Gone in October

Jack is dead in St. Pete. I was reading about him in an old journal when Shirley called out from downstairs, having heard it on the radio. There were the bad moments waiting for a repeat of the newscast; there were the waves of awareness coming up and receding.... I have always addressed my sentences to him, to his canny eye, and it will be different to write from now on.... Allen G. called. By happenstance, he will be in New Haven tomorrow, and we will go down. "He didn't live much beyond Neal," Allen said as a matter of interest. "Only a year and a half." I spoke to Gregory & Peter too--they were all at the Cherry Valley farm.... We wired Memère & Stella--useless words. Portents of his death somewhere, sometime, have plagued me for eight--ten years--as recently as last Thursday I thought of him dying in St. Louis or Chicago on some Kerouac-crazy trip.... I haven't dared think of his mind in its last hours. What can one say? He's gone. It's over for him.

--Journal, Oct. 21, 1969, 12:45 p.m., Old Saybrook, Conn.

I

Shirley and I drove down to New Haven for Ginsberg's reading at Yale under clear high skies of blue. The trees had turned in the last days to full autumn, and it occurred to me that it was apt that Jack had gone away in October, which was his favorite month, and that it was one of those red-and-gold New England afternoons through which footballs used to loft in such brave arcs when we were young.

No more Jack, I repeated to myself as I drove, his death a fact too inexplicable, too final to go down. I'd known him for half my life. Whatever sort of man and writer I'd become was due in no small measure to our friendship. As young men, we had shared those important, exuberant years that sometimes shape the rest of life. Damn him! I caught myself thinking. Why does he do things like this? I'd talked to him for an hour on the phone not ten days ago, and we had bickered as we often did when he was drunk, and he had challenged me to call him back in an hour, and I hadn't done it, exasperated by his boozy monologs. And now the phone was permanently dead.

We parked near the Yale Co-op and walked through chilly streets to the Political Union Library, where the students were holding a reception for Allen. In a paneled upstairs room, 20 or 30 young people, drinking port and sherry, sat on the floor around the ringleted Karl Marx beard and dome of balding forehead that gave Allen the look of a worldly Talmud scholar who had retired to the Negev. Gregory squatted on his heels in an enormous George Raft overcoat, working on a tumbler of sherry, and Peter, now become a grizzled wrangler of bitter winters in Upstate New York, stared silently out from under the three-inch brim of a hat of Day-Glo red. It was the first time that we had all been in the same room in over five years.

In the middle of a long answer about ecology, Allen waved, and Gregory came over, whispering, "What a time to get together, huh?"

Allen finished, and he and Peter worked their way through the crowd, and we all embraced. "Well, old Jack's dead, I guess," Allen said, and we looked at one another, wordless with the fact.

We straggled through the evening streets toward dinner with some of the students, arranging that the three of them would drive home with us that night and we'd all go up to Lowell the next day for the funeral. Then on to the reading, which was held in a large, high-ceilinged hall, already filled with young people in their Army jackets, beards, ragged blue jeans, maidenly falls of hair, love beads and peace amulets--recruits in the war against the death drive in the modern world, which, for some of us, had already been going on for two decades. We were taken down front to wait, and there on the stage was a paper banner, 12 by 4 feet in size, on which was written: In memoriam: Jack Kerouac, 1922-1969, and below that: Neal Cassady, 1927-1968.

Allen and Peter came down the side aisle and up onto the stage with their harmonium, where they removed their jackets to get down to work. "We'll begin with a prayer," Allen said, and he and Peter began chanting a sutra, Jack's sutra, the Diamond, standing together in their shirts, Peter palming the bellows of the harmonium with the metronomic motion of a weaver with his beater, and both wailing the clear, high-pitched chant, which was followed by a scatter of applause from the perplexed, politicalized students, who expected something more inflammatory, or more "relevant." Allen was quietly remonstrative. "You don't have to applaud a prayer," he said.

Then he read three or four choruses from Jack's Mexico City Blues, repeating the 211th Chorus, "The wheel of the quivering meat conception," because of the lines:

"Poor! I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead"

He repeated this three times for emphasis, as if to say: "See, there's your politics, that's your art, that's your reality, that was life to him." Then he read the last Chorus with some deliberation:

"Vanish. Which will be your best reward, 'Twere better to get rid o John O'Twill, then sit a-mortying In this Half Eternity with nobody To save the old man being hanged In my closet for nothing And everybody watches When the act is done-- Stop the murder and the suicide! All's well! I am the Guard"

Perhaps no one on the outside of Jack's life ever really understood these lines, but years ago they had made me realize he didn't want to stay in such a world, and even say as much in Nothing More to Declare, and have him chide me about putting him in his grave.

After this, Allen read for almost an hour out of his own poems, and finally said: "I've been setting some of Blake's poems to music, and Peter and I will sing a few after we take ten minutes off, so John Holmes can hear them." After the break, they both turned to look down at me, Allen smiling with the healing euphoria of song, having been able to add something at last to our old master, Blake--if it was only these in cantatory, Hebraic, singsong melodies that piped so wild.

When they were done, Allen opened it up to questions from the audience, and the questions weren't too silly, just a little solemn with the "nonnegotiable" puritanism of kids that year. At last, a blond kid got up, somewhat shy, bespectacled, grave and confused, and stumbled out that he thought they'd like to know what Allen thought about Kerouac's death, and where Jack fit into the scene today, and why he seemed to have drifted off into curious, cranky ideas in recent years, and should they care about him? Was he--well, important? They couldn't say. Would Allen?

Allen sighed and leaned on the lectern toward the microphone on his elbows, and didn't say anything for 50 seconds. I knew what he was thinking: How could you sum it up in a few glib words? How could you bring back the eager Jack, Jack of the tender eyes, the raucous Jack of midnights, Jack's earnest sweat, maddening Jack of the end of the nights, maudlin Jack of all the songs, the Jack who knew for sure, Jack simple as a cornflower, fist-proud Jack, the bongo Jack of saucepans, Jack of the Chinese restaurants, Jack mooning under street lamps about guilt, the Jack of Jacks?--when all they probably knew anything about was drunken, contentious Jack, bigoted, mind-stormed Jack, the Jack of sneers, who somehow now appeared to have drunk a hole in his Balzac belly. How could you? No way.

But Allen gathered his thoughts and leaned closer to the mike and simply said: "Well, he was the first one to make a new crack in the consciousness," and everything else--pot, rock, doin' your thing, make a new Jerusalem, etc., had come out of that crack. What he had done was to try to follow the implications of his sad-comic view of things to the bottom of his own nature and transcribe it in its own onrushing spontaneous flow, and leave it there for later, for others.

"So he drank himself to death," Allen said bluntly, "which is only another way of living, of handling the pain and foolishness of knowing that it's all a dream, a great, baffling, silly emptiness, after all." And then abruptly he said nothing more.

