Beat

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: 17 years old, hair an unholy mess and a little loden-green beret perched on top to keep it in place, 83 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 an sf flick, hitched all the way from Oxnard, California, and there I am on Jack's front porch in Northport on Long Island, December 23, 1958. 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 onto 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-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 3000 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 had flunked English, history, calculus, art, phys ed, music and lunch. I wanted adventure, the life of the road, free wheeling chicks in berets and tea and bongos and long benzedrine-inflected bullshit sessions that ran 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 3000 miles, her Jacky was my Jack, and I was cold through to the bone, stone broke, scared, heartsick and just about a lungful of O2 away from throwing myself down in the slush and sobbing until somebody came and shot me. I knocked again.

"Hey, Ma," I heard from somewhere 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 that the door was open and Jack himself was 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.

I stopped knocking. My mouth fell open and the snot froze in my nostrils. "Jack Kerouac?" I said.

He let a grin slide down one side of his mouth and back up the other. "Nobody else," he said.

The wind shot down my collar, I caught a glimpse of colored lights blinking on and off in the room behind him, and suddenly it was all gushing out of me like something I'd been chewing over and digesting all my life: "I hitched all the way from Oxnard and my name's Wallace Pinto but you can call me Buzz and I just wanted to say, I just wanted to tell you--"

"Yeah, yeah, I know," he said, waving a hand in dismissal, and he seemed unsteady on his muscatel-impaired feet, the smoke curling up to snatch at his cracked-blue squinting eyes, the words slow on his lips, heavy, weighted and freighted with the deep everlasting bardic wisdom of the road, the cathouse and the seaman's bar, "but I tell you, kid, you keep drumming on the door like that, you're liable to end up in the hospital"--a pause--"or maybe a jazz combo." I just stood there in a trance until I felt his hand--his Dharma Bum Subterranean On the Road bopmaster's gone Mexican-chick-digging hand--take hold of my shoulder and tug me forward, over the threshold and into the house. "You ever been introduced to a true and veritable set of tight-skinned bongos?" he asked, throwing an arm over my shoulder as the door slammed behind us.

•

Two hours later we were sitting in the front room by this totally gone Christmas tree bedecked with cherubim and little Christs and the like, indulging in a poor boy and a joint or two of Miss Green, my Charlie Parker record whizzing and popping on the record player and a whole big pile of red and green construction paper strips growing at our feet. We were making a chain to drape over the Beatest tree you ever saw and the music was a cool breeze fluttering full of Yardbird breath and the smell of ambrosia and manna crept in from the kitchen where Mémère, the Beat Madonna herself, was cooking up some first-rate mouth-watering Canuck-style two-days-before-Christmas show. I had not eaten since New Jersey, the morning before, and that was only some pretty piss-poor diner hash fries and a runny solitary egg, and I was cutting up strips of colored paper and pasting them in little circles as Jack's chain grew and my head spun from the wine and the weed.

That big old lady in the Christmas dress just kind of vanished and the food appeared, and we ate, Jack and I, side by side. We left our Beat plates on the sofa, threw our chain on the tree and were just pawing through the coats in the front hallway for another poor boy of sweet Tokay wine when there was a knock at the door. This knock wasn't like my knock. Not at all. This was a delicate knock, understated and minimal, but with a whole deep continent of passion and expectation implicit in it--in short, a feminine knock. "Well," Jack said, his face lit with the Beatest joy at discovering the slim vessel of a pint bottle in the inside pocket of his seaman's peacoat, "aren't you going to answer it?"

"Me?" I said, grinning my Beatest grin. I was in, I was part of it all, I was Jack's confidant and compatriot, and we were in the front hallway of his pad in Northport, Long Island, a fine hot steaming mother-of-Jack-prepared meal in our gone Beat guts, and he was asking me to answer the door--me, 17 years old and nobody. "You mean it?" and my grin widened till I could feel the creeping seeping East Coast chill all the way back to my suburban-dentist-filled molars.

Jack, uncapping, tipping back, passing the bottle: "That's a chick-knock, Buzz."

Me: "I love chicks."

Jack: "A gone lovely spring flower of a beret-wearing flipped long-legged coltish retroussé-nosed run-away-from-home-to-big-Jack-Kerouac chick-knock."

Me: "I am crazy for gone lovely spring flower of a beret-wearing flipped long-legged and coltish retroussé-nosed run-away-from-home-to-big-Jack-Kerouac chicks."

