Looking for Jack Kerouac by Barbara Shoup

Author:Barbara Shoup
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 9781938126673
Publisher: Engine Books
Published: 2014-07-21T04:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

Over the next couple of weeks, Duke and I walked the sections I’d marked off on the map, Duke forging ahead in the idiotic Hawaiian shirt and RayBans he’d taken to wearing wherever he went; me tagging along, feeling weirder and weirder every day.

We cruised the bars at night, getting back to the Y just under the wire. I’d fall into bed, exhausted, but Duke would get out the Big Chief and work on Beat Highway. He went through one notebook, then another. He was Jack Bliss. I was Rocco Minetti. That’s all I knew. Sometimes he’d stop, pen poised, beatific.

“I’ve got to say, this shit is brilliant, Paulie. Seriously. You won’t believe it.”

“So let me read it,” I’d say.

But he always refused—and I couldn’t sneak a peek at what he’d written, either. He kept the Big Chiefs, along with all the little notebooks he’d filled up, in a metal lock box he bought at the dime store and wore the key on a chain around his neck. He slept with the frigging thing under his pillow.

He was so obnoxious sometimes. He knew everything; he had an opinion about everything. Those summer nights, on break at the mill, we discussed things. Mostly, we agreed; sometimes, though, we’d argue in a friendly, spirited way. Now he didn’t want to have a discussion, he just wanted to impress whoever he was talking to with what he knew.

At least I’m not getting married, I’d tell myself. That’s something to feel good about.

Well, for about two seconds. Because my next thought always was, I also wouldn’t be getting married if I’d had the balls to tell Kathy the truth about how I felt. When she started in on the wedding plans, all I’d have had to do—once—was tell her no.

Eventually, we began to catch some trail of Jack, mostly during our nightly cruise of the St. Petersburg bars and pool halls. He’d been seen at the Chatterbox, the Twilite Lounge. Somebody had played pool with him at the Tic Toc. A guy who worked at Haslam’s Books told us he came in now and then and moved his books from the bottom shelf where the “K’s” were and put them, cover out, at chest level so you couldn’t help but see them.

He drank shots with beer chasers, we also found out. Duke kept track of all this in his notebook. He started drinking shots with beer chasers every night, in honor of Jack, until he got so drunk he forgot all about looking for him and started trying to make it with some girl, telling her the increasingly dramatic story about hitchhiking down here—which was my only clue about what the novel he was writing in the Big Chiefs might be like.

He made fun of our first ride—Hank, singing “Moon River”—and mimicked his spiel about how Barry Goldwater was going to save us from the Commies. Duke said, “When he dropped us off, I stood in the middle of the highway and yelled at the top of my lungs, ‘Fuck you, old man,’ as he drove away.

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