Empty Phantoms - Interviews and Encounters With Jack Kerouac (Expanded & Revised) by Paul Maher Jr

Author:Paul Maher Jr. [Maher Jr., Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781312917064
Publisher: Lulu.com
Published: 2015-02-13T05:00:00+00:00

“Kerouac Revisited” – Val Duncan, Long Island Newsday (July 18, 1964)

He sits in the rocking chair, a can of beer in his hand. His eyes are startlingly blue and they seem to be staring through the walls. Behind the shag of a black, four-day beard, there's a friendly, honest face with a ready smile.

"Look," he says, being to his sockless feet, encased in a pair of ragged red slippers. He points to calluses on each ankle. "That's from doing so much rocking. Hours of it. How about a shot of Scotch?"

Here is Jack Kerouac, so-called bard of the Beat Generation, the spokes-man for the cool cats and their chicks, the guru of the pad dwellers from Greenwich Village to the Coast. His books, hard and soft covers, have sold in the millions and have been translated into twelve languages.

He spots the photographer and fingers the heavy stubble on his face. "If you're going to take pictures, I'd better get rid of this. He goes off to shave, nicking his cheek in the process. He comes back. You ask him how he's doing these days.

"Come with me," he says, and beer can and shot glass in either hand, leads the way down the corridor of the $24,000 house he owns at 7 Judy Ann Court, Northport. The room has a thousand books on many shelves and everybody's there from Aristophanes to Allen Ginsberg. Two of the walls blaze with abstract paintings and bright postcards from many lands. Classics, primitives, El Greco, Rouault, Picasso, Van Gogh, Rousseau, Gauguin, -- and many more, contrasting with oriental plaques and soft Japanese mezzotints. Special spotlights stab down at his typewriter. He spins a dial and an expensive hi-fl blasts into action. It is far out jazz.

"Now," he says, carefully placing his drinks on coasters so that no stains will mar his books or papers. Then he takes off one of his slippers, centers it precisely in the center of the floor, puts his head down on it and, with the grace of a champion gymnast, elevates his feet until he is standing on his head. Then with continuously perfect form he raises and lowers his feet ten times. The rippling stomach muscles show the strain and the strength. But when it's over he's not even breathing hard. "See," he says, draining his shot glass. "That's how I'm doing these days."

He flexes bulging biceps and slaps his belly, hard as a butcher block. Kerouac, at 42, stands 5 feet, eight inches, weighs 190 pounds without an ounce of fat. It's the kind of body you need to do the things he's done -- played varsity football for Columbia; sailed the Arctic run during the war; thumbed his way from coast to coast; rode the rods to the

Northwest.

It was the telling of his travels across the country and Europe that won him the idolization of 5 million youngsters, hipsters, poets, jazzmen and rich girls in convertibles. In his hooks, they lived vicariously as free souls, roaming the

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