Jack: "Then answer it."

I pulled open the door and there she was, all the above and more, 16 years old with big ungulate eyes and Mary Travers hair. She gave me a gaping open-mouthed look, taking in my loden-green beret, the frizzed wildness of my hair sticking out from under it, my Beat Levi's jacket and jeans and my tea-reddened joyous hitching-all-the-way-from-Oxnard eyes. "I was looking for Jack," she said, and her voice was cracked and scratchy and low. She dropped her gaze.

I looked to Jack, who stood behind me, out of her line of vision, and asked a question with my eyebrows. Jack gave me his hooded smoldering dust-jacket-from-hell look, then stepped forward, took the poor boy from me and loomed over the now-eye-lifting chick and chucked her chin with a gone Beat curling index finger. "Coochie-coo-chie-coo," he said.

•

Her name was Ricky Keen (Richarda Kinkowski, actually, but that's how she introduced herself), she'd hitchhiked all the way down from Plattsburgh and she was as full of hero worship and (continued on page 149)Beat(continued from page 102) inarticulate praise as I was. "Dean Moriarty," she said at the end of a long rambling speech that alluded to nearly every line Jack had written and half the Zoot Sims catalog, "he is the coolest. I mean, that's who I want to make babies with, absolutely."

There we were, standing in the front hallway listening to this crack-voiced ungulate-eyed long gone Beat-haired 16-year-old chick talk about making babies, with Charlie Parker riffing in the background and the Christmas lights winking on and off, and it was strange and poignant. All I could say was "Wow," over and over, but Jack knew just what to do. He threw one arm over my shoulder and the other over the chick's and he thrust his already bloating and booze-inflamed but quintessentially Beat face into ours and said, low and rumbly, "What we need, the three of us hepsters, cats and chicks alike, is a consciousness-raising all-night bull session at the indubitable pinnacle of all neighborhood bodhisattva centers and bar and grills, the Peroration Pub, or, as the fellahin know it, Ziggy's Clam House. What do you say?"

What did we say? We were speechless--stunned, amazed, moved almost to tears. The man himself, he who had practically invented the mug, the jug and the highball and lifted the art of getting sloshed to its Beat apotheosis, was asking us, the skinny underage bedraggled runaways, to go out on the town for a night of wild and prodigious Kerouackian drinking. All I could manage was a nod of assent. Ricky Keen said, "Yeah, sure, like wow," and then we were out in the frozen rain, the three of us, the streets all crusted with ugly East Coast ice, Ricky on one side of Jack, me on the other, Jack's arms uniting us. We tasted freedom on those frozen streets, passing the bottle, our minds elevated and feverish with the fat spike of Mary Jane that appeared magically between Jack's thumb and forefinger and the little strips of benzedrine-soaked felt he made us swallow like a sacrament. The wind sang a dirge. Ice clattered down out of the sky. We didn't care. We walked eight blocks, our Beat jackets open to the elements, and we didn't feel a thing.

Ziggy's Clam House loomed up out of the frozen black wastes of the Long Island night like a ziggurat, a holy temple of Beat enlightenment and deep soul truths, lit only by the thin neon braids of the beer signs in the windows. Ricky Keen giggled. My heart was pounding against my ribs. I'd never been in a bar before and I was afraid I'd make an ass of myself. But not to worry: We were with Jack, and Jack never hesitated. He hit the door of Ziggy's Clam House like a fullback bursting through the line, the door lurched back on its hinges and embedded itself in the wall, and even as I clutched reflexively at the 83 cents in my pocket Jack stormed the bar with a roar: "Set up the house, barkeep, and all you sleepy fellahin, the Beat Generation has arrived!"

I exchanged a glance with Ricky Keen. The place was as quiet as a mortuary, with some kind of tacky Hawaiian design painted on the walls and a couple of plastic palms so deep in dust they might have been snowed on. It was nearly as dark inside as out. The bartender, startled by Jack's joyous full-throated proclamation of Beat uplift and infectious Dionysian spirit, glanced up from the flickering blue trance of the TV like a man whose last stay of execution has just been denied. He was heavy in the jowls, favoring a dirty white dress shirt and little bow tie pinned like a dead insect to his collar. He winced when Jack brought his Beat fist down on the countertop and boomed, "Some of everything for everybody!"

