A Lonesome Wind Blowing Through Rockaway – Jack Kerouac
by A.M. Amodeo
He walks down Cross Bay Boulevard to sit at the beach, Rock-Rock-Rockaway Beach, to smoke a cigarette, in his clothes that have the square lines of plain work clothes. No fashion plate he, of the broad shoulders and smoldering eyes. He looks around as he walks, smoking, thinking alternately that he is in Walt Whitman’s paradise of seething humanity, and that he is glad, glad that the city sleeps, that he is alone, that he is in a lonely hell, but for his cigarettes and his hip flask.
Allen, in California or New Jersey or on the couch in some friend’s apartment in Manhattan, writes him a letter, telling him when the pay phone will ring in the drugstore downstairs. Memere does not have a phone. In Queens at night, Kerouac might as well be walking in the desert. Forty years later, I will ride my bike down Cross Bay Boulevard, on my way home from the beach. In fifty, I will drive over the bridge in my car in the late evening looking at the still-empty streets. In Queens, people go home and stay there.
Who would Jack have passed at two a.m. in 1949? No one. No one would have been out walking. The rare car might have passed by, some guilty husband slinking home, some teenaged son in his father’s car, hoping his parents were asleep.
Memere is in bed. She has to work in the morning and Jack is a strapping man, although unemployed. The streets are darker, and the waves break the moon’s reflection into shards more scattered than thoughts. Memere sleeps well enough.
Jack will sit on the cool sand, watching the waves, taking drinks from his flask. When he finishes his cigarette, he will lie down in the sand with his hands behind his head, regarding the stars. Regarding the stars, we are all points of darkness, he will think. Then the warmth of the drink will relax him, the rhythm of the sea will stir him, and he will think of a woman, naked in the sun, coming to straddle him. He will smile, and taste salt air. During this fantasy, he will compose a Zen sex haiku. Woman on my penis, the violent waves wash me completely away. This will be one of the ones his editor rejects. When he dies, Memere will find it in his rucksack and destroy it, embarrassed. Why couldn’t you write something nice, she will ask his empty room.
We own you now, Jack, because you are dead, and because you don’t care. Allen cared. He is dead too.
One or two of your old girlfriends are still around. I have seen them at poetry readings. One dresses entirely in black with black tights and tunic top and black ballet slippers, even though she is sixty, because she cannot bear to give you up, cannot bear to have the world think even for a second that she is not a woman who went with you one drunken night. It was not that great a night, but she was in awe, and she still thinks, what if he had stayed? At least, she might have made a career of you. She doesn’t realize that she has, anyway. She announces at a reading that she is the Oldest Living Kerouac Girlfriend, and people stare, amused or skeptical. She nods in satisfaction, mistaking their glances.
Entire classrooms full of young people have taken to the road carrying your books. Like and unlike you, they had no particular place to go. They just went. We all went, peering down the giddy receding decades at your joyful, rushing, drunken form, talented and surrounded by talented friends. We wrote a poem. We smoked a joint. We looked at our friends.
You carried all this down Cross Bay Boulevard in the middle of the night. Invisible filaments, like cigarette smoke clinging to your clothes: the future.