9781988256184-epub2

by DMP

  “Nah,” I say. “I came here to listen to you guys.”

  “Leave her alone, Diane,” says Charles, but Diane ignores him, smiling. “Well, if you ever feel . . . moved,” she says. I’m pretty sure she’s messing with me, but I’m not going to take the bait.

  “That won’t happen,” I say. “But you guys go ahead.”

  And they do. Read, talk, argue, laugh, sing, and read again. Elise reads about loving someone who won’t love you back, and Diane reads about a baby inside her and what the baby will find when it comes out. Charles reads three of his poems and they’re all sad enough to make you cry.

  After Charles, Gregory Corso reads a poem about marriage, which is really about not getting married, and that makes me think about Gary Daddy-o. Then he does one about laughing sickness and another about hitchhiking and I think, it’s finally my birthday and isn’t it funny? I’m here, where I wanted to be.

  The man in the back puts his cigarette out, and I can see the top of his head. I know he’s been listening to everyone but no one’s talking to him and he doesn’t say anything. He stretches his legs out and one of his boots falls onto the floor.

  “So what do you think?” Elise asks, and I turn back to her.

  “Well, yeah,” I say. “I love it, I mean, it’s . . . beautiful. Everything, I mean, all of it.”

  “No,” Elise says. “I mean, what do you think about giving us one of your own?”

  “Oh, no—not after listening to you guys.”

  “Oh, come on,” says Diane. “We’re all too drunk to know better anyway. We won’t remember a thing you say.”

  They all start laughing and then I hear a voice coming from the back of the room. The man who’s lying on the couch starts reciting, and not two words come out of his mouth when I feel like I want to die.

  Sweet fleet beat of the street

  Rising heat

  From the white of the sidewalk

  And the conga sound of the

  Bonga bonga bongos

  “Please stop,” I say. And he does.

  I can tell they’re all staring at me, but if I look up I think I’ll run out or explode or something. I’m seeing Gary Daddy-o juggling his oranges, and of course I can’t tell them that. So I just look down at my shoes, letting my hair fall over my eyes.

  And then I hear the couch creaking, and I can tell the man who just spoke is getting up and either putting on his boots or kicking them off. Now he’s walking over here. I want to look up but I can’t. And then I do.

  He squats in front of me, and I know right then.

  He opens a notebook and hands it to me; I recognize it right away. I take the notebook without taking my eyes off his face—the face I wanted to see for years—and did see, except I didn’t know it. He didn’t want to tell me who he was the night I met him. I don’t know why I thought he’d look like a statue or something, but he’s the opposite—a regular guy with wrinkly jeans and hair on his forearms. It was him, sitting on the stoop beside me with the girl draped around him like a boa constrictor.

  It was Kerouac.

  He’s in a blue shirt with rolled-up sleeves, and his hair is combed away from his forehead, which is long and broad. He’s bigger than I thought but, at the same time, thinner, and I get the feeling he knows everything about me and everyone else here. But he knows how to wait and listen, too.

  “You okay?” he says finally.

  I nod.

  He points to the poem I wrote in his notebook. “I like this.”

  I’m too embarrassed to talk about it, so I change the subject.

  “Did you really write a book on toilet paper?”

  For some reason that makes everyone laugh.

  “It was tracing paper,” he says. “Toilet paper was a rumor.”

  “Sorry,” I say, and I can feel my face getting hotter by the second.

  “No big deal.” His eyes twinkle like we have a secret between us. But he doesn’t say anything more and I realize he’s not going to talk about his book or anything else he wrote. He wants me to give him something, but I don’t know what it would be.

  “Are you okay?” he asks again. The sound of his voice tells me he’s really asking, not pretending to ask. I think he really does want to know.

  “My mom is getting married,” I say. “But not to my dad so I don’t know if I’ll see him much anymore.” My mouth starts twitching and I put my hand over it so he won’t see.

  He nods like he wants me to keep talking, but I can’t. After a minute he says, “Yeah,” and then Corso nods, too, and I realize they’re all with me. Everyone in this room had something happen to them, maybe not exactly like what happened to me, but similar. And in a way, that’s why they’re here.

