T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

In the next instant he loomed up on the table, pulled out a chair and dropped into it with a thump that reverberated the length of the dining room. “Gina, listen,” he said, as if they were right in the middle of a conversation and the man with the insect face didn’t exist, “about last night, and you’re not going to believe this, but it was—”

And then he faltered. Gina’s mouth was hanging open — and this was a mouth that could cushion any blow, a mouth that knew the taste of leather and the shock of the punch that came out of nowhere. “Christ, Les,” she said, “what happened to you — you’re a mess. Have you looked in the mirror?”

He watched her exchange a glance with the man across the table, and then he was talking again, trying to get it out, the night, the way they’d come at him, and they weren’t just your average muggers, they were the law for Christ’s sake and how could anybody expect him to defend her from that?

“Les,” she was saying, “Les, I think you’ve had too much to drink—”

“I’m trying to tell you something,” he said, and his own voice sounded strange to him, distant and whining, the voice of a loser, a fat man, the maker of bad guesses and worse decisions.

That was when the red-haired man spoke up, his eyes twitching in his head. “Who is this jerk, anyway?”

Gina — Gina the Cheetah — gave him a look that was like a left jab. “Shut up, Jerry,” she said. And then, turning back to Lester, “Les, this is Jerry — my manager?” She tried to inject a little air into her voice, though he could see she wasn’t up to it: “Seems like he can’t live without his meal ticket, even for three days.”

Jerry slouched in his chair. He had nothing to say.

Lester looked from Gina to Jerry and back again. He was very far gone, he knew that, but still, even through his haze, he was beginning to see something in those two faces that shut him out, that slammed the door with a bang and turned the key in the lock. He had no right to Gina or this table or this hotel either. He was nothing. He couldn’t even make it through the first round.

Gina’s voice came to him as if from a great distance—“Les, really, maybe you ought to go and lay down for a while”—and then he was on his feet. He didn’t say Yes or No or even See you later —he just turned away from the table, wove his way through the restaurant, down the stairs, and back out into the night.

It was fully dark now, black dark, and the shadows had settled under the skeletons of the trees. He wasn’t thinking about Gina or Jerry or the empty apartment on 24th Street or even April and the kid in the Suburban. There was no justice, no revenge, no reason — there was just this, just the beach and the night and the criminal elements. And when he got to the place by the lagoon and the stink of decay rose to his nostrils, he went straight for the blackest clot of shadow and the rasping murmur at the center of it. “You!” he shouted, all the air raging in his lungs. “Hey, you!”

(1997)

Yeah, I was Beat. We were all Beat. Hell, I’m Beat now — is, was, and always will be. I mean, how do you stop? But this isn’t about me — I’m nobody, really, just window-dressing on the whole mother of Bop freight-train-hopping holy higher than Tokay Beat trip into the heart of the American night. No, what I wanted to tell you about is Jack. And Neal and Allen and Bill and all the rest, too, and how it all went down, because I was there, I was on the scene, and there was nobody Beater than me.

Picture this: seventeen years old, hair an unholy mess and a little loden-green beret perched up on top to keep it in place, eighty-three cents in my pocket and a finger-greased copy of The Subterraneans in my rucksack along with a Charlie Parker disc with enough pops, scratches and white noise worked into the grooves to fill out the soundtrack of a sci-fi flick, hitched all the way from Oxnard, California, and there I am on Jack’s front porch in Northport, Long Island, December twenty-three, nineteen fifty-eight. It’s cold. Bleak. The town full of paint-peeling old monster houses, gray and worn and just plain old, like the whole horse-blindered tired-out East Coast locked in its gloom from October to April with no time off for good behavior. I’m wearing three sweaters under my Levi’s jacket and still I’m holding on to my ribs and I can feel the snot crusting round my nostrils and these mittens I bummed from an old lady at the Omaha bus station are stiff with it, and I knock, wondering if there’s an officially cool way to knock, a hipster’s way, a kind of secret Dharma Bums code-knock I don’t know about.

Knock-knock. Knockata-knockata, knock-knock-knock.

My first surprise was in store: it wasn’t Jack, the gone hep satori-seeking poet god of the rails and two-lane blacktop, who answered the door, but a big blocky old lady with a face like the bottom of a hiking boot. She was wearing a dress the size of something you’d drape over a car to keep the dust off it, and it was composed of a thousand little red and green triangles with gold trumpets and silver angels squeezed inside of them. She gave me the kind of look that could peel the tread off a recapped tire, the door held just ajar. I shuddered: she looked like somebody’s mother.

My own mother was three thousand miles away and so square she was cubed; my dog, the one I’d had since childhood, was dead, flattened out by a big rig the week earlier; and I’d flunked English, History, Calculus, Art, Phys. Ed., Music and Lunch. I wanted adventure, the life of the road, freewheeling chicks in berets and tea and bongos and long Benzedrine-inflected bullshit sessions that ran on into morning, I wanted Jack and everything he stood for, and here was this old lady. “Uh,” I stammered, fighting to control my voice, which was just then deepening from the adolescent squeak I’d had to live with since consciousness had hit, “does, uh, Jack Kerouac live here, I mean, by any chance?”

“Go back where you came from,” the old lady said. “My Jacky don’t have time for no more of this nonsense.” And that was it: she shut the door in my face.

My Jacky!

It came to me then: this was none other than Jack’s mother, the Bop-nurturing freewheeling wild Madonna herself, the woman who’d raised up the guru and given him form, mother of us all. And she’d locked me out. I’d come three thousand miles, her Jacky was my Jack, and I was cold through to the bone, stone broke, scared, heartsick and just about a lungful of O 2away from throwing myself down in the slush and sobbing till somebody came out and shot me. I knocked again.

“Hey, Ma,” I heard from somewhere deep inside the house, and it was like the rutting call of some dangerous beast, a muted angry threatening Bop-benny-and-jug-wine roar, the voice of the man himself, “what the hell is this, I’m trying to concentrate in here.”

And then the old lady: “It ain’t nothing, Jacky.”

Knock-knock. Knockata-knockata, knock-knock-knock. I paradiddled that door, knocked it and socked it, beat on it like it was the bald flat-topped dome of my uptight pencil-pushing drudge of a bourgeois father himself, or maybe Mr. Detwinder, the principal at Oxnard High. I knocked till my knuckles bled, a virtuoso of knocking, so caught up in the rhythm and energy of it that it took me a minute to realize the door was open and Jack himself standing there in the doorway. He looked the way Belmondo tried to look in Breathless , loose and cool in a rumpled T-shirt and jeans, with a smoke in one hand, a bottle of muscatel in the other.