A/N: I've been re-reading "On The Road" before dressing up like Kerouac for Halloween. It struck me how manic his style is, and how much effort he puts into a single thought. This story isn't supposed to actually fit with the story of "On the Road", I just wanted to capture some of that pensive energy and general beatnick-ity-ness.
It was hot and overpowering that night. I had taken a ride with a young girl who kept making nervous glances at me while I sat beside her and tried to make conversation. She just kept laughing and nodding and saying "yep, yep, yep." She had her radio set to bop, and I told her I liked it, and she began to sweat. Maybe she thought I was going to take advantage of her. I felt bad for her, so I told her to let me off before where I actually wanted to go. I thanked her and gave her a dollar, and she smiled at me and said that she was glad I liked her music choice and good luck to whatever it was I was doing.
So I walked along the road for a while, trying to get someone to pick me up, but nobody stopped. It was getting late now, and I figured that I might as well just walk into the next town, whatever it may be.
Turns out it was Parkin, Arkansas. I wondered dumbly how I had gotten here. Sure, I knew where I was going, but this was an awfully scenic route to get there. I reflected for a moment as I stared at the town's welcome sign.
All towns have welcome signs. I find them a strange and sad façade. The people in the towns may be the single most grumpy and ill mannered group of people you've ever met in your life, but they're always going to pretend that they care that you're in their little dump of a town. They make their lives there, and they're going to defend it. So welcome.
But the diner was open, and I was grateful for that. I ate eggs and drank some coffee, and spent my second to last dollar.
"You look tired," the waitress said to me.
She looked tired to, and I told her so. She was a beautiful black girl with an ugly cut on her face from her cheek to the end of her lips. When I asked her about it, she told me she slipped while washing dishes and smashed a plate against her head.
I wrote her a get better note on the back of my bill and left. I would have liked to invite her back to a hotel room, but seeing as I didn't have one of those, and I only had a dollar, it would have been pointless.
A dollar was just enough to get me a bus ticket to Memphis. From there, I could work on going back East. I slept a little on the bus, but my head kept rattling against the window, even when I had my arms propped up uncomfortably as a pillow. I kept imagining that there would be some nice girl like Terry would come and sit by me, and she'd give me her coat and let me sleep, and when I woke up, we could talk about how weary we were.
But nobody like that came, and I got off at the Memphis bus terminal and pleaded with the ticket seller to let me sleep. He did, and I curled up under the seats, exhausted and sick to my stomach. In my dreams I ran up and down the San Francisco roads, screaming like a mad-man… like Dean. I woke with a start, hitting my head against the chairs and cursing loudly. For some reason, the dream had frightened me. Was that what I was becoming? Dean was my buddy, but I sure didn't want to be him. I didn't want to live that beat existence with no end in sight where every tomorrow was an empty promise. Every morning was the same as the last, the same excuse to do the same thing every day of your life. Even the holy goofs lived eight-to-five existences that lacked the excitement they thought they had created. We were all trapped in a world that was confining and smothering.
It reminded me of Old Bull and his talk about Washington and unions. They were holding us back. And not just them, everyone in the whole world. There was so much to do, so much to see, so much to become that I could hardly understand everything. I wasn't myself and neither was anyone else. Who were we? We as a generation? The bop generation? The swing generation? The beat generation?
I longed for Terry, Dean, Carlo, my aunt… Those were the people who could be happy in this horrendous life that seemed to me to become more and more like a coalmine. We were thrown into a pit and expected to produce, produce, produce until we got black-lung and died, and there were a few people who simply said "no". They weren't going to get black-lung, but they were going to go through something maybe worse. The pain of never knowing what it would be like to be smothered by the system. And that is a pain. That is a pain so real and violent that it tears apart people like Dean and Carlo until they do too many drugs and drink too much.
But I couldn't sit there in the bus station all day, so I thumbed a ride with a man who didn't speak to me, and we just listened to the news the whole ride. In West Virginia, I got another lift from a boy who didn't seem much older than nineteen, and he told me about his dreams and his girlfriend and his college scholarship in New York City. He was going to be a painter, and I told him I was happy for him.
My aunt greeted me with surprise as I walked back into the house. She gave me dinner and we talked for a while. She didn't feel as though life is a coalmine. I went to bed early, and decided that tomorrow I would get a job.