Allen and Peter had to go tape an interview for the university radio station, so Gregory and Shirley and I went to clean out the dormitory room they had been assigned but wouldn't need now. As we hurried through the bitter-cold New Haven streets, Gregory said of the students: "I always tell them, 'Listen, I was born when people smoked straights and drank booze. Let me have a drink and I'll noodle your doodle, or save your soul, whatever you're after,'" laughing in a breathless, delighted little cackle, which, the next day, driving to Lowell, I would hear from the back seat--heh-heh-heh-heh-heh--and realize, "By God, it's Jack's laugh, Gregory laughs like Jack now, modestly, as at some private thought, happy." I'd forgotten Jack's old laugh; he hadn't laughed that way much in recent years, not that soft heh-heh-heh of pleasure, and I remembered it without a pang.

We went through shadowy quads as icy as your winter nose tip, shrouded students hurrying home under old elms, and up into the dorm to collect their stuff: Gregory's movie-camera case, a suitcase of what Jack used to call "needments," a green sport shirt, and a pair of Jockey shorts drying on the Venetian blind. Shirley made us a bourbon in the single tooth glass and we sipped it while Gregory told us about how they had gone out into the Upstate woods after they heard the news about Jack, just the day before, all of them up in Cherry Valley, and carved Jack's initials into a tree--"You know, in the name of American poetry."

We struggled all the baggage down into my car, and then walked down the block to the radio station, where Allen and Peter sat in a smoke-bleared recording booth with seven or eight student activists, Allen patiently going into his sixth straight hour of talk. Gregory and I went in for a minute, to be interviewed, too, but of course the four of us kept drifting into personal things, having had no real chance till then--such as how the rain water runs down the stone embankments in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, and how, yes, we'd all been there, though never together, and it was where Carry Nation conducted her last campaign against drink. The young men seemed bewildered by this and one of them finally said: "Why do you guys always talk about where people are from, and what happened (continued on page 140)Gone in October(continued from page 98) there? Does all that really matter?" How explain?

It was too hot in the booth and Shirley and Gregory and I went into another room and waited, and finally Allen and Peter got free, and we piled into the car and circled the large, deserted green, with its row of ghostly churches, and got onto the Connecticut Turnpike, and talked about Jack at last: "Isn't it weird?" Allen kept saying. "What are we all doing here? Do you know why he drank like that, John? I don't understand that kind of drinking.... But what did we do wrong? Do you think we should have made a greater effort to get down to Florida? Could we have done anything?"

I didn't think so. There was nothing one friend could do for another but accept his nature wholeheartedly, and in the last months, during those endless phone calls at unlikely hours that had become a habit with Jack, I had heard the booze speaking out of him like the voice of one of those baleful spirits that take possession of the soul in Gothic novels. But we had been far too close for the admonishments that are possible in shallower relationships. I knew he was serious, even about his dissipations, and the basic seriousness of a man's struggle with his destiny is beyond "help."

We drove the 35 miles home to Saybrook in the dark and cold, stars pin-bright like so many stars on so many driving nights when we had all gone somewhere for forgotten reasons, full of expectations when we climbed into the car, only to become quenched and ruminant as the hours went by in the huge, graphic winter night. Home to a fire, an immense bowl of Shirley's vegetable soup for famished Allen (who'd quit smoking) and whiskey for the rest of us.

We all went off to bed eventually, all of us dead out, Allen saying as he glanced around my shelves: "Well, you have all Jack's books, I see. I kept lending mine away and I haven't got them anymore. Now I'll have to sit down and read them again, I guess"--a funny, private little laugh admitting the ambiguities of the emotions at such a moment. Bone-tired, smoked out, I had one more booze but began to think, so didn't finish it, and slept the sleep of a hoarder of resources.

II

Up to the russets and others of an October day through which leaves scattered into bright drifts, a day that was bland in the sun but hinted at winter once you stepped out of it. I went off to get extra antifreeze, in case we had a sudden drop of temperature overnight. When I got back, we all sat around, while Shirley made biscuits and fresh coffee, and we ranged far afield in our separate intelligences.

At some remark of Gregory's, Allen launched into a description of the Gnostic theory of the universe. The basic idea (he explained) was that the creation was only the first instant of the Void's awareness of itself, from which original act of consciousness all successive enlayerings of consciousness had come, each covering up the insight of the other, but all seeking to hide the knowledge of the perfect emptiness of origins (the snake in the garden sent to tip us off to this truth), and from that, of course, the Western idea of evil had inevitably come.

"And you see, Jack knew all that," Allen said. "That's what he was writing about--the agony of differentiated consciousness. He knew it was all a dream."

It didn't seem unusual to be establishing a metaphysical ground from which to think about Jack's death. Simple sorrow for the friend was a private matter, an individual loss, but what he had been trying to say, the world of his unique eye, the still point toward which all the words were aimed, seemed necessary to know with some clarity that crisp October morning when at last we would all go to Lowell together. At one time or another, each of us had talked with Jack about doing it, and had made impromptu plans, only to lose them in a fume of booze or distraction, and only Allen had ever made it, for a night or two a few years before.

Over the coffee and biscuits, my mother arrived with maps to show me a quick route to Maine that would take us right by Lowell, and Allen put his arm around her in simple creaturely friendliness as she drew it out, though they hadn't seen each other in 14 years, and then we all sat down for a while and talked--organic gardening, root cellars, Scott Nearing, the properties of bancha tea. Gregory wanted to take movies of us all, and so we went out in front of the house in the cold sun and lined up like members of The Band, Allen saying of my mother, "Behold, the survivor!"--at which her eyes moistened, because she had known Jack for a long time and, like most mothers, thought of him as a gifted and unruly man, in whom she glimpsed the loyal and affectionate son.

But it was time to go, and we took off up the Connecticut Turnpike through rolling hills, as richly mottled with autumn foliage as the texture of a parti-colored sponge, the car's rear end slewing around with all the added weight, and the wind coming so strong across the highway that my wrists ached holding the car on the road. After a while, Allen and Peter got out the harmonium and sang for an hour, Allen saying: "What would you like to hear next? London? Yes, we've done that," and they performed it. "All right, what's next? Call out your favorites.... No, I'm leaving Tyger, Tyger to the last, because it's the most obvious and the hardest to do...."

The car rocked with wind and wailing voices as we passed through little towns full of crazy, every-man-for-himself Massachusetts drivers; and as we roared up Route 495 among the barreling trucks, the day gloomed over (as I knew it would, as it had to near the "Snake Hill" of Doctor Sax), the harsh, gray sky darkening with that hint of arctic north that always murmurs the mysterious word "Saskatchewan" to me--with its images of fir forests awesome in winter snow at twilight, and prairie immensities north of Dakota over the line, and finally the terrible majesties of the Canadian Rockies that make the mind ache with awareness of its own insignificance. In my time, only Jack had found a prose commensurate with the dimensions of the continent as they weighed on human consciousness. Most writers no longer even tried for that kind of range.