  I look down at the notebook again.

  Every spring

  They sprout like toadstools

  In the key of heat

  I look up at Kerouac. “I don’t know.”

  “What?”

  “It’s not what I want right now.”

  “What do you want?” he says. And I tell him.

  “Sad old song

  winding up inside my head.

  Alone like the song says,

  in a million songs,

  alone.

  I’m looking for something, I think you’d call it

  what I had.

  But I couldn’t tell you what it was,

  just that I had it,

  like a penny or my shoes,

  bowl of cereal or a kiss.

  What I had

  and what I have, two different countries.

  But tonight there’s only a sad old song

  singing over, over, over again.”

  I look down again and stop. I want to keep going but I can’t. And, for a minute, it’s really quiet. And then Kerouac says, “You have to write that, Ruby. You have to write that down.”

  “I think they’re going to make me go to school,” I say softly.

  “It’s okay,” he says. “Write.”

  He hands me a pen and I scribble the words into the notebook. And when I look at him again, he’s sitting on the floor in front of me.

  “Do you feel better?”

  “Sort of,” I say, and he laughs.

  “I had to go to reform school,” Corso says. “But I ran away.”

  I turn to him. “Where’d you go?”

  “Anywhere I could.”

  “I want to go to Paris.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Me, too.”

  Jack tears out the page with my poem and hands it to me. I fold it and put it in my pocket.

  “Where else you want to go?” he asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I have a friend who’s going to Mexico, but not because she wants to.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Her father went on strike at work so they’re sending the family back to Mexico. That’s where they’re from.”

  “You want to write that, too,” Jack says. I want to tell him about Manuela, about the hunger strike, about all the things I did after I met him. I want to tell him it’s my birthday, I want to tell him a million things, but I know that’s how everyone feels.

  I hear snoring in the corner and look over at Yogi, who’s fast asleep.

  “S’all right,” Charles says. “He sleeps here a lot of nights.”

  “I want to come back,” I say. “Can I come back sometime?”

  “We’re here every weekend,” Peter says. “Not all of us, but most.”

  I nod, watching Elise get up to read again. Just as she’s about to start, she looks at me. “Don’t worry, Ruby. I mean . . . you’ll get to Paris, you know? I think we all get where we’re going . . . eventually.”

  She starts reading, but this time it’s one of Ginsberg’s poems, ca
lling out to his mother and saying farewell. It makes me think about saying that to Nell-mom and I decide I’m not ready. I’m mad at her but I still love her, even if she is driving me nuts right now.

  I need to sit tight for a while, maybe meditate like Yogi so she’ll get tired of Chaz and go back to Gary Daddy-o. In the meantime, I have to keep going over to his place and make sure he doesn’t stay away from us. Keep his hopes up, and keep him and Ray coming home.

  Right now, though, I’m sitting in a room full of the greatest poets in the world. I want to hear Kerouac read and I have a feeling he will before the night’s over. It looks like I can come to Chumley’s every once in a while and maybe write something really good one day if I ever get around to it. I don’t think I’ll ever be as good as these guys, but you never know.

  Like Elise says, we all get where we’re going eventually. So maybe the stuff you go through when you’re a kid, no matter how rotten, is what spurs you to get wherever you want to be. The main thing is not to give in to what everyone else wants and keep doing what you do best. Because, when all is said and done, you know—that’s all you mostly have. That’s what Beats know. What it means in here and on all the Beat streets.

  Every spring

  In the key of heat

  Sweet, fleet Beat Street

  That’s what it means.

  Reader’s Guide

  When I started work on The Beat on Ruby’s Street, I was looking for kids. Were there any in Greenwich Village in the 1950s? Were their parents artists? Some of the Beat poets had children, but they didn’t talk about them much, and not much has been written about their lives. After a while, I gave up trying to find a real kid and created one of my own. I’d always wanted to grow up in a place saturated with art and artists, so I folded the childhood I wished for into a story. And, as stories do, it slipped away and turned into The Beat on Ruby’s Street.