Ricky Keen and I followed in Jack's wake, lit by our proximity to the centrifuge of Beatdom and the wine, marijuana and speed coursing through our gone adolescent veins. We blinked in the dim light and saw that everybody Jack was referring to comprised a group of three: a sad, mystical, powerfully madeup cocktail waitress in black tutu and fishnet stockings, and a pair of crewcut Teamster types in work shirts and chinos. The larger of the two, a man with a face like a side of beef, squinted up briefly from his cigarette and growled at Jack, "Pipe down, asshole. Can't you see we're trying to concentrate here?" Then the big rippled neck rotated and the head swung back round to refixate on the tube.

Up on the screen, which was perched between gallon jars of pickled eggs and Polish sausage, Red Skelton was mugging in a Santa Claus hat for all the dead vacant mindless living rooms of America, and I knew, with a deep sinking gulf of overwhelming up-Beat sadness, that my own triple-square parents, all the way out in Oxnard, were huddled round the console watching this same rubbery face go through its contortions and wondering where their pride and joy had got himself to. Ricky Keen might have been thinking along similar lines, so sad and stricken did she look at that moment, and I wanted to put my arms around her and stroke her hair and feel the heat of her Beat little lost body against my own. Only Jack seemed unaffected. "Beers all around," he insisted, tattooing the bar with his fist, and even before the bartender could heave himself up off his stool to comply, Jack was waking up Benny Goodman on the jukebox and we were pooling our change as the Teamsters sat stoically beside their fresh Jackbought beers and the cocktail waitress regarded us out of a pair of black stavedin eyes. Of course, Jack was broke and my 83 cents didn't take us far, but fortunately Ricky Keen produced a wad of crumpled dollar bills from a little purse tucked away in her boot and the beer flowed like bitter honey.

It was sometime during our third or fourth round that the burlier of the two Teamster types erupted from his barstool with the words "communist" and "faggot" on his lips and flattened Jack, Ricky and me beneath a windmill of punches, kicks and elbow chops. We went down in a marijuana-weakened puddle, laughing like madmen, not even attempting to resist as the other Teamster, the bartender and even the waitress joined in. Half a purple-bruised minute later the three of us were out on the icy street in a jumble of limbs and my hand accidentally wandered to Ricky Keen's hard little half-formed breast and for the first time I wondered what was going to become of me, and more immediately, where I was going to spend the night.

But Jack, heroically Beat and muttering under his breath about squares and philistines, anticipated me. Staggering to his feet and reaching down a Tokaycradling spontaneous-prose-generating railroad-callused hand first to Ricky and then to me, he said, "Fellow seekers and punching bags, the road to Enlightenment is a rocky one, but tonight, tonight you sleep with big Jack Kerouac."

•

I woke the next afternoon on the sofa in the living room of the pad Jack shared with his mémère. The sofa was grueling terrain, pocked and scoured by random dips and high hard draft-buffeted plateaus, but my stringy impervious 17-year-old form had become one with it in a way that approached bliss. It was, after all, a sofa, and not the cramped front seat of an A&P produce truck or roadhopping Dodge, and it had the rugged book-thumbing late-night-crashing bongo-thumping joint-rolling aura of Jack to recommend and sanctify it. So what if my head was as big as a weather balloon and the rest of me felt like so many pounds and ounces of beef jerky? So what if I was nauseated from cheap wine and tea and benzedrine and my tongue was stuck like Velcro to the roof of my mouth and Ricky Keen was snoring on the floor instead of sharing the sofa with me? So what if Bing Crosby and Mario Lanza were blaring square Christmas carols from the radio in the kitchen and Jack's big hunkering soul of a mother maneuvered her shouldery bulk into the room every five seconds to give me a look of radiant hatred and motherly impatience? So what? I was at Jack's. Nirvana attained.