Lowell, of course, turned out to be an ugly, ratchety mill town in unplanned sprawl along the Merrimack: shuttered factories, railyards blown with hapless papers, unpainted wooden buildings with their date plaques blurred by weather over the doors, and the turreted town hall with the library next to it where Jack had read his Balzac when he was a polite, bow-tied, moody youth, when he was Jackie (as he was still Jackie to everyone who'd known him in Lowell)--all in a mad tangle of evening traffic on crazy, unmarked one-way streets of cobble, all of it plain with that New England mill-town brick-and-siding plainness.

My direction signals weren't working properly, the nerves of driving in the rush of cars hurrying home to supper were wearing me down, but we got parked near where Allen thought Nick Sampas (Jack's brother-in-law) had a bar. We'd go in there and get located. We tumbled out into a bone-cold little square, all but grassless, the air full of those vagrant swirls of snowflakes that always seem to blow so forlornly in squares in the run-down part of any town, where the drunks wander with chapped hands in old overcoats and the Ballantine signs in the saloons are the only coziness. We went into a bar that resembled Allen's recollection of Nick's place. Here we came--every honest Greek workingman's idea of what was wrong with the fucking country: long hair, beards, old coats, red hats, cracked (continued on page 158)Gone in October(continued from page 140) shoes. And what was a pretty woman, in her black-leather coat and black pumps, doing with that bunch of weirdos?

But, though we were strange to the drinkers there, they didn't freeze us with hostility, and Shirley and I had whiskeys, while the others sipped a glass of wine apiece. It wasn't the right bar, after all, but the men in there knew the place we wanted: "Sure, Nicky's place, used to be the old Sixty-Six Club, 'cross town, you go up here, take your first right at the light--" In the end, they scrawled out the directions on a beer coaster for Allen, who quietly and politely persisted through the blunt stares of men to whom he must have seemed as alien as Saint Francis in the Vatican.

Back to the car again. Peter took over the driving and we went up to the first right, made the correct turn this time, went down further dreary blocks and, yes, there was Nick's--we'd gone right by it on our way into the center of town. Beyond its steamy plate glass, it was overwarm and "modernized"--creamy indirect lights set into the back bar, captain's stools, a shuffleboard game, and a few tables in the eating half of the place, where you imagined rows of men dancing slow, arms-on-shoulders bouzouki dances on Saturday nights.

Yes, the bartender said, he had that day's Lowell papers with the funeral plans and, yes, he recognized Allen from the time Allen had been in there drinking with Jack some years ago and, yes, Nick would be back any time now. He'd gone out to Logan Airport to pick up Stella (Jack's wife) and Tony (another Sampas brother), who was bringing her up from St. Petersburg, but he'd be there shortly, and Jack's body was already in Lowell, having come in on an earlier flight. What did we want to drink?

We read the funeral announcement in The Lowell Sun: The body would be on view from seven to ten that night, the funeral was tomorrow morning at 11 in Saint Jean Baptiste Cathedral. "God, and here we sit, reading it, in Lowell," Allen marveled, "and where's Jack?"

At that moment, in came Nick--big-faced, bluff, blue-suited, with large, somehow heavy eyes, the eyes of a tired, harried man dealing with some bad turning that his life had taken; the talkative, assertive, helpful, bearlike brother, who was at home in the loquacities of winter taverns. Stella, he said, was outside in the car. So out we all went. Only Allen had ever met her, because when Jack had come to New York or Connecticut, he had always come alone.

There in the frigid street, with the wind at our backs and the northern dusk coming down with the implacability of a shroud, she looked up as Nick opened the car door, as startled as a bird but knowing for a certainty who we were, and got out--so much smaller than I had imagined, with a strong-featured, intense face, a wide mouth and bright black eyes that filled with tears at the sight of us (no, the eyes sprung tears against the mind's instructions), and she choked on a sob as if she'd been struck in the stomach and got out, "All of you here! Why didn't you come to Florida when he needed you?" with a tone of fierce, involuntary recrimination that was followed immediately by a kiss for Shirley, and then for each of us in turn, because we'd been his friends and had come to his funeral after all.

I leaned over and kissed her hand, and a smile--crooked, brave and somehow worse than the tears--managed to contort her mouth: "He loved you all," she said. "He never stopped talking about you," the tears welling up again, just coming of themselves, and then she looked at Gregory and actually laughed: "Oh, Gregory, he used to talk--" shaking her head back and forth at funny stories Jack must have told her.

We were introduced to Tony Sampas--the thin brother, the lawyer, who lived over Nicky's bar with no wife in sight, and stayed up with the difficult drunks, like Jack, and perhaps slept in a single bed in a dim room with only a bureau and a chair in it; weary, dependable Tony, who had flown down to Florida immediately and hadn't slept in two-three days. "I'll take her over to the mother's place now," he said to me in an undertone, "and see you later.... And, really, it means a lot to her, and all of us, that you could come."

So we all trailed back into the bar again with Nick, who took over the details of the next hours with the gruff and thoughtful ease of the best of hosts: "Now, you'll have dinner right here, I'll make the dinner myself, a steak, how about steaks, and shrimp, some shrimp to start.... No, no, you'll eat here.... Now, you have your drinks, anything you want.... Walter, give them anything they want...."

So there we were: Shirley and I with more whiskey, Gregory having retsina, Allen and Peter sipping sherry, and all of us going back into the kitchen now and then, where Nick was hauling out steaks and shrimps and lobster, and talking steadily, the big, heavy, tough, imploring eyes saying: Just don't worry, everything's taken care of, the Sampases appreciate your coming all this way, and of course you'll stay at Mike's (yet another brother), say no more about it--My God, why are they protesting? You mean, they should stay in some motel when they've come all the way up here for Jackie's funeral?

I was amazed at how difficult it was for us simply to accept the Sampases' generosity--the opening of house, pantry, purse; the giving of beds and food; the willingness to include us in the rituals of their bereavement. We were continually trying to find words to thank them, as if each of us needed to remain poised in a kind of stoic equilibrium if we were to get through, and so had withdrawn slightly into ourselves, where even kindness was an intrusion. The Sampases, on the contrary, automatically drew together in the emergency and became a tribe once more, their differences from one another put aside for the moment, only the likenesses remaining. It came to me in the following hours that, as Jack had known, the primal basis for society is still the family, after all, and, uprooted from its supportiveness, our individual attempts at understatement seemed a pathetic psychic orphaning. For if death is one of the great life experiences, it is precisely because it awakens all the hungers that define our mortality--the need to weep, to laugh, to touch, to help--and its consolation is the reminder of human fraternity that it offers to anyone not too armored by fear to receive it. Thankfully, our "notorious" individualities melted and we joined the group.

Dinner was spread out on a long table in the eating half of the bar--a pile of steaks, a dish of lobster meat, shrimps, breads, a bottle of retsina--eat, eat, eat! While we did, we were occupied with the thought that we hadn't thought of flowers. There should be something from Jack's friends, from "American literature," as Allen said. So Gregory sketched out an elaborate floral symbol--a large red heart resting on a lotus, with spikes of fire shooting out of it and five thorns with our first names on them. But what to say on the ribbon? "Hold the heart," Allen suggested. Then the end of Mexico City Blues came to mind and I said: "No, guard the heart."