  I can tell you a lot about the Beat generation, but so much has been written I think it best to give you a quick sampler and link you up to websites that will help you find more. One of my favorite stories, and the one I started with, is about Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road being written on a long, continuous roll of paper.

  You may think Beats started writing poetry in the 1950s, but things really got rolling in the 1940s in New York and San Francisco. Jack Kerouac supposedly coined the term “Beats,” which meant beaten down by society with no prospects for success. Poets like Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Gregory Corso were part of the scene and became known for questioning authority and mainstream America.

  Allen Ginsberg’s first book Howl and Other Poems is thought to have spurred the first wave of the Beat generation’s poetry. Howl was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s press City Lights; and Ferlinghetti was brought to trial the next year on obscenity charges. The judge ruled the poem was not obscene and the case brought enormous attention to Ginsberg and other Beat poets.

  Though the most famous Beat artists are Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and William Burroughs, there are tons of Beat writers whose work is exceptional, including women who played a significant role in the inspiration for this book. Elise Cowen, Diane di Prima, Hettie Jones, Denise Levertov, and Anne Waldman wrote superbly during the years when Beat poetry was flourishing—and there were many more.

  Movies like Howl, On the Road, and Kill Your Darlings can show you how Beat writers are portrayed by Hollywood, but the only real way to find out what they cared about is to read their work. I hope you’ll check out some of my favorites:

  “Constantly Risking Absurdity”—Lawrence Ferlinghetti

  “My Alba”—Allen Ginsberg

  “Weather”—Hettie Jones

  “Trees”—Jack Kerouac

  “People at Night”—Denise Levertov

  To learn more, read This Is the Beat Generation by John Clellon Holmes from the New York Times, The Beat Book (edited by Anne Waldman), and The Portable Beat Reader by Ann Charters.

  Questions for Discussion

  Given Ruby’s patchy eating habits, do you think she was trying to take the orange from the fruit stand? Or was she falsely accused?

  What kinds of subjects do you think Ruby and her friends cover at Blue Skies? What would you choose to study if you were with them?

  Ruby believes poetry (and art) aren’t good for anything except “making you feel better.” Do you agree? Why or why not?

  Things seem a lot easier for Ray than for his sister, Ruby. Is it because of Ray’s personality, or how people treat him? Do you think there are other reasons things seem to go better for Ray?

  There’s a saying that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” What choices could the characters have made so things might have turned out differently?

  Does Ruby’s relationship with Manuela change her life? What does Manuela learn from Ruby?

  Is Ruby’s mother making the right decision in order to bring Ruby home?

  What role does Ruby’s cat, Solange, play in the book?

  Sophie’s mother is a comedy writer, which was extremely rare for women in 1958. Can you find any examples of other nontraditional roles played by women in the 1950s?

  What do you think Ruby learns about herself at the end of the book?

  About the Author

  Jenna Zark is a columnist, lyricist, playwright, and novelist. Her play A Body of Water was published by Dramatists Play Service and produced regionally after its debut at Circle Repertory in New York. Other plays were produced in the Twin Cities, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and St. Louis. As a former staff writer at Scholastic Choices magazine, Zark wrote extensively for middle school and junior high students on a range of topics. Zark’s columns, poetry, essays, and articles have been published in the online magazine TC Jewfolk, Stoneboat literary magazine, the Jewish daily newspaper The Forward, and numerous other publications. Zark is also a member of a composer-lyricist group in the Twin Cities. She’s still trying to figure out if it’s harder to write a play, a novel, or a song. To share your thoughts on that or to learn more, please visit jennazark.com.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  At the Station

  Underground

  House of Sorocco’s

  Kerouac Dreams

  Blue Skies

  Little Nell’s

  Maybe

  Silky

  Remember This

  Regular Real

  Organizadora

  School

  Voices and Visitors

  We Shall Overcome

  Bleak and Blue

  Rotten Unveiled

  Daddy-o’s Here

  Chaz

  Fake Day

  Real Beats

  Reader’s Guide

  Questions for Discussion

  About the Author

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