Jack Kerouac is Dead to Me

by Gae Polisner

  This is better, this being a grown-up thing. To hell with high school. To hell with Bobby Masters.

  I down the rest of the drink, and my father holds up my empty glass to the light and gives me an approving look. “Shall we order you another?,” he asks, which causes my mother to get that face she gets right before she’s about to become apoplectic, when I’m saved by a quiet commotion that ripples through the bar. Heads turn, bow together in whispers and secretive glances, cast toward Gunther’s front door.

  “What’s going on?” my father asks.

  My mother leans across the table toward him. “Kerouac,” she stage whispers, indicating less unobtrusively than she thinks in the direction of a handsome man who strides in our direction, stopping at a table not far from ours, to chat with some people he obviously knows. My eyes catch his, and I look away. My mother leans conspiratorially closer and says, “Check his feet. I hear he wanders around town barefoot, without any shoes.”

  “That’s what barefoot is, and he has shoes on, Ma,” I say, tapping my empty glass that Dad has returned to the table, to let him know I’m waiting on another. “For God’s sake, let him be. He doesn’t need strangers gawking at him.”

  Except I am having a hard time not staring myself. He’s rather good-looking in person. Dark hair, chiseled cheekbones, if a sort of sad, hollow look in his eyes. There’s no doubt it’s him. Anyone who lives within a ten-mile radius knows he moved in with his mother a few years ago. To escape from the commercial success of On the Road.

  I had friends who’d seen him moseying around town, but they don’t care like I do. They’re not well read. But I’ve read practically everything he’s written. Not just On the Road three times, but The Subterraneans, and I’m right in the middle of Dharma Bums.

  “My word, he’s handsome,” my mother says, leaning in again. “Don’t you think?”

  I do, but I can’t bear her fawning, so I ignore her, which isn’t exactly fair. She’s closer to his age than I am. But only one of us is married. Either way, I’m grateful when the waitress returns with my second drink. I suck on the whiskey-soaked cherries before sipping it quickly down.

  I’m sure it’s the alcohol that emboldens me. When Kerouac heads to the cigarette machine, I excuse myself from our table, and head in the direction of the ladies room. As I reach him, I stumble. Years later, when I dare tell the story, I’ll say “purposely,” but likely I catch my heel in the uneven slats of the wood floor. And coupled with the whiskey, well, I stumble right where he stands, and he—Jack Kerouac—catches me, graciously, by the arm.

  “You okay, miss?” he asks, and I have to fight to stop myself from swooning.

  “Yes. Thanks.” Though I’ve steadied myself, his fingers remain linked around my forearm. His intense brown eyes search mine. Does he think he knows me? Is it some sort of request? Invitation?

  “I must have caught my heel on something,” I say, giggling. “It’s my eighteenth birthday. I’ve had a drink or two. Legally.” I smile on the word “legally,” though I’m not sure why. The room spins a little, leaving me glad he still has a hold on me. I glance back toward our table, wondering if my parents are watching, my father ready to spring up to protect me, but the hall curves slightly, leaving us out of view.

  “I’m Jack,” he says. “And I’m legal, too.” His eyes take me in, sending my heart spiraling into the pit of my stomach.

  “Ruth,” I respond. “And I know who you are. I’m a reader. A fan. Dharma Bums is my absolute favorite so far. I’m reading it right now. Well, not right now.” I giggle foolishly again. “At home, is what I mean…”

  “Well, then,” he says, and the next thing I know, or at least remember, we’ve gone out the back door, and I’m pressed up against the building, and Kerouac’s lips are on mine, and Bobby Masters is nothing more than a dim memory, some childish fancy, I’ll barely remember in twenty years.

  LATE MAY

  TENTH GRADE

  “A shithole. I told you.”

  Max stops the bike at the end of the long gravel driveway surrounded by overgrown yellow-brown grass, and motions at a small house, green paint badly peeling, and two of its four front windows covered in plywood. “You sure you want to do this?” Next to the garage, an old maroon Ford Taurus sits, both its taillights knocked out.

  I’m suddenly not sure. Now I get why it’s taken him so long to bring me here.

