Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [36]
“Last night I felt like, ‘God, he is so neat. I just love him,’ ” I wrote in my diary the next day. “Although I doubt I really meant love. But it sure seemed like it at the time. Okay, yeah, I meant it.”
Still, despite my unquenchable passion, nothing in my flimsy fifteen-year-old playbook gave me the slightest clue about how to transform him from a one-time make-out into my boyfriend forever.
I was briefly encouraged when he turned up unannounced one night to visit me at my parents’ house. As I showed him my record collection—which was, oddly enough, identical to Ned’s—I knew exactly what I wanted to see happen: a riveting conversation on topics of deep personal importance, perhaps involving the roots of the blues, that would somehow lead to a lot more passionate kissing. Unfortunately, a few minutes after I started to play him my new Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee album, Bob fell asleep facedown on my bedroom floor. At first I was puzzled. Then I was touched: Aw! See how relaxed he is around me! Then I was puzzled again: Why would he come all the way over here to fall asleep? Then I was rattled, unable to decode what a sixteen-year-old boy passed out on the floor of my bedroom might possibly mean in the bigger romantic overview. “Last night I spent one of the most depressing evenings I have ever experienced,” I wrote in my diary. “Maybe I gained a little insight into things, but I doubt it. It’s strange, but the more I am with Bob, the less I seem to know him. It is impossible for me to determine ahead of time just how he will act around me. Not that I would ever want him to be predictable. It’s just that … I never know what is going on inside his head. I would love to know what Bob considers this relationship to be. Am I his girlfriend or am I just his friend? Does he always make out with all his friends in cars? Tonight as he was lying on the floor of my room, asleep, how did he expect me to act? When he woke up and I sat with him, he seemed very far away. I want him to like me so bad but I never seem to know what he wants. Oh fuck. Now no one likes me again.”
The dilemma I was facing was obvious. Unfortunately, the solution was not. What oh what did I have to do to rewrite this story with a better ending?
How could I become the kind of charismatic figure that could inspire Bob to stay awake in my presence? I didn’t know where to turn.
I turned to Jack Kerouac.
A few times a week, after school, my new best friend, Debby, and I would put on our shredded cutoffs, our striped T-shirts, our leather sandals, our leather earrings and bracelets (which Debbie had made), and ride our bikes to Kepler’s bookstore, about two miles from my parents’ house, to hang out. I loved this bookstore. It had all the right cultural trappings: enormous weird posters of French cinema stars, an espresso machine, a dish full of peace symbols for sale next to the cash register. And, for an infinite amount of extra bonus points, it was owned by someone named Ira who was said to be a close personal friend of Joan Baez’s. That was the fewest degrees of separation between me and someone awesome … ever.
I spent hours and hours browsing through the aisles of Kepler’s, picking out books to read based solely on the artwork they chose for their covers. But what I was really doing was searching for something … a novel, a play, a poem that could offer me a vivid diagram of who I should be. I was looking for a three-dimensional blueprint, a manifesto on how to be a real authentic artist and therefore nothing at all like my parents. Because the name Jack Kerouac was mentioned in most of the roundups of things that were hip, when I saw his books featured on a front table, I was drawn to them.
The only title I recognized was his most famous book, On the Road. I almost didn’t buy it because of the cover illustration: a pouty watercolor sketch of an Ann-Margret look-alike with a bare