I am the Reincarnation of Jack Kerouac & Holden Caulfield
Published by A.M. Cicero at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 A.M. Cicero
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
Thank you for downloading this free ebook. Although this is a free ebook, it remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied and distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy at Smashwords.com, where they can also discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.
About the author
To find out more about me and my writing, please visit fictionstrategies.com
Chapter 1: Tunnel Music
I was afraid of train stations. When I went to bed I would think about being on the subway platform. Falling off. I didn't like how short the platforms were. I didn't want to fall off. I would complain about it to myself. "There should be a wall at the edge of the platform," I thought. "And this wall should have doors that the train doors line up with, like an elevator." And then I would fall asleep. I never had any nightmares about trains, or about anything. I worried when I was awake instead.
On the train at seven o'clock in the morning. Surrounded by adults going to jobs. I thought about the thousands of kids that also went to high school in Manhattan and wondered where they were. What trains did they take, and why weren't they filling up my train? That adult world was cold. Dozens of adults standing, packed, into a long narrow hallway. A hallway that one doesn't walk through, a hallway that moves. And the arbitrariness of those that had seats, just because they got them before everyone else. Those adults hated the trains just as much as I did. But they were veterans of hate, and they didn't give me any introductions. I was left on my own.
#
I'm on the two train heading south, on the way to a tai chi class on the upper west side. The train leaves the last stop in the Bronx. We are in an interborough tunnel. It is me and five other people in this train car. The train is moving jaggedly. A tiny screeching begins, and lights flicker. Darkness outside the windows. A fast-moving darkness. A darkness that is lit up by sparks of bluish-white electricity. Train lightning. I can't see the darkness because of the light, even the darkness hides. Maybe there are six people. Personalities are hidden somewhere, they're hard to count. The lights flicker, the screeching gets louder. An unavoidable sound. Will these notes stand on a five line staff bar; they have no composer, and maybe they're the music of the tunnel people. We are the tunnel people on this train, I'm listening to our music. It is folk music. My eyes are closed and I'm only focused on the screeching sound. I'm listening. I'm trying to understand, the sound, my self. A loud overbearing, piercing sound? It is a whisper to me if you listen.
#
He called us "beastie one and beastie two." He was running even when he was sitting. I saw him in front of us on the steps. This is in the fifty-ninth street train station. Going down beneath the earth, inside city, below where most tunnel people go, the platform of the uptown express train, green line, the five. It was eighty five degrees outside, 100 in the tunnel. We were running down the steps, to the right of us the escalator is coming up. Seventy people on the staircase, running down; twice as many to the right on the escalator moving up. He was running faster than all of us down those steps. Weaving in and out of us, sweating. He pointed at a man on the escalator and said "Hey look, Clark Kent, Indian style." When we got down to the platform he noticed us. "It's beastie one and beastie two." He dubbed us. We were now the friends of crazy, sweaty Eddie Rodriguez.
He was a muscular man. I thought that at any given point he was going to punch me in the face. He sat next to me on the two-seater, and Billy stood. He was pointing at people on the train and cursing at them, calling them names, making fun of them. Every one kept their head down. Only me and Billy laughed. We were invited to laugh. We were given the privilege of sitting up with the king.
He pulled a box out of his duffel bag and shook it. It sounded like metal. He told us that someone in a building thought he was a messenger and handed it to him to deliver. But he wasn't a messenger, so now it belonged to him. He was hoping that it was expensive silverware. Then he pulled out a forty ounce bottle of Budweiser and started drinking it. He offered me and Billy a sip, we politely declined.
He told us that we were now his friends, and to come visit him in his neighborhood, Castle Hill. He told us to look out for his girlfriend, she's tall and muscular and has a long red mohawk. He left the train at 149th street and grand concourse. We never saw him again.
#
I used to see a man that had no body from the waist down. He had a torso, arms, and a head, on top of a dolly. I would see him in the train stations. He never asked for any help, and when he rolled along the platform it was always at the edge. He would even move from one car to the next while the train was moving.
#
I almost knocked a few people over on the train, pulling my knapsack out of the door. They looked at me like I was a rude, mindless pusher. Maybe the door never closed on them before. You get to a stop, the doors open up and you have time to look at the floor, the black spots that used to be pink gum, and then maybe the wooden bench, with a stranded newspaper, and a missing light-bulb, someone you thought you've seen before, someone you thought you knew; the doors close, and it's not enough to epitomize it. Next time you'll see more, without even wanting to notice, you gradually come to understand it. Like, if I say to you that the Jackson avenue train station is skeptical, you'll know what I mean.