When finally I threw back the old fuzzy Canuck-knitted detergent-smelling fully Beat afghan some kind soul--Jack?--had draped over me in the dim hours of the early morning, I became aware that Ricky and I were not alone in the room. A stranger was fixed like a totem pole in the armchair across from me, a skinny rangy long-nosed Brahmin-looking character with a hundred-mile stare and a dull-brown Beat suit that might have come off the back of an insurance salesman from Hartford, Connecticut. He barely breathed, squinting glassy-eyed into some dark unfathomable vision like a man trying to see his way to the end of a tunnel, as lizardlike a human as I'd ever seen. And who could this be, I wondered, perched here rigidbacked in Jack's gone Beat pad on the day before Christmas and communing with a whole other reality? Ricky Keen snored lightly from her nest on the floor. I studied the man in the chair like he was a science project or something, until all at once it hit me: This was none other than Bill himself, the marksman, freighted all the way across the Beat heaving blue-cold Atlantic from Tangier to wish Jack and his Beat Madonna a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

"Bill!" I cried, leaping up from the sofa to pump his dead wooden hand. "This is, I mean, I can't tell you what an honor," and I went on in that gone worshipful vein for what must have been ten minutes, some vestige of the benzedrine come up on me suddenly. Ricky Keen snapped open her pure golden eyes like two pats of butter melting into a pile of pancakes and I knew I was hungry and transported and headachy and Bill never blinked an eye or uttered a word.

"Who's that?" Ricky Keen breathed in her scratchy cracked throat-cancery rasp that I'd begun to find incredibly sexy.

"Who's that?" I echoed in disbelief. "Why, it's Bill."

Ricky Keen stretched, yawned, readjusted her beret. "Who's Bill?"

"You mean you don't know who Bill is?" I yelped, and all the while Bill sat there like a corpse, his irises drying out and his lips clamped tight round the little nugget of his mouth.

Ricky Keen ignored the question. "Did we eat anything last night?" she rasped. "I'm so hungry I could puke."

At that moment I became aware of a sharp gland-stimulating gone wild smell wafting in from the kitchen on the very same Beat airwaves that carried the corny vocalizations of Bing and Mario: Somebody was making flapjacks!

Despite our deep soul brother-and sisterhood with Jack and his mémère, Ricky and I were nonetheless a little sketchy about just bursting into the kitchen and ingratiating our way into a plate of those flapjacks, so we paused to knock on the hinge-swinging slab of the kitchen door. There was no response. We heard Mario Lanza, the sizzle of grease in the pan and voices, talking or chanting. One of them seemed to be Jack's, so we knocked again and boldly pushed open the door.

If there was a climax to all that had come before, a Beat epiphany and holy epitomized moment, this was it: Jack was there at the kitchen table and his mother at the stove, yes, but there was a third person present, arrived among us like one of the bearded mystics out of the East. And who could it be with that mad calculating bug-eyed big-lipped look of Zen wisdom and froglike beauty? I knew it in an instant: It was Allen. Allen himself, the poet laureate of Beatdom, come all the way from Paris for this far-out moment with Jack and his mother in their humble little Beat kitchen on the cold north shore of Long Island. He was sitting at the table with Jack, spinning a dreidel and singing in a muddy moist sweet-wine-lubricated voice:

Dreidel, dreidel, dreidel, I made it out of clay, When I want to spin it, Dreidel I will play.

Jack waved Ricky and me into the room and pushed us down into two empty chairs at the kitchen table. "Flipped," he murmured as the dreidel spun across the tabletop, and he poured each of us a water glass of sticky Mogen David blackberry wine and my throat seized at the taste of it. "Drink up, man, it's Christmas Eve!" Jack shouted, and thumped my back to jolt open the tubes.

That was when Mémère came into the picture. She was steaming about something, really livid, her shoulders all hunched up and her face stamped with red-hot broiling uncontainable rage. But she served up the flapjacks and we ate in Beat communion, fork-grabbing, syruppouring and butter-smearing while Allen rhapsodized about the inner path and Jack poured wine. In retrospect, I should have been maybe a hair more attuned to Jack's mother and her moods, but I shoved flapjacks into my face, reveled in Beatdom and ignored the piercing glances and rattling pans. Afterward we left our Beat plates where we dropped them and rushed into the living room to spin some sides and pound on the bongos while Allen danced a disheveled dance and blew into the wooden flute and Bill looked down the long tunnel of himself.