Later, the lotus and the spikes of fire, and even the thorns, proved impossible for the florist to create at that late hour, but a large heart of red roses was made for us, with white roses around it, and ribbons with our names on them, and these names added, because they were close friends of Jack's: Lucien (Carr), Bill (Burroughs) and Robert (Creeley). And in the center, Guard the heart.

After eating, we sat in the bar, waiting to go to the funeral home. A flush-faced, sandy-haired young man, with the look of an ex-basketballer starting to lose his muscle tone to the beer, was hunched over a drink a stool away, and Nick insisted that we meet him, because he had gotten drunk with Jack so many times. He shook hands with each of us gravely and said: "He was something, though, wasn't he? I mean, I'm no slouch with the sauce myself, but Jack--" shaking his head at Jack's prodigious thirst, his red-rimmed eyes sobered with shock.

I thought: How many hundreds of guys there must be who had gone along on historic, days-long binges with Jack and told the stories over and over ever since, not because Jack was Jack Kerouac but because he was a boozer's boozer, and something always happened, something uproarious or outlandish or mind-boggling, that often ended in the ludicrous jail tank in the ashes of dehydrated dawn. How many there must be who felt they were his good old buddies, because they had known the surprising intimacy and candor of his cups and remembered that florid, volatile face yelling or laughing, telling them with feckless exuberance, "Hey, I'm Jack Kerouac," but never giving too much of a damn whether they'd heard of him or not, because it was a great night, it was a good place, let's go somewhere else, let's find us a mad goddamn party. And how many had fastened on him just because he was Jack Kerouac--"Hey, man, you know who I got stoned with last night? Jack fucking-well Kerouac! Yah, you know, the beat writer! I'm going to drive him up into New England someplace next week." How many had laughed with him (or at him) and spent his money (or their own) and passed out to his voice still indefatigably trying to keep pace with the reel of his imagination, but never heard the drowning note of maddened fatalism that had blurred it recently.

These were the people among whom Jack had spent a lot of his last years--barflies, mechanics with a Saturday-night thirst, the jocks around the local saloon, tyro writers talking their books away, the punks of the night looking for a latch to build tomorrow on, the wifeless, overworked, bored, sweat-socked men and boys of bewildered inner America, who could recognize a certified roarer and his roll.

Why did he drink like that? I think it was because his was a deeply traditional nature, so sensitive to social and familial cohesions, and their breakdown in the modern world, that he intuited more about the contemporary human mood in his nerves and mind than anyone I had ever known. And yet most of his close friends were alienated, rootless urban types, and so he lived simultaneously in both worlds, a tremulous bridge between two realities bent on denying each other, a seismograph trying to register an earthquake in the middle of a tornado--and drink temporarily seemed to stabilize his psychic ground. He drank, as well, because he had no gift for even a saving cynicism, and couldn't act out the simplest role (much less the infinitely complex role of "spokesman" or "prophet"), and because, though he was the most insatiably gregarious man when tipsy, he was not easily sociable when sober and increasingly, as he got older, was occupied with the enigma of his own identity ("I'm descended from an Iroquois chief," he would announce. "I'm a Breton nobleman," he would insist a week later) and, finally, he drank because I don't think he wanted to live anymore if there was no place to direct his kind of creative drive, except inward. But I don't really know. All I know for sure is that it has pained this head for years to imagine the waste to him of those thousand barroom nights, and that something must be awry in an America where a man of such human richness, and such extraordinary gifts, would be most appropriately mourned in a hundred saloons because he felt he had no other place to go--the fraternal warmth for which his whole soul longed having been exiled to the outer edges of life in the America of his time.

Then we were off to Archambault's Funeral Home, with Nick directing us, rolling down empty streets of small-city American neon, with cracked sidewalks down which one imagined Doctor Sax's manuscript "riffling" in the winter wind, which was how Jack had gleefully described it to me once outside the San Remo in the Village on a night as cold, when we were both in our 20s and bursting with Melville, five years before he wrote the book: "And then, see, this manuscript comes riffling down the sidewalk out of nowhere--this terrible, prophetic testament of what lies at the end of the night!"--a manuscript which (it has always seemed to me) Jack had spent the rest of his life transcribing out of the original vision.

Funeral homes are all alike, of course. Archambault's was Victorian in decor, with pale-green walls, lofty ceilings, an ornate balustrade going up from the vestibule to--what? The formaldehyde rooms. The butcher shops. Wherever it was they stored the coffins and showed them to customers susceptible in their bereavement. Two "showings" were going on in opposite rooms, and the neatly lettered placards (like those in hotel lobbies telling you in which room your convention is being held) announced Kerouac on the left and Levesque on the right.

The Kerouac room was filled with people--middle-class, well-dressed Lowell people, and a few kids (Custer-bearded youths with grave, out-of-place faces and miniskirted girls, solemn with they-knew-not-what unclear emotions). Most of the local people seemed to be Sampas relatives, and suddenly I realized how few Kerouacs there had ever been. Later, we met a row of young Kerouac second cousins--pretty little girls with that dark, round-faced Breton look, and muscular, abashed boys from Dracut or Nashua. Among the crowd was Charley, the eldest Sampas, news editor of The Lowell Sun, a large, suave man with flesh on him, in a well-cut business suit, balding now, the successful head of the clan, his urbane eye on all the details. It was Charley who had encouraged Jack to write when Jack was best friends with his younger brother, Sebastian, who had been killed in Europe in 1944. Charley had told Jack that if he wanted to write, he ought to get out of Lowell, and perhaps Charley, too, had wanted something more than to be standing there in his expensive suit, with certain private ambitions unachieved, despite his position in the community. There, too, was Stella on a settee off to one side, out of the theatrical lights that bathed the coffin, the banks of fresh flowers and--Jack.

Down to it, I didn't much want to "view" whatever some mortician had thought to fashion out of what was left of him, but I knew I would. Allen and Peter and Gregory went right up through the crowd to have a look, but whether they had seen the handiwork of funeral homes before, I didn't know. Allen and Peter had observed dozens of corpses on the burning ghats in India, but (as Allen said later) that was natural, you see the husk of the body for what it is--organs, so much simple meat, just the garbage of our chrysalis from which the butterfly has flown, nothing but the residue of transitory life. But in the war I had seen half a hundred dead sailors being gotten ready for shipping home to inconsolable parents and wives, and later "viewed" my father laid out under the lights like a waxwork figure in Madame Tussaud's that is somehow unlike the person precisely because cold skill has so striven to make it resemble him, feature to feature, and you stand in utter perplexity wondering why it doesn't only to become aware that what is missing is not merely movement, animation, but something else, the invisible spark that makes the mask cohere, the soul lighting up the persona from within, the unique and irreplaceable Being that invests the face with human possibilities.