Chapter 2: Completely Satiated
I was wearing a t-shirt that had the Gaterade logo on it but said "raverade" and it was 9:30 AM in the foodmall, which is in the basement of the Citicorp building on fifty-fourth street, right off of third avenue, five blocks away from Art and Design High School. A couple of us are in the men's room, which requires security guard access. With a key. The security guard is with us. Drinking beer. And Vinny and Drew too. They are sharing a forty. The security guard is pouring the beer into his mouth, without touching his lips to the bottle, demonstrating that you swallow the beer as it pours into your mouth, allowing it to flow rather than drinking and gulping with pauses. Vinny's very drunk. So is Drew. So is the security guard.
Me, Billy, Vinny, and Drew get on the E train. And also too, so does Rami, Maria, Emily, Jessenia, Flora, Carlos, Robert Taimes, Robert Sultan and Ralph and everyone else. The E train takes us to the A train. The train car on the A has no one else in it except us. We are underground in a tunnel, somewhere in Brooklyn. Gerald and Drew are standing between the cars smoking cigarettes. Emily is laughing. Albert is jumping around; it seems like he's causing the train to rock. Billy is taking pictures of everybody. Rami is listening to a walkman.
Vinny and Drew enter the car and declare that they have to urinate. We try to persuade them to wait till we get to the beach. They insist that they are getting off at the next stop and looking for a restroom. The doors don't open yet, we don't arrive at the next stop, lights flash by. Vinny is laughing, buckling at the knees, he's very drunk, it appears like he's crying, but he's laughing. Drew has a look on his face like he'll never see tomorrow. We are all quite concerned.
"Whatever you do, don't get off at Euclid avenue" is what my father had told me the night before, but it is what we did because they had to urinate. The train station was empty. The bulk of us stood at one end of the platform while Vinny and Drew went to the other end. As they walked back over to us I saw an oval, flat puddle, working its way onto the train tracks. Vinny is still laughing; if he had a beer bottle he would throw it, but he didn't. Good. Drew had a look on his face not like he wouldn't see tomorrow, but like he had to see today: he was in the moment, he was the Irish-American Buddha, he wasn't merely Drew,(Drew once hustled a kid in a pool game on twelfth street; he was Paul Newman and/or Jackie Gleason).
At some point, only a few stops away from the beach, we get off, and then onto another train, which is filled with kids. Everyone just got their report cards, and is now going to the beach in celebration of the first weekday of the year that it is legitimate to do so.
There are a couple of different radios playing in the train car. Billy is doing some gymnastics on the pole (one time, on college night at Art and Design, Billy went into a room filled with people giving out gymnastics scholarships. Billy was not a gymnast, but knew a great deal about it because he watched it every day during the 92' Olympics. For fun, he lied and told them that he was a gymnast. He used his encyclopedic knowledge of gymnastics to talk it up, and make it sound real good. Talking about how he dislocated his shoulder doing a dismount on some complicated move. Which was somewhat true: he dislocated his shoulder rollerblading down two flights of slate steps in central park.) and we are all laughing because he is almost banging into these girls that have nasty looks on their faces. It is not because he is almost banging into them that is the funny part. The funny part is that they are mad, not that he is almost banging into them, but because he is having a good time.
We get to the boardwalk and go into the bathroom to change. The bathroom is surprisingly clean, lit up only by the sunlight coming in through the door. And it is cool in there. The floor is dry with some sand on it, and the toilets are shiny chrome. Ralph reaches over the divider into the stall that I am in and takes my hat off. We all scold him for creating such a disturbance.
#
We set up our place on the sand and I pretend we are not in Brooklyn. I pretend that we are in Newport Beach, California. Vinny has been there many times and I sit on the white sheet, with a Snapple and a cigarette, while he tells me about it. It looks similar to where we are. He explains the differences and I replace the reality with fantasy coming from his memory. So, the waves are not three feet high but five feet high. And they don't break at separate places, but all at the same time; one long breaking wave, going down the entire stretch of the beach, crashing down. And there aren't New Yorkers standing in front of the waves, letting themselves be thrown and thrashed about. Instead there are a few surfers, but mainly body-boarders. Along the boardwalk, instead of cheeseburger concession stands, and apartment buildings, there are surf shops, and avocado salad concession stands, and little bungalows that I pretend we are all renting for the summer.