What can I say? The legends were gathered, we cut up the benzedrine inhalers and swallowed the little supercharged strips of felt inside, feasted on Miss Green and took a gone Beat hike to the liquor store for more wine and still more. By dark I was able to feel the wings of consciousness lift off my back and my memory of what came next is glorious but hazy. At some point--was it eight? nine?--I was aroused from my 17-year-old apprentice-Beat stupor by the sound of sniffling and choked-back sobs, and found myself looking up at the naked-but-for-a-seaman's-peacoat form of Ricky Keen. I seemed to be on the floor behind the couch, buried in a litter of doilies, antimacassars and sheets of crumpled newspaper, the lights from the Christmas tree riding up the walls and Ricky Keen standing over me with her bare legs, heaving out chesty sobs and using the ends of her long gone hair to dab at the puddles of her eyes. "What?" I said. "What is it?" She swayed back and forth, rocking on her naked feet, and I couldn't help admiring her knees and the way her bare young hitchhiking thighs sprouted upward from them to disappear in the folds of the coat.

"It's Jack," she sobbed, the sweet rasp of her voice catching in her throat, and then she was behind the couch and kneeling like a supplicant over the jeanclad poles of my outstretched legs.

"Jack?" I repeated stupidly.

A moment of silence, deep and committed. There were no corny carols seeping from the radio in the kitchen, no wild tooth-baring jazz or Indian sutras roaring from the record player, there was no Allen, no Jack, no Mémère. If I'd been capable of sitting up and thrusting my head over the back of the sofa I would have seen that the room was deserted but for Bill, still locked in his comatose reverie. Ricky Keen sat on my knees. "Jack won't have me," she said in a voice so tiny I was hardly aware she was speaking at all. And then, with a pout: "He's drunk."

Jack wouldn't have her. I mulled fuzzily over this information, making slow drawn-out turtle-like connections while Ricky Keen sat on my knees with her golden eyes and Mary Travers hair, and finally I said to myself, If Jack won't have her, then who will? I didn't have a whole lot of experience along these lines--my adventures with the opposite sex had been limited to lingering dumbstruck classroom gazes and the odd double-feature grope--but I was willing to learn. And eager, oh yes.

"It's such a drag being a virgin," she breathed, unbuttoning the coat, and I sat up and took hold of her--clamped my panting perspiring sex-crazed adolescent self to her, actually--and we kissed and throbbed and explored each other's anatomies in a drifting cloud of Beat bliss and gone holy rapture. I was lying there, much later, tingling with the quiet rush and thrill of it, Ricky breathing softly into the cradle of my right arm, when suddenly the front door flew back and the world's wildest heppest benny-crazed coast-to-coasting voice lit the room like a brushfire. I sat up. Groped for my pants. Cradled a startled Ricky head.

"Ho, ho, ho!" the voice boomed. "All you little boysies and girlsies been good? I been checkin' my list!"

I popped my head over the couch and there he was, cool and inexplicable. I couldn't believe my eyes: It was Neal. Neal escaped from San Quentin and dressed in a street-corner Santa outfit, a bag full of booze, drugs, cigarettes and canned hams slung over his back, his palms hammering invisible bongos in the air. "Come out, come out, wherever you are!" he cried, and broke down in a sea of giggles. "Gonna find out who's naughty and nice, yes indeed!"

At that moment Jack burst in from the kitchen, where he and Allen had been taking a little catnap over a jug of wine, and that was when the really wild times began, the back-thumping high-fiving jumping jiving tea-smoking scat-singing Beat revel of the ages. Ricky Keen came to life with a snort, wrapped the jacket round her and stepped out from behind the couch like a Beat princess. I reached for the wine, Jack howled like a dog and even Bill shifted his eyes round his head in a simulacrum of animacy. Neal couldn't stop talking and drinking and smoking, spinning round the room like a dervish, Allen shouted "Miles Davis!" and the record player came to life, and we were all dancing, even Bill, though he never left his chair.

That was the crowning moment of my life--I was Beat, finally and absolutely--and I wanted it to go on forever. And it could have, if it weren't for Jack's mother, that square-shouldered fuming old woman in the Christmas dress. She was nowhere to be seen through all of this, and I'd forgotten about her in the crazed explosion of the moment--it wasn't till Jack began to break down that she materialized again.

It was around 12 or so. Jack got a little weepy, sang an a cappella version of Hark, the Herald Angels Sing and tried to talk us all into going to the midnight Mass at St. Columbanus' Church. Allen said he had no objection, except that he was Jewish, Neal derided the whole thing as the height of corny bourgeois sentimentality, Bill was having trouble moving his lips and Ricky Keen said that she was Unitarian and didn't know if she could handle it. Jack, tears streaming down his face, turned toward me. "Buzz," he said, and he had this wheedling crazed biggest-thing-in-the-world sort of edge to his voice, "Buzz, you're a good Catholic, I know you are--what do you say?"