Anyway, I pushed my way through the crowd alone, fearful I might be revulsed and that it would all come down on me if anything of Jack were actually there, and over the dark silhouette of a shoulder, I saw him--laid out in flowers, in the prescribed funerary attitude of tranquil slumber, hands folded with a rosary entwined, in a pale shirt, a natty bow tie and a sports jacket. No need to say that no one had ever seen him that way since he was Harcourt Brace's soulful young Thomas Wolfe 20 years before. And the face? It had been made to look as peaceful as a babe's, the brows slightly knotted, but with perplexity rather than pain, all the fevers gone, the mouth not his mouth at all, the color of the flesh a rather pale pink in the lights, Jack's sweaty, grinning, changeable expression nowhere to be seen. He looked thin, calm, waxen, almost choirboyish--and Jack had once been choirboyish, all right--but this was a faintly prissy, I'm-all-right-Jack Jack, and no Jack I'd ever known.

Gregory was kneeling at one side of the coffin, crying now, and I looked at Jack again and felt for just a moment the sheer obscenity of death, the irreparable period that it places at the end of portions of our lives, closing us off forever from the consciousness that has gone, and the first sick feeling of gut loss came over me. "It will be different to write from now on": The words came back and I hoped that no one would ever mourn me so self-centeredly. Tears welled up in my eyes, the involuntary tears that we sometimes shed for the mute flesh itself. He wouldn't walk, he wouldn't run, he wouldn't ever come into my house again, yelling like a banshee, or grinning pensively, or moody with his special thoughts. That's what I felt. His body died before my eyes and I had to accept that I was stuck in my own body, in my own flesh, and that this mannequin was the last I'd see of a friend of 21 years of feverish association. I put an arm around Gregory and we turned away.

I found Shirley, who had taken only the briefest look from a distance, and we went up to Stella, who broke down again as we bent over her, and Shirley knelt down and stayed with her for a while after I'd muttered a futile word or two, hugged her and cursed under my breath. Cursed what? My own closed throat that wanted to bring up something consoling, something that wouldn't push her over any farther. Better to stumble out: Jack's dead! What am I going to do! And all the while her eyes observed me, something going on behind her tears: "Is this John Holmes? Is this Jack's friend? Why isn't he suffering? Is he suffering? What kind of suffering is that?"

Hours, hours--the room too hot--too many people to meet--too many names to remember. After a while, Shirley and I went down into the Smoking Lounge (oh, the imaginations of morticians, all of whom aspire to the respectability of theater managers), where we sat and smoked and talked about other things and kept each other company. Then, coming down the stairs, I saw a face I recognized but couldn't place for a second. It was Ann Charters, who had compiled Jack's bibliography a few years before. She was wearing a large knitted tam and a chic suede coat, and her alert, intelligent face, with the observant eyes and quick smile, was pale with cold, and her husband, Sam, whom I'd never met, was with her.

We all started chattering at once (death makes you talk, you talk so as not to think, you chatter as if you'd found a similar soul at the worst cocktail party of all time), and at one point Sam said: "I reread your Kerouac chapter in Nothing More to Declare the other night, and it's the best thing on Jack so far." I felt a curious twinge in my gut but didn't recognize what it was, except that it wasn't just my old reflex of being unable to accept praise. "You should do the book," Sam said. "There's going to be a book, and you're probably the one to do it." Twinge. The next afternoon, Sterling Lord, Jack's literary agent and mine, would say to me: "You know, John, you're really the one to do the book. You knew him from the inside, but you can stand away from it all, too." Twinge. "No, really, you're the one to do it," and the twinge became knowledge. The idea of the book--that combination of authorized biography and cool critical assessment without which America does not know how to think about its most challenging writers--revolted me. It seemed a coffin no less inadequate to contain the Jack I'd known than the one in which he lay.

I didn't want to go through it all again. I didn't want to have to rifle my own memories, much less other people's, and try to be objective, measured, scholarly. I realized that I had loved him because, on an entirely private level, I had understood his point of view with an instant empathy that was the closest thing to clairvoyance in my life, and the goddamn book would have to be done by someone other than this survivor of the last, maddening quarter century, who had his own secrets, bad habits, awful mornings of hangover, resolutions to save himself, arduous days of getting through on nothing but nerve, futile hopes for two months' rest, for a calm life once the fever eased, for mint-fresh mornings of zestful work. For I did know why Jack drank. We talked to each other sometimes late at night, utterly different men with a similar cast of mind, the same wound in the heart, and he talked to me as an alcoholic in the Age of Pot. "How glum life is without the booze," he said to me once, raising his glass mockingly, able to say it right out to me, knowing I would understand just what it was that made men like us feel glum--our disappointed expectations, and the novelist's necessity to accept into his work the irreconcilables that his own personal hopes struggle to deny.

When we went back upstairs, people were starting to drift out of the "viewing" room, leaving Stella there, kneeling by Jack, caressing his face, kissing him, a hunched, small, abandoned figure in the theatrical lights, her shoulders heaving just a little.

We crowded into the car again to go to the Sampases' mother's house for "the wake," and finally stopped on a corner under a few spare trees, on a block of plain old commodious houses, with an empty lot across the street and a shuttered factory beyond a chain link fence. We piled out and went into the house across a small veranda.

It was already overcrowded with people. There was a baby grand in the front hall, off which was a pin-neat parlor with doilies on the chair arms and landscapes on the walls. Beyond was the TV room with a butt-sprung couch and a wall of photographs--Nick in his Army tunic, Mike as a young student, Sebastian in the central spot--a thin, beaming young man in uniform, with curly blondish hair, looking out of the Forties at this night. The kitchen was full of dark, heavily attractive women bustling about a large, restaurant-size coffee urn and shooing everyone out. A sumptuous spread was laid out on the dining-room table--feta in chalk-white wedges, heaping plates of pastries, slices of delicious spinach pie and cup on cup of coffee.

The house was too small for all the people who milled around the immense, 250-pound Sampas matriarch, who spoke little English and wheezed down into sagging armchairs in her bedroom slippers, and was brought food and drink by other, aging Greek ladies. Stella sat among these women, looking at everything as if from a new, strange distance--at the warm, thronged circle of Jack's Lowell within which moved his curious friends from the disordered city years--her eyes asking herself: Can all this be true? When will I wake up?

We ate and drank coffee, and Gregory came up to me with that day's copy of The Harvard Crimson, which had an obituary. "John, you've gotta read this...this says it all." What it said was what I had seen on the faces of the Yalies the night before and in the bewildered young men at the funeral home: We don't know exactly why it's such a shock. We never really read him much. But today we realize that he meant something to us, after all, and we don't know why he's dead. And these curious last lines: "We should say a prayer for him: God give us strength to be as alive as Kerouac was. Send us more to help burn away the bullshit."