  “Don’t worry. He’s not home,” he says, rolling the bike up next to the car. “This piece of shit doesn’t run. It used to belong to my mother.” I notice the bumper sticker, a faded red-and-white thing with an apple that reads: “Teachers Do It with Class.” “I’m only sorry you won’t get to meet the old man today,” he says, turning off the bike and removing his helmet. “He’s a real charmer.”

  I take off my helmet and hand it to him, and he hangs it from the handle of the bike. As I follow him around the side of the house, and up a flight of dilapidated porch steps through an unlocked side door, he mumbles, “Remember, Jailbait, I warned you.”

  * * *

  The inside of Max’s house is sadder than anything I could have imagined. Water stains on the ceiling, and actual holes in the dirty white walls. The furniture looks like it came from a thrift store, and the worn carpeting smells of mildew, smoke, and stale beer.

  As we walk past one of the holes, Max reaches a fisted hand out to it. “For when he gets really mad. God forbid he patch it up after,” he says.

  “I’m so sorry—” I start, but he shrugs.

  “Don’t be. Better the Sheetrock than me, right?”

  When we pass the empty recliner in the living room, Max kicks it. “And here we have Exhibit A: the Beer King’s throne. The good news is, when he runs out of beer at home, and TV shows, he heads out to Healy’s for the duration. Especially easy to do when you don’t have cable. Basically, haven’t seen him since the day before yesterday.”

  “How does he afford that?”

  “Friend of his owns it, so he’s got a tab there. He’s sort of their mascot, or advertisement, or something—seat at the bar near the window and all that, so the place always looks open for business, and since he can’t work a real job on account of his back…”

  I wait, but he doesn’t finish. I do a quick count of the empties on the table next to the chair. Four cans of Budweiser, two bottles of Michelob, and an ashtray filled with cigarette butts, all of which make me wonder if Max also drinks too much, more than he should, more than most kids our age, more than a guy with an alcoholic father should. But I don’t dare ask. He didn’t want me coming here in the first place.

  “What did he used to do?” I ask instead.

  “Lineman, electric company. Got hurt on the job six years ago. That’s when everything went to shit. The year after, my mom left, and I got held back.”

  I knew Max had been held back in middle school, but I wasn’t sure why. There were rumors, all sorts of dumb stuff, but I learned months ago not to believe what other people had to say about Max Gordon. No one knows him the way I do. They only pretend to. I do the math in my head. Six years ago, Max was thirteen. So his mother left five years ago, when he was fourteen.

  “You coming, Jailbait?” He’s stopped halfway down the hall.

  “Doesn’t he work at all?” I ask, catching up.

  “Nope, still out on disability. He claims the herniated disks in his neck and his back are stopping him, but I’ve seen him lift a forty-pound case of Budweisers, no problem. He was probably drunk off his ass when he got hurt in the first place. They pay him something, but I’m not sure what. Enough that they avoided a lawsuit.” We stop at a closed bedroom door, and he adds, “A little better in here. You won’t catch any diseases, at least,” and he turns the handle and pushes it open.

  SPRING

  END OF EIGHTH GRADE

  Principal Goldstein marches us single file through the heavy blue double doors and toward the gym. My nerves are humming, and I’m tempted to take your hand, but I don’t.
We’re too old for that. We’ll be in high school soon.

  “Steven Shilling,” you whisper, nodding as we pass a cute boy with shaggy black hair who stands, one leg bent up, leaning against the baby-blue-painted brick wall, talking to a pretty girl with red hair. “He’s friends with Ethan’s friend Patrick. And Adie McKane. Co-captain of the girls’ soccer team.”

  Principal Goldstein turns and holds a finger to her lips as we enter the gym for the various boring speeches by the faculty and administration.

  After, we head toward the C wing where the science classrooms are. You turn to me constantly to mouth things: people you know through Ethan, more gossip. It’s all new to me, but you know not only people, but the structure of the school itself, its classrooms and hallways, having been here plenty of times for concerts and honor society inductions and award ceremonies for your star brother, Ethan. No doubt he’ll be picked Homecoming King end of senior year.