All eyes focused on me. Silence rang suddenly through the house. I was three sheets to the wind, sloppy drunk, 17 years old. Jack wanted to go to midnight Mass, and it was up to me to say yea or nay. I just stood there, wondering how I was going to break the news to Jack that I was an atheist and that I hated God, Jesus and my mother, who made me go to parochial school five days a week since I had learned to walk and religious instruction on Sundays to boot. My mouth moved, but nothing came out.

Jack was trembling. A tic started over his right eye. He clenched his fists. "Don't let me down, Buzz!" he roared. When he started toward me, Neal tried to stop him, but Jack flung him away as if he were nothing. "Midnight Mass, Buzz, midnight!" he boomed, and he was standing right there in front of me, gone Beat crazy, and I could smell the booze on his stinking Beat breath. He dropped his voice then. "You'll rot in hell, Buzz," he hissed, "you'll rot." Allen reached for his arm, but Jack shook him off. I took a step back.

That was when Mémère appeared.

She swept into the room like something out of a Japanese monster flick, huge in her nightdress, big old Jackmothery toes sticking out beneath it like sausages, and she went straight to the fireplace and snatched up a poker. "Out!" she screamed, the eyes sunk back in her head, "get out of my house, you queers and convicts and drug addicts, and you"--she turned on me and Ricky--"you so-called fans and adulators, you're even worse. Go back where you came from and leave my Jacky in peace." She made as if to swing the poker at me and I reflexively ducked out of the way, but she brought it down across the lamp on the table instead. There was a flash, the lamp exploded, and she drew back and whipped the poker like a lariat over her head. "Out!" she shrieked, and the whole group, even Bill, edged toward the door.

Jack did nothing to stop her. He gave us his brooding lumberjack Beat posing-on-the-fire-escape look, but there was something else to it, something new, and as I backpedaled out the door and into the grimy raw East Coast night, I saw what it was--the look of a mama's boy, pouty and spoiled. "Go home to your mothers, all of you," Mémère yelled, shaking the poker at us as we stood there drop-jawed on the dead brown ice-covered pelt of the lawn. "For God's sake," she sobbed, "it's Christmas!" And then the door slammed shut.

I was in shock. I looked at Bill, Allen, Neal, and they were as stunned as I was. And poor Ricky--all she had on was Jack's peacoat and I could see her tiny bare perfect-toed Beat chick feet freezing to the ground like twin ice sculptures. I reached up to adjust my beret and realized it wasn't there, and it was like I'd had the wind knocked out of me. "Jack!" I cried out suddenly, and my creaking adolescent voice turned it into a forlorn bleat. "Jack!" I cried, "Jack," but the night closed round us and there was no answer.

•

What happened from there is a long story. But to make it short, I took Mémère's advice and went home to my mother, and by the time I got there Ricky had already missed her period. My mother didn't like it but the two of us moved into my boyhood room with the lame college pennants and dinosaur posters and whatnot on the walls for about a month, which is all we could stand, and then Ricky took her gone gorgeous Beat Madonna-of-the-streets little body off to an ultra-Beat one-room pad on the other end of town and I got a job as a brakeman on the Southern Pacific and she let me crash with her and that was that. We smoked tea and burned candles and incense and drank jug wine and made it till we damn near rubbed the skin off each other. The first four boys we named Jack, Neal, Allen and Bill, though we never saw any of their namesakes again except Allen, at one of his poetry readings, but he made like he didn't know us. The first of the girls we named Gabrielle, for Jack's mother, and after that we seemed to kind of just lose track and named them for the month they were born, regardless of sex, and we wound up with two Junes--June the male and June the female--but it was no big thing.

Yeah, I was Beat, Beater than any of them--or just as Beat, anyway. Looking back on it now, though, I mean after all these years and what with the mortgage payments and Ricky's detox and the kids with their college tuition and the way the woodworking shop above the garage burned down and how stinking closefisted petit bourgeois before-the-revolution pigheaded cheap the railroad disability is, I wonder if I'm not so much Beat anymore, as just plain beat. But then, I couldn't even begin to find the words to describe it to you.

"I wanted to put my arms around her and stroke her hair and feel the heat of her Beat little lost body."