A word about this matter of the kids--the hippies, the activists, the children of the Beats. The next day, they were at the church, and again at the cemetery, in their scruffy duds and Franz Joseph wings of sideburn, each with a camera clicking away, getting "shots," as if they were recording an event the meaning of which would become clear only in the developer, and most of them seemed to have been impelled to come for reasons that they began to comprehend only once there. They all looked as if this were their first funeral, and they were uneasy about being that close to the death they talked and sang about so much, but I don't think most of them had thought very much about Kerouac in the past few years. They had probably read On the Road, or one of the easier books, when they were 15 or 16, and had written him off in the light of his recent political statements, tuned out by his unfashionable love of his country and his disinterest in their subculture and its heroes. And yet they came.

At the cemetery, I overheard a young reporter from Rolling Stone say to Sterling Lord: "Well, it was his politics--I mean, we can't relate to all that America shit," and I heard myself break in and say: "Don't understand him too easily. His politics began on another level than yours." But how could I say what I meant? The Jack who came out for William Buckley, who occasionally was about as tolerant as Archie Bunker and sometimes skirted perilously close to anti-Semitism--how could I say that he really wasn't that way? "All right, smartass," the young man could quite reasonably have demanded, "what's your evidence?" There was nothing I could say but this: I know in my heart the man wasn't that way.

I had argued with him over issues for 20 years, only to realize that politics weren't real to him at all, convinced, as he was, that most "issues" were evasions of our actual human complicity and that truth lay elsewhere--down in what Yeats had called "the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart." Also, Jack had the impatience with logic, and the cartwheeling leaps of insight, that sometimes characterize the alcoholic mind. But above all, he was a lonely, disappointed man, who had been down all the roads--the drugs, the screws, the fantasies, the highs, the hopes--and knew in his own ravaged nerves what was left at "the end of the night." Beyond that, I think he felt emotionally disenfranchised by the polarization of an America that no longer seemed to care about the urge toward harmony that he believed to be its founding truth.

It was too soon to say that he was wrong, and so I said nothing more to the young man from Rolling Stone. Still, the presence of those kids at his funeral leads me to conclude that the obit in the Crimson accurately reflected a feeling of mysterious kinship that Jack's sudden death aroused in so many of the young.

The evening inched along with exquisite slowness. We were all depleted, our brains numbed remembering names, and some of us longed for a drink, and others for sleep, and finally Stella got up and padded through the crowds without a word and went to bed. We stayed on for a while, and then piled into the car again and went on to Mike's house, following the red eye of his taillight.

The house was a large, three-storied Victorian mansion with a porte-cochere, in a style that might be dubbed Mill-owner New England. We took our bags and our weary eyes into a huge, dark-paneled kitchen. Betty, Mike's wife, a Protestant girl from Marietta, Ohio (her direct, hospitable nature shaped by the splendid curve of the river there, as particular rivers shape the natures of those who live beside them), was there--a chubby, good-looking woman, a no-nonsense nestler of children, quietly observant, the kind of woman who likes to sink down into an easy chair after the day is over and have a convivial drink with her husband. She had been around most of the evening, pleasant but unobtrusive, keeping in the background the way an "outsider" in a large, tight-knit, boisterous family usually does. But now she was in her own house, and she got our drinks while Mike took us up to the third floor and our rooms.

We went up through the enormous house with its 12-foot ceilings and heavily varnished woodwork, its black-and-gold-marble mantels and ornate brass fixtures in the bathrooms. Two little boys were sleeping so soundly in one room that even our tramping through didn't cause them to stir, and there were two little girls in another room amid a profusion of dolls and Twiggy posters, and there was Tony, the son of 12, who had his room up on the third floor near ours. It was a jumble of hi-fi, flower power, Charlie Brown and, lo, a huge Allen Ginsberg poster photo. The boy was giddy with the idea that he was actually in his very own house, and you could feel his impatience for tomorrow, and school, and his buddies. Allen promptly whipped out a pen and wrote his name and a line or two on the poster.

Downstairs, the 15-year-old daughter, a self-contained young creature with a fall of fine brown hair on her shoulders and a pretty, coltish face, sat with us in one of the parlors as, exhausted, we finally had a big drink with her parents. Peter had resolutely gone off to bed and Gregory got himself a drink and went off too. Allen sat with Shirley on a couch, I sank into a large armchair to savor the taste of the bourbon on gums anesthetized by too many cigarettes and we talked of death, the girl listening gravely, saying little or nothing, but very adult in her attention.

"It's really strange," Allen said. "With all of you, all of this, all Lowell.... Do you think it mightn't have happened if he'd stayed here instead of moving down to Florida?"

"Well, we could have at least protected him a little," Mike said. "I mean, you know, the police all knew him here, and we'd go down and get him out of jail when he went on a binge. We could have looked after him.... We shouldn't have let his mother insist on the move. I mean, Jack and Stella didn't really want to go down there. He wrote Tony just two weeks ago that somehow they'd come back in the spring. We didn't do enough, I guess"--this solemn, worried man, resembling none of the other Sampases (none of whom resembled any other, as if the loins of the parents had contained whole tribes), with his dark brows of puzzled concern, his bony nose; a man kept thin with worry as his wife got plump with childbearing; an upright man worried about his responsibility for the death of a crazy brother-in-law.

"Well," Allen said, "I was interested to see his face. Did anyone think to take a picture of him?" This tightened my gut a little, but I understood Allen's long view, and time makes most proprieties seem silly. "And by the way, I really think one of his friends should be a pallbearer."

I, too, felt that one of us, one of Jack's friends, should help bear his pall, but rejected Allen's notion that we draw lots and insisted that he be the one, being the oldest friend among us, and he accepted the suggestion. But I was dead out, and gulped a quick second drink, and Shirley and I went off to bed up under the eaves of that many-chambered house, opening the shutters of one window to look briefly out at the fierce stars burning over New Hampshire, under which Jack and I had discovered that we had both walked (me, along the Pemigewasset River; he, along the Merrimack into which it flowed) on the same windy night after the big flood of 1936--only one of the many odd coincidences (like the fact that we had been born on the same day in March) that had lent our friendship a special, brotherly quality.

III

The morning dawned fair and milder than the day before, with tall, white, supple birches outside that high window. I shaved as Shirley packed us up. Probably we wouldn't be coming back here. Allen had to go to New York that night and he would be driving into Logan with the Charterses. Peter and Gregory would go back to the farm with Robert Creeley. who was coming over from Syracuse for the funeral. We would just go on home.

Down in the kitchen, two of Jack's friends from Albany were going into their 20th hour awake. I'd seen them the night before at the Sampas house, and afterward, as it turned out, they'd gone on to the bars to mourn and carouse, and now they had turned up at Mike's for coffee and some of Betty's French toast. Allen appeared, his face scoured by sleep, not a psychic burr on him, and had a cup of tea. Gregory came down muzzily and sipped a light whiskey. We were due at the funeral home at ten, as it turned out, so that the cars could be properly lined up for the procession to the church. I had hoped to go out for a walk on my own, just to get the air, to sniff out Lowell ambiance, but there wasn't going to be time. Suddenly, in fact, it was ten of ten and Peter was awakened with only time to gulp a quick mug of coffee and we were off.

