This is the part with no whales in it. A lot of gay guys, though, and Jack Kerouac, who may have been bisexual, even if, strangely for our times, no one seems to know for sure. Bob Dylan will be showing up too; he’s definitely not gay, but he’s got Allen Ginsberg with him.

It was about 1976 or ‘77 and Sam and I (we’re not among the gay ones in this story, I blatantly hasten to add) had yet another summer with time on our hands. I must have been telling him stories about my childhood visits to New Bedford, but by that time there was no Uncle Bill to visit; it was more likely a matter of being full of Kerouac and wanting to get on the road ourselves, so why not go his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, and spend some time beached on Cape Cod?

Somehow I talked my dad into loaning us his car for the journey, and we promptly stole a page from Hunter Thompson and rechristened it the Great Silver Shark.
Naturally it didn’t come home without a fresh dent in it, which I managed to incur in an absolutely empty parking lot right off the beach. It’s possible to blame the bump on American beer, which, since it’s so weak compared to Canadian brew, requires vast quantities to be consumed to acquire a proper buzz, and in the hot sun this can be tricky.

I’ll cut the beach part short because Kerouac’s the more interesting bit here.

We soaked up some great sun and greater sunsets, having got ourselves ensconced in the cheapest possible beach house we could find. Our days and nights were spent in and around this incredibly rustic lonely cottage out in the middle of the dunes. We smoked large quantities of weed from a glass pipe, sucked back every buyable brand of those novel-to-us American liquor mixers in cans, and boiled up lobster after lobster, the better to ensure our safety in the sea.

Here’s Sam on the veranda of the mansion, the Great Shark leering from the, er, driveway.

For variety, one day we drove out to Provincetown on the extreme tip of the cape to spend the night. I don’t know where we ended up staying, but it wasn’t in any of the half-dozen charming little inns we found advertised in the local paper. They were all very pretty on the outside, beautifully decorated on the inside – and queer as a three-dollar bill from the cellar to the ceiling.

I think it took visits to three of them before it dawned on Sam and me that the strange proliferation of really good-looking guys hanging around every one of these places – in couples, some quite friendly, some blowing us kisses – represented a pattern that wasn’t going to diverge as long as we stuck to the same kind of newspaper ads.

I hadn’t heard that Provincetown had become a gay mecca since I was last here. Now I knew.

So we went downtown among the refreshingly ugly tourists from Naugahyde, Kansas, and gorged ourselves on beer and lobster burgers (yes, lobster on a bun – in America everything eventually becomes a sandwich). I think we headed back down the cape in a hurry after that.

K ~ K ~ K

So Provincetown was a shock, and then, so was Lowell – from the utterly opposite direction.

The grotty factories and chintzy bars and dreary grey of Kerouac’s ancient mill town certainly suited our working-class sensibilities better, but my God was that city glum! (And still is, as far as I can tell from the satellite images on Google Earth.)

So we got down to business and began applying the teacup full of information we had on where exactly old Jack had been planted eight years earlier: It was a Catholic cemetery called Edson. You’d think a quick flick through the phone directory would locate that much, but even a couple of bashful phonecalls didn’t get us any closer.

As I recall we asked a couple of locals and got the impression that they’d heard of Kerouac but basically didn’t know if he was dead or alive, let alone his current address. Asked to direct us to a cemetery, they pointed vaguely toward the dead centre of town, fittingly enough, and after a struggle to find a spot to park the Shark, we hopped a fence into a massive and massively closed graveyard.

Massive = many, many graves. All we knew was that Jack’s tombstone was just a marker flat on the ground. This much we knew from “Rolling Thunder Logbook”, Sam Shepard’s account of the 1975 concert tour by Bob Dylan and the Rolling Thunder Revue, which has a photo of Dylan and Allen Ginsberg sitting on the grave.

On the concert tour, which Sam and I had “caught up with” (as they say in the trade) at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, Ginsberg was unaccountably along for the ride, chanting onstage and being in the movie they sort of made en route, “Renaldo and Clara”. So when the Thunder ewas rolling towards Boston, Allen suggested that Bob pay respects to their mutual hero Kerouac, and Ginsberg, at least, knew where the grave was because he’d been a pallbearer at the funeral in ‘69.