  “Ethan told me,” you whisper not softly enough as we pass room C104, its door bearing a sign that reads: “Never Trust an Atom, They Make Up Everything,” “that Kiki Munson smashed it with Max Gordon right in there, after school, behind the high tables in the Bunsen burner lab.”

  “Who smashed what?” I whisper back, more to seem interested than because I am. I don’t know who either of those people are. You cover your mouth to stifle a laugh.

  “It,” you say, your eyes bulging wide like I’m dumb. “You know, her. It. Right there on the floor. The janitor caught them, and Ethan says that Gordon kid tried to bribe him with a twenty-dollar bill. To stay and let them finish up. Like, not even caring what they were doing. Ethan says everyone calls it the Munson Burner Incident. Get it?”

  “I doubt that happened,” I say. “Did he see it?”

  “Well, no. Not him, but his friend Patrick’s friend Boris. And he told Patrick, who told Ethan, who told me. But I don’t think he’d make that up.”

  “Whatever. It’s dumb,” I say, loud enough to cause Principal Goldstein to turn again and sternly pronounce, “Girls, please, quiet. We all need to behave like grown-ups here.”

  I give you a look, and you say, “Sorry, Principal Goldstein, I’m just trying to show my friend which room is which,” and you smile too sweetly, which makes me want to cringe. You seem different today, insincere. Sure, we always share secrets, but this feels show-offy and mean, as if you’re trying to prove you’re better than me. That you’re in on things I don’t know about or understand. Besides, I’m sure it’s all a stupid rumor, and it’s no one’s business who does what with whom, even if Ethan says so. And anyway, how many girls would want to go to the back of a science room with him, right? My breath hitches at the thought.

  I follow quietly until we reach the freshman biology lab where, speaking of Ethan, he’s meeting us, partly because he’s Mr. Slattery’s favorite, so he’s one of the three students walking groups through “Your Typical Day in Bio Lab,” and partly because he’ll be buddying up with us the rest of the day when we break off into individual schedules—one senior assigned for every new freshman, and you made sure I got to pair up with you.

  “Hey, Eth,” I say, when we’ve gathered around his lab table. He smiles at me, eyes crinkling through his safety goggles.

  “We wear these for most of our labs,” he says, tapping at them. “Chemistry or bio, and there’s an emergency sprinkler up there, in case it’s needed.” He points up to a bronze sprinkler head in the ceiling and adds, “But don’t think you won’t get detention for setting it off on purpose, and you don’t want to end up in detention with the Ellises and the Gordons of the world.”

  Ethan winks at me, right as the girl next to me leans across to you and says, “I would. At least with Max Gordon. Seriously. Have you seen Max Gordon?”

  You push her back, and Ethan moves on with his demonstration; everyone, including Mr. Slattery, still laughing, though, for the life of me, I’m not completely sure at what.

  LATE MAY

  TENTH GRADE

  If Max’s house is sad, his room completely breaks my heart, not because of how neat and clean it is, made up with a green-and-blue plaid blanket and heavy matching curtains on the window, but because of the bookshelves. One whole small wall covered in them.

  “Don’t laugh, I made those,” he says, pointing to the curtains.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I would never lie to you about curtains.”

  I laugh, and wrap my arms around his waist and bury my nose in his sweet heady scent. “You’re seriously going to tell me you sew?”

  “Not exactly. Not sew.” He shakes me off, and walks over and flips the bottom edge of a panel up toward me and says, “But I can staple pretty well.”

  I wrap my arms around him again and kiss the back of his neck. More than ever, I want to give myself to him, if not all of me, everything, then at least something big, to make him feel good. “Well, they’re nice. It’s really nice in here,” I offer.

  “Don’t go overboard.”

  “I’m not. I’m serious. So, you never told me … Does your mom ever come home? Visit, at least? Something?”

  It occurs to me how little I really know about him, at least personal stuff like that about his family. Only what he’s volunteered, which isn’t much. And I want to know everything.

  “Nah, she’s a little too far for that.”

  “Wait, where is she again? Japan?”

