Summary:

Jack LaFleur was a self-destructive, Kerouac-style wanderer, a secret poet and, according to his own legend, a bit character in Kerouac's last great novel, Big Sur. At the end of the sixties, Jack LaFleur married Carrie Anderson and attempted to settle down in the American suburbs to raise a family. But at best he could achieve only an uneasy truce with the land of shopping malls and frontage roads, and he died years later a bitter and frustrated alcoholic.

Three years after his death, as Jack's Boys opens, he continues to be a towering presence in the lives of his surviving family members. Matt, the oldest child and narrator, is a shy copy editor whose romantic notions of women doom all his relationships before they start. Kelley is an office temp whose devotion to her boyfriend is betrayed when he dumps her after she becomes pregnant. The youngest, Theo, is a brilliant, media obsessed high school student who may or may not be following in his father's self-destructive ways.

When Theo impulsively hitchhikes across the country to visit the grandfather none of the children have ever met, he discovers a secret Jack never revealed to his family: Jack was a poet whose work was thought destroyed but is now a valuable commodity in a mini-renaissance of Beat poetry.

Excerpt:

On Saturday mornings when I was little he'd take me for rides. We'd drive around the cities to look at far suburbs or we'd drive to the homely downtowns of Minneapolis or St. Paul where we'd stop at diners for breakfast, or anywhere people were gathered together, and Jack would make friends and find out what was going on. When we got back, we'd take walks through downtown Clear Lake, visiting the shops in the open courtyard where on one end stood a liquor store. Jack'd take me in and he'd buy a bottle of whiskey that wouldn't last the week. Then we'd stop in at the barber shop where Jack would tell his stories for the tenth, or twentieth, or hundredth time. Sometimes it'd be slow and the barbers would be in their chairs themselves passing time with idle chatter about President Ford or Governor Anderson, and then Jack would come in and maybe we'd get a cut or maybe not. They'd talk about the folks in town who'd lived there forever and about the people, more every day, who'd just moved in. And judging by the rate of construction out beyond the highway there were more folks on the way. Every day it seemed a new field was cleared and roads laid down to handle the constant flow of trucks carrying lumber and shingles and concrete to holes in the ground that sprouted nice little homes like housing was simply the latest crop for the American heartland.

It's gonna go on forever, Jack would say. They'll keep building these gronky little houses on every scrap of backyard dirt they can find. They'll build ‘em on top of each other after that, till from space we look like a big prickly ball of cheap pre-fab housing.

And the barbers would laugh and one of them would say, You'd think all these folk'd be a good thing for downtown. Why, we've got a Applebaum's grocery and Persimmon's Department Store and the Arcade Theater and the Clear Lake Tavern. Plenty to do down here.

You'd think so, said Jack.

But downtown Clear Lake wasn't doing well at all. There was that mall to the south in Maplewood that had recently opened, and the Saturday morning barber shop think tank figured the horde of new arrivals just headed there and forgot about this quaint little section of Clear Lake. There were only the old-timers who knew about it any more, it seemed.

And Jack, who'd been a regular since the fall of 1968, which was the year he came to town riding shotgun in a VW microbus. He was coming north for the summer to look for a friend he had met in Denver when this bus found him in Iowa City. It belonged to a man from St. Louis who was not in the bus, because his son had taken it after a heated disagreement and headed north. The reason for the disagreement and the young man's flight was a girl from Madison, Wisconsin, who lay on a makeshift cot in the back of the bus. She was eight months pregnant and spent most of her time drinking Coca-Cola and chanting Janis Joplin lyrics. They were headed for her parent's house in Madison, hoping to make a home there based on trust and understanding and a generally more fair shake in things than they'd been getting from his folks in Missouri.

In Iowa they picked up Jack and cannonballed from there, stopping only to gas up and let the pregnant girlfriend -- she was nineteen, tops -- relieve her bladder. Every fifteen minutes the father-to-be would point his chin at the back of the van and stare at her as the microbus drifted listlessly toward the edge of the road. He'd rub at his beard, a thin patchwork of dirty blond curls, and say, You gotta pee, Sunshine? As the wheels bit shoulder gravel she'd answer with an uh-uh or an emphatic uh-huh which Jack couldn't decipher but the driver could, and if it were necessary they'd pull over, open the doors and she'd do her thing, puddling the highway from a squatting position in the doorway.

Then they'd start again, chewing up the road and spitting out exhaust. You know, man, the father-to-be kept saying, though three times out of four he didn't finish the statement but let it dangle. He wore a tiedye under a leather vest and a beaded medallion. Jack himself wore sensible clothes, plain cotton shirts with collars and cuffs that he'd picked up in Kansas City thrift shops.

Jack wasn't with the hippies, he'd tell the barbers on those Saturday mornings. He didn't like their music, he didn't like their politics, and he for sure didn't like their drugs. He'd seen them on acid and was convinced there was something evil at work there, in this drug that delivered psychosis disguised as liberation. Why, he wouldn't be surprised at all if the government didn't have a hand in it. It'd work perfect in their favor to distribute tasty pharmaceuticals to would-be political radicals in order to waylay the entire movement. No, the hippies weren't his thing at all, he'd be sure to say, though he'd catch rides with them and drink their whiskey and listen to their stories and tell them his own. But he couldn't figure them out, how they could be so dumb and feel so free.

And the barbers would ask, So what were you doing, Jack, out there hitching rides and wandering like a damn fool yourself?

And Jack would say, I was a traveler myself then. I was not yet a responsible brain dead citizen with mouths to feed and a lawn to tend to. Why sir, I launched my journey in 1960 and didn't stop till Carrie Anderson sank her lovely hooks into me. I was gonna show Kerouac a thing or two, that was my so to speak philosophical underpinning. And so I got ambulatory, and lived a life to be proud of in every corner of America I could get to. Not that it was easy toward the end, you see. I had to fight through hordes of these tie-dyes, like Sunshine Knocked-up and her boyfriend Mellow Fellow.

Who'd be driving along and sometimes just say Far Out in a way that Jack would expect him to point out the window at something. He rarely did, and when he did point it was at something that probably wasn't there, since Jack saw nothing but trees and fields and power poles and the like.

What type of chemical have you been sampling? Jack asked. Then he had to repeat it.

I'm on love and peace, the guy answered. And Jack laughed and handed him the whiskey bottle and wished it weren't nearly empty.

Me and my Bobby McGee, sang the girl from her cot in the back. Luh-la la, luh-la, luh lah-la ... she went on. Looking back on it, Jack told me, it was nothing to be proud of, though I'm sure till their dying days all three of them -- wherever they are now -- are still laughing about it in some secret place in their heart.

They dropped Jack at the Applebaum's near the highway at three in the morning and sped off like a clipper on the winds of the American night, the boyfriend behind the wheel and Sunshine curled up in the back. Jack finished off the whiskey under a streetlamp and thought for a second about what to do. He had an address for his friend, but no map and no inclination to go wandering, and there was a bench right there where he could catch up on his sleep, so he settled in as best he could and dozed off.

Grebmar.net contains fiction written by Michael Ramberg. Please do not steal or redistribute it. I can be reached at mramberg@grebmar.net

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