Sometimes stories don’t start at the beginning. So this is really Not Quite The Beginning
I left Baltimore with my way packed Subaru on the afternoon of Tue Aug 7, locking my Subaru onto 95 N knowing full well I was headed to NYC rush hour traffic and NOT CARING! Giddy baby!! Two months off – yea! Greatest Hits of the Jackson Five canked LOUD. I know Jack Kerouac wouldn’t have listened to the Jackson Five even is they had been around. He was listening to bop – to Byrd Parker. And sometimes the blues. But he didn’t spend kid-days frantically shakin’ his l’il butt with six brothers and sisters while mom and dad played Going Back to Indiana on the stereo. But I know he felt that thrill of heading off like I me. He was all about leaving.
(It is great writing this now next to the highway in the Motel Six hearing the sucking rush of traffic on a wet road compete with train horns yowling from nearby tracks.)
So thru a hazy silver day rushed over powder blue bridges – the arching Delaware Memorial the erector set of the Verrazano Narrows, zipped thru lower Bklyn with Lady Liberty waving at me between grafittied rooftops and landed (lost at first, but eventually) at my dear buddy, tap dancer Michael “Toes” Tiranoff’s home in Windsor Terrace Brooklyn. We narrowly ( I am not making this up) escaped a TORNADO in Brooklyn early the next morning. The first in 118 years. It touched down barely a mile away imploding trees into car windshields, washing out intersections, flooding subways and giving TV panic mongers grist for a solid week easy.
All of which was great but didn’t really feel like the beginning. I’ve spent tons of time in New York. And Jack didn’t start his trip leaving Baltimore and going to New York.
But I researched Jack. I realized a dream and set up my lap top in the Rose Reading Room of the New York Public Library on Bryant Park. A vast ornate sweep of beautifully detailed space built around massive arched windows. White articulated granite walls, tiered brass chandeliers. Ceilings – coffered, gilded, modeled and muraled. This has to be one of the proudest most glorious pubic spaces to work in ever. And here I am exploring a call Jack Kerouac made when young. A decision my sister Maura would call a “very bad choice.”
From the tall stools in the periodical’s room I print out a New York Times article from Aug 17, 1944. The headline reads “ Columbia Student Kills Friend And Sinks Body in Hudson River”. “ A fantastic story of homicide…” is revealed as 19 year-old sophmore Lucien Carr confesses to stabbing 33 year-old David Kammerer to death with Carr’s Boy Scout knife, then binding the corpse tight with the victims clothes and shoelaces, loading his body up with rocks and rolling him down the Riverside Park embankment at 115th Street. Kammerer is described as a “homosexual” who has made “improper advances” to Carr. Carr is described as fighting him off that night with said knife.
What the paper doesn’t say is that Carr and Kerouac were drinking the Sunday night before the Monday am murder in the West Side Bar at the bottom of Harlem, north of the Columbia campus. On his way back to his apartment Jack ran into Stammerer who was looking for Carr. Carr’s former Scout Master, the older man was obsessed with Lucien and had followed him across the country from school to school. Jack told Kammerer Lucien was still at the West End. (Why? I wonder.) And at three am that morning, after going to Riverside Park together Carr did the deed.
Afterwards Lucien headed to his friend, fellow St. Louis rich boy William Seward Burroughs. Burroughs with the sense of the wealthy told him to go to the police immediately, confess and plead self-defense. But Carr didn’t – he went to his new buddy Jack Kerouac’s apartment Jack went back out into the night accompanying Carr as he dropped the Boy Scout knife down a sewer grate, and buried Kammerer’s glasses in Morningside Park.
The day after Carr’s first headline, Kerouac’s name is in the Times. He is arrested as a material witness for failing to turn his friend in and as accessory after the fact for helping get rid of the weapon. The second charge was dropped but the “workingman proletarian Jack London redneck” as Allen Ginsberg called him at the time was sent to the Bronx prison to await trial on the first. His father Leo Kerouac, pissed at his son’s actions wouldn’t post bond. After hanging in the prison fo a week and id’ing the bloated corpse of Kammerer, Jack, who had been trying to avoid marrying her, called then girl friend Edie Parker and got hitched while he was in jail so her wealthy family would bail him out.