Morning Lowell reminded me of Fall River or New Bedford--trampled school lots full of children, factories asmoke, the mild air of autumn amid the yellowing trees. The street in front of Archambault's was full of funeral directors in gray-suede gloves, striped trousers and the self-satisfied faces of traffic managers in communion with the mysteries of logistics. We were gotten into the line and went inside.

It was just like the night before, except that a pale-yellow, Chekhovian sun bathed the room where Jack lay in his waxen, musing pose. Gregory took movies to the silent shock of Sampases, and Shirley and I sat in the vestibule, waiting. Then our names were called and we went back to the car again and pulled out toward the church. There were cops and more funeral directors in the narrow street, people were thronging up the wide steps of the cathedral, a wan sun gilded the brick-red upper stories of commercial buildings. We double-parked in the line, got out and queued up with the "family & friends"--who, according to the logistics, were to troop in solemnly at the last moment. Inside, the church was all lofty light, pale-marble columns, dark-wood pews, the stained-glass windows over the altar--blue and green and red in the lovely sun--depicting saints in the tall, Grecoesque majesty of their robes.

We were led down to a point just behind the pews reserved for the family, and Shirley (shrouded in a black-lace scarf that, had materialized out of her purse) pulled down the knee rest automatically, ex-Catholic as she was, and all at once I could feel her grief. She was tensing toward the austere words of the Mass that would finalize it all for her. There was no help for her now, she was going to have to endure that celebration of the mystery of Death from which the renegade Catholic can flee, but never far enough, and she couldn't just "get through it," as I could. The fact was going to be nailed down in her consciousness. She and Jack had been lapsed Catholics together, they had had that between them like the stoicism of cigarette smokers who accept the cancer statistics but refuse to quit, and so much else, too--a certain bantering camaraderie; a line-perfect memory for the lyrics of all the songs; an unspoken acknowledgment of the frailty behind life's poses; me. To Shirley, I knew, Jack's death had been an inevitability, not because of the booze (she was married to a boozer of sorts, she'd nursed my groanings, she'd learned to accept the prodigious thirsts of a secret idealist whose private motto was Break the Black Heart) but because down in herself she believed that the best of life came down to this. She believed that there was a mortality that tracked every one of us out of season. She was a soldier who was revulsed by the war of life but stubbornly wouldn't desert it. She had that toughness that comes only from certain bitter acceptances made when one is too young to recognize the sadder, more ambivalent options, and she had learned to hold on to people who were special to her with open hands--and Jack had been special to her in a way that had little to do with me. And now the ritual of the Mass, which would have been a catharsis for the devout, promised her nothing but the cold clarities and losses of the morgue.

The coffin and the pallbearers came down past us (Allen there in his beard and beads) and the Mass began. It was a High Requiem Mass, performed in English, with the priest facing us instead of the altar, but I couldn't concentrate on it. I got up and stood, I sat when others sat, I listened to the chants, the responses, and registered none of it. I stared at the coffin and thought of Jack inside it. The priest, an old friend of Jack's of whom I'd heard stories for 20 years, gave the eulogy, a good eulogy, too (in my doubter's troubled mind, I thought it a good job of work), and I got up and stood dumb in my shoes, and sat down, and couldn't pray, but said the words of the Lord's Prayer when it came, and honestly hoped their hope, thinking that Jack's hunger for continuity, Jack's essential reverence, was being well served. Communion. And at last Shirley wept.

Then it was finished, the priest circling the casket with the swaying censer as the funeral directors came up, genuflecting automatically with the wheeze of too many lavish dinners, shepherding the pallbearers to their proper places, and we filed out, down the long aisle behind Stella and the family, out into the sun again, where photographers jumped about, and Allen stood next to the hearse being interviewed, a crisp wind ruffling his beard there in the traffic-jammed street. Suddenly, there was Robert Creeley, too--wiry as a guitar string, and graceful, with the meticulous small beard of a bravo or a cavalier, in a proper suit and short overcoat, his one busy eye saying, "Yes. At last. Funny. Well. We all do exist, after all," as we were introduced.

We piled into the car and again moved off in the procession. Creeley coming along with us. There was nothing to say, and so we chatted. Peter drove and I lit cigarettes for him, and Shirley commented on the brevity of the new Mass, and I thought about these streets, every name of which I'd known for two decades, and it seemed to be miles before we reached the cemetery gates, where the line of cars paused, then moved on, then came to a stop at last. We got out into the musing, somber air that New England graveyards exude, the leaves drifting amid old stones and meandering walks, and there, beyond some trees, a green canopy had been raised over the fresh-dug grave.

Brief ceremonies to which I didn't listen. The late October breeze stirred in the elms, the crowds milled, photographers posed getting poses. But no ceremonies ease the sight of a coffin poised over a grave's raw hole, and Stella stood there before it, shrouded now in widow's veils, her arm held by Charley, the eldest, as the last stark prayer was said.

Then there was a rush to grab flowers and toss them onto the casket. I looked on, a few steps away. Allen and Peter and Gregory were selecting roses from our flower heart, red roses that they laid on the burnished-bronze surface of the casket. I went up and took a white rose and put it over the place where Jack's head lay. The young man from Rolling Stone was at my elbow, asking irrelevant questions. Why did Jack drink? Was he, in my opinion, a significant writer? What had he thought of rock? I took note of all this but felt nothing.

I saw Allen and Gregory standing near the coffin that was about to be lowered, and I broke away. I didn't have another word in me. I stood with them, and the funeral man pressed some sort of button and, easy as grease, Jack went down into the ground. "Here, you should throw the first dirt," someone said to Allen, a strange young man in work clothes, and Allen reached down to the pile and clenched up a handful and tossed it. Then Gregory, the same. It was hard to get a real handful because of the stones. Then me. I took up the stones, too, and openhanded them down onto Jack's head.

Confusion, milling again. I stood around and didn't know what to do. Shirley stayed on the edges of the crowd, which was dispersing now. Creeley looked on with a cold eye, doing it his own way. We all tarried, and then turned to leave, but the gravediggers were spading the dirt down onto the casket, joking to one another, so we turned back there under the cold, fluttering trees and watched the pile of earth fill the hole. I don't know why we all turned back at the same time--some last awareness of what was being sealed off from us by the spades, I suppose. And then we'd all had enough, and drifted back to the car to finish it up.

There was a lighter mood in the little rooms of the Sampases' mother's house now, a mood not unmixed with that familiar upwelling of relief that follows a bad experience. There were paper cups of Scotch and cans of soda and beer and another lavish spread--the fish that is traditional on such occasions with the Greeks, plus macaroni dishes, rolls, salads, all brought around in the crowd by those large, darkly beautiful women.