But we are at Rockaway Beach. We spend most of the day standing in front of the waves and letting them crash us down, or trying to withstand their force. The waves, for New York, are particularly strong today. They are about three to four feet high. There are two breaking points for them. Carlos, Vinny, and Billy venture out beyond the second break.
I'm standing right before the first break. The water is up to my waist. The wave is coming. I turn my back to it. Still looking at it. I jump forwards, as the wave propels me, and smoothly ride into the beach. Sand gets in my hair, I leave it there, hoping that later I will get dread-locks.
#
I'm standing on the beach, looking out at the waves. Realizing where I am. Comfortable with where I am.
Some people played frisbee, with kids from another school that we did not know. I stayed in the water most of the day. I would stay in the water for about forty minutes and then come in to dry off. There are perfect moments to be had. My eyes can be closed, and I can feel the sun on my face. And that. Just that. With the sound of the ocean waves, which isn't very loud. Can help me hear the present moment (even though the waves aren't very loud, that is all you hear when you close your eyes) all day long.
Four PM was the perfect time to leave. On our way out we stop at a concession stand on the boardwalk. We eat cheeseburgers. We play some video games. Drew walks around to tell everyone that "I'm so mellow right now bro."
Me, Billy, and Emily were on the L train. That's when I began to feel the motion of the waves. I felt the waves drifting through me, the sun was grayish yellow (much like four PM). We ate pizza at seven o'clock. The sun was still out.
Chapter 3: Prom Night
That whole day all I could pay attention to was the rich blue sky that, in a way, said to me that the night was going to be filled with the pure joy for life in every moment. I felt that being fulfilled, as I drove on to the Hutchinson River Parkway. It was 7:30 PM and the sun was still out, and the sky was still that rich blue. Breeze was warm coming into the window. I could see its true motion and fluctuation by the way it moved the smoke from Billy’s cigarette.
I arrived to the toll for the Whitestone bridge, and as I was about to pay, the car stalled out. I turned it back on again, paid the toll, and drove on. I wasn’t worried about the car. As long as it lasted me through that evening, and even if it didn’t, I was going to be alright.
I look in the rearview mirror and see Jessenia’s face. The wind is blowing her black, straight hair against her cheek, as she looks out the window. Every time I look at her she looks like a different beautiful girl. Never the same face twice. Or rather, it’s too beautiful to remember accurately.
The day that I met her she was wearing a rich red lipstick that seemed almost to resemble the blood in my heart, as she said “What’s your frequency?”
Unlike almost everybody else, who spent a few hundred dollars a piece on a limo, clothing, and a dinner, we decided to spend our prom night in a jalopy car rental, that Billy’s mother’s boyfriend rented on our behalf for the weekend for ninety dollars. That was only thirty dollars each between the three guys: Me, Billy and Samson.
So we began in the Bronx with Me, Billy and Jessenia. We go to Queens and now all six of us are in the car. Samson, the only one with a license besides me, wants to drive. Caroline sits in the passenger’s seat. Me, Jessenia, Billy and Rami are in the back. This old car has an old stickiness to its pale blue vinyl seat, but the seat is large in the back, and the car smells like an old cab, cigarettes and iced tea.
It is dark out and we are driving with the lights off. Samson touches every knob and switch in the car, and we’re still unsure if the lights are on. We pull over in a residential neighborhood in Queens. I go in front of the car and say “good, they’re on,” when they are finally on, and then we go. After about fifteen minutes, Samson remembers that we’re headed to the city and that he doesn’t want to drive in the city. So I take the drivers seat, and Jessenia takes the passengers seat. To the city. Through the midtown tunnel. Down the east river drive, and off at Houston street.
The city is busy. The sidewalk of Bleeker Street is filled with people. Bright lights come from windows of stores selling the same t-shirts and silver jewelry. Dim, faint light vaguely comes from the dark glass in romantic restaurants. People are howling, people are laughing. People are smiling because they’ve never seen this before. Poets dressed in simple button shirts and loose pants, are walking slowly, smoking cigarettes, to or from cafes. The cars are moving slowly, stopping at signs and lights in the tiny streets. Some people have their music blasting. Others are playing with their brakes pretending they have hydraulics in their cars. A man is wearing three-foot high platform sneakers and a green wig, and carrying a flashlight.