Cop cars slide incuriously by, one, two, three; I’m breaking no law. An hour passes, and now a huge benevolent bodhisattva mailman comes treading toward me at his own pace, the stuffed bag over his shoulder. “How do you like my chances?”, I ask him. He stops and smiles and shakes his head. “These days . . . ” he says. “I dunno. Maybe if you were on Martha’s Vineyard.” And smiling sweetly he leaves me in my spot. No rides, no rides. A photographer materializes, spectral, keen, snapping at me with the long lens. He tells me he works for the MetroWest Daily News and spotted lonely need-a-haircut me as he motored between assignments: apparently I am cutting something of a figure at roadside here, with my sign and my anxiety-shimmer and my whole thing. “Are you an On the Road kind of guy?” he wonders before vanishing again. Two hours now. Two hours of the weeds tickling my boots and the clinging monoxide of anti-climax on my clothes . . . Fuck this, daddy-o. I’m catching the commuter rail.
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THE AUTHOR’S ROAD: "And the things that were to come are too fantastic not to tell.” |
2) Scrolls of the faithful departed
Getting shitfaced in Lowell was a big part of Jack’s life, each time a little worse than the last. Lowell of his dark superstitious French-Canadian roots, Lowell where his older brother, Gerard, died aged nine, surrounded by nuns who were convinced the God-minded little boy was a saint (birds perching on his fingertips etc.), Lowell where Jack was a lion of a high-school football champ and also a swooning bisexual bard. . . . Slowly the lower brain claimed him, region of racism, misogyny, and boorishness, his “notself” as he identified it. Terrible ironies: after his great Beat subversion of the masculine, he became a blowhard in a bar. After claiming all America as his birthright, he became a hometown casualty. But out in Lowell right now (part of my reason for going) they have on display his highlight: the original 1951 scroll of On the Road. I want to see it, I have to see it.Visions from the train: a railroad worker in an orange vest, wired up with his iPod, playing frantic fiddley air guitar to the industrial emptiness. In my bones I know he is listening to Ratt. And then out by Wedgemere the first leaves turning, the sacred heart furnace of fall beginning to light up the trees. And then arrival and the trudge into Lowell — spacious, sad, with sketchy men doing loops on bicycles and the turrets of dead mills looking on. But how friendly are the townspeople when you talk to them, how vigorously friendly! A fellow makes me a BLT telling tall tales of youth custody. “This kid would do like three hundred push-ups,” he says, rough-voiced and loud. “Just get down and do ’em — bam! bam! bam! You’d go and take a leak, come back, he’s still doing it. I’m telling you it was SICK, dude.”
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