I track Jack and Lucien’s steps that night. An overcast and muggy upper west side is appropriately David Lynchian. Heading down the steps into Riverside Park to smell a big, sweet-smelling bush of white flowers I find out at nose length it is covered with hordes of shiny green flies. A city truck, with a low ominous humm, is pumping water out of a marshy part of the Park into the Hudson. An effeminate cat in a g-string swimsuit vogues, chatting on his cell phone and sunbathing. The West Side highway blocks the roll into the Hudson now, but it’s current looks way swift, its banks steep.
As I head up onto Columbia’s campus I run smack into a statue of Dionysus’ friend Pan reclining in the nude, with big goat ears, cloven hoofs and crooked flute. It seems an odd subject amidst the severe, arrogant brick and granite buildings.
Just past the Campus at 421 West 118 is Jack’s old apartment building. Six stories of white brick with pseudo-Italinate ceramic details. Still a bit seedy for the area. Battered, mismatched AC units hang, out. Tacky gold and black stick on numbers with the address over the door. As he is leaving a current tenant holds the door for me to go in.
The airless stuff lobby creeps me out. It looks so much like so many lobbies in my New York history. The same worn marble steps, the once crisp moldings and steel banister now gummed and gobbed with decades of sloppy paint. It looks like Toes’ old lobby on MacDougal Street in the Village. Or my brother Vince’s lobbies on the Upper East Side.
The same lobby Jack left on a really bad call is a lobby I know well.
As I head west into Morningside Park a storm rises and the sky spits. Morningside Park is so not morning. It is a steep, tree-filled trench held by a massive dark stone embankment. A crenallated tower is built in and at the base is a jail style barred door. I head toward it. Kids see me and come running. “Yo – did you SEE something up there! Are there bodies up there?! My Aunt says a nun hung herself from a tree here – but I’m not sure which one.”
At the library I look at microfiche of 1944 Yellow Pages. I hope the bars are listed. A lot of the bars I worked in over my twenty years behind the counter weren’t. Who wants the calls from the wives? But yea! There it is. “West Side Bar & Grill 456 W125 – University 4-9606” There is also a West Side Grill at 1354 Amsterdam. Did Jack and Lucien go there sometimes? Did that place have better food? I climb out of Morningside Park with its odd mix of medieval goth landscape punctuated with the shouts from the basketball courts and head to Harlem.
I find the West Side Grill on Amersterdam. From the colors of the original banners looks like it used to be Italian but the banner over that says Chef Roldan’s (Oax, Mex). But the steel rolled doors are down and the only thing really happening is a huge woman with perfect olive skin and cascading rolls of flesh. She sits under the awning trying to sell fortunes to passers by.
The West Side Bar at 456 West 125 Street is gone. Fallen to architect Le Corbusier’s vision that public housing should rise high in tall towers to leave green space at the base. Three huge projects. No bar left. Across the street, in front of the Free Delivery Farmacia and the Mini “Harlem” Deli middle class folks – black and Latino walk fast, laugh, chat, kiss their babies. Filling the sidewalks of Harlem with rush hour commotion. Whatever evil the West Side bar might have helped foment it paid for its sins with demolition. Lucien’s long been forgotten. And Jack would meet many more devils ‘fore it was all over.
My brother Vince and his new wife Tami have me over for dinner. Vince wants to know why – why Jack? And I explain that I empathize so. That I used to be a drinker like Jack. “But you never helped cover up a murder” says Vince. And then he starts to laugh. “Maybe you just never had a chance.”
I remember my hometown hero John Waters explanation of why he is against the death penalty. “How do I know it won’t be me?” says John. “Anybody can have a bad night!”
So I guess New York was like the part in On The Road where Sal, with an idealistic view of hitchin’ Route 6 clear cross country goes to an obscure location to pick it up only to find there is no traffic. With his huaraches disintegrating he heads back into the city to grab a bus to Chicago.
“Besides” says the man who finally picks Sal up and saves him from Bear Mountain “there’s no traffic passes through 6. If you want to go to Chicago you’d do better going across the Holland Tunnel in New York and head for Pittsburgh.”
Which is kinda what I did next – slamming into the standard Holland Tunnel traffic jam following part of Jack’s bus ride route and heading for Akron for Jack and Me and The Big Difference which really is a beginning.
DISCLAIMER- This is a rough draft being written on the road without good access to internet, libraries, editors etc. Read at your own risk!