Sam and I had of course missed the funeral – we were still mostly kids at the time – so we searched and searched around the cemetery and, after all of 30 minutes of dreary searching, gave up, sat down and rolled a spliff. There was a haunting-ish mausoleum in one spot with some flat-to-the-ground markers nearby, so I took a picture of Sam sitting thoughtfully by one, all Dylanesque. Where that picture is today I’m not sure, but believe me, we were there, dude, in an actual graveyard in actual Lowell, Massachusetts, where Jack Kerouac his actual self might actually have been buried. Somewhere.

K ~ K ~ K

And now, a few actual excepts from “Rolling Thunder Logbook”:

Allen’s in the front, in the non-driver position, greying curls jumping like little springs over his ears, head bent low over Kerouac’s “Mexico City Blues”, stacks of other Kerouacs falling off his knees, all flowing picture words of places we’re heading straight into.
First glimpse of Lowell off the edge of freeway is the opposite of what you’d call romantic. Smoking black brick skeleton buildings, stacked-up clapboard houses, dirty little parks, brown gymansiums. We swing off with Allen carrying on a running narration.

We pull up at Nick’s Lounge, a depressing little bar owned by Kerouac’s brother-in-law, Nick Sampas. The Sampas brothers greet us with genuine hospitality and good cheer. On the wall, lost in among dozens of snapshots of other locals, is a color Polaroid shot of Kerouac and a girl taken right there in Nick’s. Taken about a month before he died. He looks very soused and bloated. we’re treated to big plates of spaghetti and cold beer as we run down the different locations we want to hit with Tony Sampas. Tony smiles as he hears the names, as though each brought its own special picture to mind.

We head out in Tony’s big station wagon with the heater turned on full blast. Halfway to the cemetery to visit Kerouac’s grave, Tony pulls out a tape recorder and a special tape.”This thing was recorded at the bar. I don’t think anyone outside the family’s ever heard it.”
He snaps the cassette into place and suddenly there’s the voice of Jack. Speaking like a ghost over time. Ginsberg listens with a smile.

There it is, right inside a station wagon, captured in his hometown, the rasping whacked-out voice of Kerouac hisself. He’s obviously ripped on something because the associations are non-stop, sometimes lilting into a old cowboy song, sometimes beating out the rhythm of language on his knees, trains, drunks, brakemen, California,”the midnight ghost, good codeine, howlin’ round the bend, jockeys all ride away in Cadillacs, files full of potatoes, Santa Clara Valley, Morgan Hill, dippin’ into the past, cement factory, looks like Kafka, lettuce bowl of the world, all ya gotta do is git an airplane, fill it with mayonnaise, fly over and drop it, now you shoot up toward the high school.”

We swing into the graveyard through black iron gates. Allen quotes from Kerouac’s favorite Shakespeare: “How like a winter hath my absence been … What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen! / What old December’s bareness everywhere!”

Dylan and Ginsberg perch close to the ground, cross-legged, facing this tiny marble plaque, half buried in the grass. Dylan’s tuning up his Martin while Ginsberg causes his little shoe-box harmonium to breathe out notes across the lawn. Soon a slow blues takes shape with each of them exchanging verses, then Allen moving into an improvised poem to the ground, to the sky, to thte day, to Jack, to life, to music, to the worms, to bones, to travel, to the States.

Now, in the face of burned-out Kerouac, Cassady, and all the other ones who went over the hill, this life seems like a miracle. Still ongoing. Ignoring all that. Respecting it but not indulging in remorse. Allen and Dylan singing on his grave. Allen, full of life, hope, and resurrection. Poets of this now life. This here life. This one lived and living.

“Dead and don’t know it. Living and do. The living have a dead idea.” – Kerouac, “Mexico City Blues”

The other spots they visited in Lowell, for the Dorseyland record, were the library, the high school, a mill, St Jean Baptiste Church, the Moody Street Bridge, Textile Lunch, the orphanage and its “grotto”, “the Castle” where Dr Sax lived and Jack’s birthplace and his favourite pool hall. Sam and I didn’t see any of them. How I wish I had another chance now.