  “Hong Kong.”

  “Geez.” It’s hard enough that my father is in California. I don’t know how Max deals with her being on another continent.

  “Sit,” he says. “Enough with the inquisition.” He nods at his bed, so I sit, and run a finger along the outline of the squares in his quilt wondering if he makes his bed every morning, or if he just made it today, knowing he was going to ask me over.

  “Tell me why she went? I swear I won’t ask more after that.”

  He pulls out the chair from his desk that’s across from me, a small wood one, like it’s meant for a kid in elementary school, and straddles it, facing me. “She got an offer to teach. They pay well there. And we needed the money. Plus it was a chance to get away from my pops. Enough?”

  “But what about you?”

  Max shrugs. “What about me? She wanted me to come, and I guess it’s pretty much a standing invitation. But when you’re fourteen, and all your friends are here, well, Hong Kong isn’t the first place you want to split to.”

  He stands up, walks to his window, and peers out, and for a second I panic, like maybe he’s heard a car. But he lets the curtain fall back and says, “Or maybe I felt sorry for the bastard because he was a disabled drunk mess, and couldn’t bear to leave him all alone.”

  “Your dad?”

  “Yeah, who else? He’s a dick, but it’s an illness. And he wasn’t always the asshole he is now.”

  “So, what about California?”

  Max sits down again, rests his arms on the back of the chair, and looks hard at me. “What about it?”

  “You’ll be leaving him soon.”

  “This is true.”

  “And?”

  “And I guess I’ve paid my dues. And now I’m going to get us some beers. As for our parents, well, they gotta grow up sometime, right, Jailbait? Spread their wings and fly.”

  JULY

  BEFORE FIFTH GRADE

  “Mom! Dad! I think they may be hatching!”

  It’s a Saturday night and Mom and Dad couldn’t find a sitter, so they’re stuck home watching a movie. “Seriously!” I call, rushing back down the hallway to my room. I don’t want to miss anything. I plop myself at my desk and sit motionless like I have so many hours this past week, staring at the big glass bowl Dad bought for me when I said I wanted to raise butterflies at home, like we did in Mrs. Stanley’s class.

  “You don’t even need a kit like she had, or anything,” I’d told him. “I watched a video and you can just pick parsley stems and put them in a big jar or bowl with the caterpillars right on the
m. No food or supplies. They do all the work by themselves.”

  Dad had found me the perfect bowl, and I’d spent an afternoon parsleyworm hunting in Dad’s vegetable garden at the back of our yard. Two days later, at least a few of the caterpillars had attached their heads and tails to the stems like the video showed, and the next morning, like magic, I’d awoken to find those few disappeared inside pale green-brown chrysalises, nearly camouflaged amongst the fading parsley leaves.

  Four days more and one of the chrysalises has turned transparent and is trembling, and Mom and Dad are going to miss it, and I’m starting to get sleepy, so I’m worried I might miss it, too. But I can’t sit still, and I don’t want to watch it hatch all alone.

  I jump up, run to my door, and shout for them to come again. I can hear them in the living room, laughing and talking and probably drinking wine—or, worse, smoking—the volume on whatever movie turned up loud.

  Can’t they pause it and come?

  But it could take hours for all I know, maybe even till tomorrow, before it emerges, and anyway, I don’t want them with me if they’re going to act all stupid and stoned.

  “What’s that weird smell? Is that pot?” you had asked one of the first times you slept over.

  “Clove cigarettes,” I’d lied, and the next morning I’d told Mom and Dad I’d tell all my teachers if they ever did that again while you or any of my other friends were over.

  Now I carefully move the bowl to the floor of my room, grab my laptop and pillow and blanket from my bed, and set up camp in front of it. It’s not even 10:30 p.m. Maybe if I FaceTime you, you’ll stay awake and watch with me.

  I call regular first. You answer on the second ring.

  “Hey, Aubs,” I say. “It’s me. Are you sleeping? Turn on FaceTime. Can you? I think the Swallowtails are hatching.”

  “Really?” You sound confused. Maybe I woke you.

  “You were sleeping, weren’t you?”