche and Alice Faye toured by limousine was a real place with real penthouses, and he would visit them soon.

      G. J. Apostolos:

      In ’38, ’39 the letters he wrote me were books. I was in the CCC’s in Estes Park, Colorado, where we were digging ditches, painting barracks. But it was the West to Jack. To him, I was breaking stallions. I had to walk bowlegged when I got off the train, to go along with him.

      I remember one day I made the mistake of going down to see Wuthering Heights with Laurence Olivier. I had a beer, and thought I was the hero. We went to Canolie Lake and went on the dodgeems. So I went over to this girl and Jack said, “There’s Heathcliff!” I whispered in her ear, “Why can’t there be the scent of heather in your hair?”

      I got panicked. A cop came over and asked me what I’d said, and I told him. I did it for Jack. He flipped over it. He was so impressionable when he was young. He never forgot his buddies.

      Despite his starring runs on the football field and his excellent grades the Columbia recruiters decided that Jack needed a year of prep school before he would be ready for the Ivy League, athletically or academically. His scholarship was arranged to begin with a year at Horace Mann School for Boys, where trainers would introduce him to the theories and methods of Columbia’s famous coach, Lou Little, while the teachers, most of them Ph.D.s, prepared him for Columbia’s tough version of a liberal arts program. Horace Mann is at 246th Street on Van Cortlandt Park, the northernmost reaches of New York City. Jack was to live with Gabrielle’s stepmother, her new husband, and their family, in Brooklyn. It was two hours each way by subway, a journey that would sweep Jack beneath the Manhattan he had dreamed about.

      G. J. Apostolos:

      When he went to Horace Mann Jack’s mother told me, “Now Jack’s going to meet the people he should have grown up with. Jack’s much better off.”

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       THE CITY

       The key to the whole thing was boredom.

      —HAL CHASE

      Hal Chase, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs—Columbia University, ca. 1944. Photo courtesy of Allen Ginsberg.