| FALL 2002 |
flashquake Editor's Pick |
|
|
Driving up I-95 north in Steve’s Oldsmobile, heading for Jack Kerouac’s grave in Lowell, Mass. It was all Ben’s idea. It was the anniversary of Kerouac’s death, October 21st, and Ben was pretty sure we’d see Bob Dylan up at Kerouac’s grave. Ben and me in the back sharing a gallon of red Gallo wine, Scarlette is up front with Steve, riding shotgun, rolling a joint — in her overdyed black hair and heavy black eye makeup. Scarlette is the bass player in Steve’s punk rock band “Living With the Bomb,” and like Steve she is dressed all in black, and like Steve, she doesn’t smile or talk very much. They are drinking generic beer out of white cans with only the word “beer” printed on them in black — like the cans labeled “food” in “Repo Man.” Steve takes a small brown bottle out of his suit jacket pocket, twists off the cap and takes a deep sniff. Then he hands it to me. “Amyl nitrate,” he tells me. “Also known as ‘Locker Room.’” He puts Social Distortion on the tape player and cranks it, and Rhode Island turns into a psychedelic blur. 
Somewhere north of Boston Steve stops at a grocery store, saying he wants to get some bread. We wander in and stray off in different directions. Ben climbs into the frozen food bin and lies down on top of the fish sticks and tater tots, folding his hands over his chest like a corpse. A woman sees him and screams. I find an intercom for the supermarket’s public address system, and I start making grocery-related announcements taken from an Allen Ginsberg poem: “Walt Whitman to the meat counter please . . . Garcia Lorca to the melon section.” Somewhere on the other side of the store I hear Scarlette laughing. Out in the parking lot, Steve takes four loaves of Italian bread out of his grocery bag, giving each of us a loaf to bludgeon each other with, “Kind of like a pillow fight,” he tells us. In a matter of minutes all of our loaves are smashed to smithereens. Steve pulls one final loaf out of his bag and hands it to me. “Here,” he says, “hold this with both hands while I do smite it with mighty blows.” The police arrive just as we are exiting the parking lot, resuming our search for Jack Kerouac’s grave. Somehow we get lost, and wind up stumbling around what we believe is a cemetery. In reality it’s just some sort of public memorial to local war heroes. Regardless, Steve is convinced that he has found Jim Morrison’s grave, and that it spoke to him. So he’s happy. The trip ends at a bar in Boston called The Rat, where Someone and the Somebodies are playing garage-punk, and Scarlette has gotten us all in for free. Ben starts to complain about our never having found Jack Kerouac’s grave. “We weren’t supposed to,” Scarlette tells him in her husky monotone. “Graves are for dead people. We just needed a reason to move.” Ben considers this, nods, then bellows out his crazed, primordial laugh, and then he starts to dance wildly, out of control in his beat-up hiking boots. We all do. Previously published in the chapbook Meat Sculptures.
|
|
| Copyright 2002 by the Author HOME | Contributors | Archives | Contact | Guidelines |
|