I was looking for an opportunity to talk to Stella, so I waited my time and ate some of the good food. Then Sterling Lord was nearby, against a wall in the dining room with his plate, and we talked a little. No, Jack hadn't been "drinking heavily for three days," as most of the papers had it, just drinking along as usual, but he'd been feeling baddish for a month, and all of a sudden he'd started to hemorrhage, and didn't want a doctor, but Stella had called the ambulance anyway, and they'd worked over him for hours, then his liver quit, and the surgery didn't help, and that was that. No, he probably hadn't been conscious much after he'd been taken from the house.

At that moment, I noticed that Stella was sitting near the door with a friend and I went up to her. She seemed put together, though again the sight of me brought tears up into her eyes, tears that acknowledged the strange situation between us: We had never met, yet there was no way for us to be reserved, polite or cautious with each other; we had to stumble through some reference to the occurrence that had brought about our meeting at last; the irony was too bald to be covered by a witticism. So we said the words: what Jack had meant to me, what I had meant to Jack. And that being over, she could brighten a little and we could get to know each other.

"I've had a few drinks." she said, dry-eyed now, small, a fine toughness of fiber emerging. "You know, I never drank with Jack. He didn't want me to...." We laughed about that, because Jack had the boozer's secret disapproval of booze, and he viewed it in moral terms.

Those last days--I'd never know the fun they'd had together! The Mets' pennant run, the Series. He'd taught her to play chess, she'd taught him to play poker. They'd done a lot of sitting around. He hadn't wanted to leave the house much. And that place, St. Pete--it was no town for younger people. Jack hadn't known anyone there. It was only because of his mother that they'd ever moved from Lowell. She shook her head, able not to say some of the things that were stirring up in her. "But those vultures!" she said suddenly. "The people who came around to see 'the famous writer.' ... You know how Jackie could never say no. And they'd say, even to his face, 'I'm gonna use you, you of bastard!' You know--supposedly joking, but they weren't joking."

I'd seen it, particularly in the first days after On the Road appeared: the curious mixture of adulation and resentment that a certain kind of celebrity seems to bring out in others; that combination of sycophancy and petulance that demands attention; all the energy and exacerbated ego of the idle and purposeless who see a famous writer having a drink at the bar and figure that writer has nothing better to do than go to a party, or on a three-day bat, or drive to Cincinnati on a whim. I'd lost Jack often enough in the early stages of an evening because he'd been drawn away into all that swirl of nerves and wastage and anticipated kicks. He had never learned to conserve himself, not if the story was interesting enough, or the person seemed to have anything unique in his spiel, or there was some promise of gaudy forgetfulness for a few hours. And all the time he was burning up the strengths that enabled him to keep upright in the yawning contradictions of his nature.

Stella's friend expressed concern about her finances and she said: "Well, I can always go into the factories, if I have to...as long as Memère is taken care of...." The friend thought she could probably lecture about Jack if she wanted to, but something hard came up into her face: "I'll never do that," she said harshly. "I'll never use him that way. No, never," her voice fiercely jealous of her private memories, as if she could already feel Literary History making its unseemly claims on them.

I crouched at her feet and we talked some more for a while, not about Jack but about other things, nothings, getting a little acquainted, studying each other, discovering that, yes, we liked each other. It was a moment of that brief, intense comminglement between strangers that death sometimes makes possible.

It was getting late, nearly three o'clock, and there was all that road ahead, and we had to get Allen and the others together to go back to Mike Sampas' to pick up their things. We started circulating through the rooms, saying our goodbyes. We had been warmed by them all, we had been welcomed without reservation. I'd often felt that it was this older, simpler communion, this natural flow of emotions outward from one's self, that Jack had looked for so tirelessly in his contemporaries. Now, of course, like so much in his life, something like it had emerged among the young in America, but emerged, for him, too late. They were forming communes, and the spiritual perspectives, the religious ecstasies, of which he had written, were the common coinage of these endeavors. Visionary drugs, music as group sacrament, the nonviolent witness to the holiness of all sentient life--all this had surfaced as he knew it would and, far from being derided in the media or patronized by the academy (as had happened in his case), it was being heralded as the unique culture of a New Age. And Jack? Jack had dropped out of it, and been ignored by it, and grown querulous with drink and age, embittered by the unrelenting indifference to the scope and intention of his life's work, so that when he died. The New York Times had had to call me up, asking if I could direct their obit man to a sober, critical assessment of that work, and I had had to say that I didn't know of a single one and that (aside from his friends) I had never met anyone who had even read the entire, vast cycle of the books. He remained an essentially unknown element in our literature.

I felt the parting with Stella keenly now, because, perhaps better than anyone, she had known the loneliness and anger and physical horror of his last years, and I wanted her to know I knew. I told her straight-out, and embraced her, and we left.

Outside, in the trampled little yard. Gregory was horsing around, and I knew he wanted more, and didn't want it all to end, and was being lured (by the promise of bottles and talk and high-jinks) into driving off with Jack's friends from Albany. Tony Sampas took my arm. Exhaustion had drained his face like a balloon with a slow leak, his shirt collar hung around his neck loosely, and once more he thanked us for coming--this perceptive man who took on the dirty jobs stoically.

My God, Tony," I said, "where else would we have been today?"

Back at Mike's, we collected everything. The Charterses were parked in the street, waiting to take Allen to Logan. We said goodbye to good, worried Mike and calm Betty with her arms full of little children, and waved at the Charterses, and had started down the driveway when I realized that I hadn't said goodbye to Allen and craned out the window with my hand raised, yelling, "Goodbye, man!" There he was, with the pale-gold light of midafternoon shining on that high, sallow dome of forehead, waving and calling out, "Goodbye, John. Stay sweet!" This was the way it usually happened with us. We stood side by side, we chattered, we got distracted, and then lost each other in confusions, with too much left unsaid. There was never time for our fellowship.

Shirley and I drove home without a break through a crisp, gathering dusk of reds and golds, the sinking sun drawing the sap up into the last of the day, that apple tang of late autumn elusive as leaf smoke in the air. We were quiet and close, and we found a letter from Don Wallis, an ex-student of mine, when we finally opened our door, a letter that said in part: "I came to see what I had always, I think, sensed: that Kerouac was a true and magnificent Original whose vision of America was a true and magnificent one, at least for me; that thing I keep going back to, whenever Nixon & company drive me to it, is something of the open-souled country that lives in Kerouac and is alive fighting to get free throughout the land. For you who knew this long ago, and knew him, and knew all along the stupid & careless neglect or willed misreading he got from most everyone, I am sure his death is that much harder to accept...." And, yes, that's true, but accept it I do, because the only alternative is a bitterness that demeans the spirit a man must serve, or a grief that belittles the love he feels. And accept it I can, because I finally had my own private wake once we got back, and decided to write up this account when I felt I could.

Words! Sometimes they nauseate a wordman with their easy evasions, their slick sentiments, their ultimate futility to catch anything but the barest shadow of events, the fleeting aftertaste of emotions. But Jack, like all serious writers, knew that writing was a vow in the continuity of life, a vow that often had to be fashioned out of all the little deaths that precede the big one.

And now he's gone in October, but it's no less true.