The train rolls, the pressure of the tunnel fills your ears, the announcement from the driver prompts you to get up, and your heart pounds. You’re in the middle of the last paragraph.
“… the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, …”
Seconds later it’s over.
“… I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.”
The devastation hewn into the sad-jazz cadence of the final words almost knocks you off of your seat and onto the rapidly moving carpeted floor. A man’s hands and fingers moved on a typewriter and put those words on paper, you think. It can be done by you and some day it will be, you think. In your own way.
But right now, the ache of wanting, the haunting finality of no finality, the crushing of confidence, and the promise of uncompromising freedom bowing to reality’s curse — that this is simply not attainable for you, not in this lifetime. Those are the stones in the road upon which your feet are stuck for trudging.
You close the cover with tears streaming down your face and you stash it in your backpack quickly as your BART car rolls into the Embarcadero station a few minutes before one in the morning.
It’s July and you don’t know what to expect once you emerge to the street surface. The sky can be so different on so many nights in this city you love so much. You feel the burn in your quads as you run up the layers of steps, escaping from the underground heat, and the foggy crispness and salty smell of the Bay falls onto you like a perfect perfume.
You look up as you often do while walking these well-worn sidewalks. The clouds are surging, doing their best to envelop this fantastic finger of hilly, holy civilization that sprouted against seismic odds and continues to baffle its believers and brethren with an ever-changing, always-evolving face. You’re warmed by the chill and illuminated by the darkness, with the clouds enclosing you as if you’re the only one there. It’s the essence of what you love about this time, this place, this San Francisco.
You watch them rolling rapidly above and you know something is changing and it won’t be stopped and you analyze your situation again, the one you’ve broken down in detail every night for weeks while twisting in bed and replaying the events.
California is laid out in front of you, a dark ribbon of asphalt with the shiny strip of cable-car track on top, a child’s train set come to life in a magical movie. The steep hills beckon, and even though your apartment isn’t close — five miles? — you suddenly know you have to make it there on foot.
Your boss had called you into his office that evening, and for a moment you thought you might get fired on the spot even though you wouldn’t have known why. But he sported a big smile and a confident little waggle to his walk, and he even put his hand on your shoulder, a first. “Congratulations,” he said. “You got a raise.”
You sat down across from his desk with the same uneasy feeling you had when he hired you four years earlier, and he told you with great pride that he had convinced the higher-ups to change your weekly salary from $526 to $543. Seventeen dollars more per week, before taxes. You told him you were insulted. He told you he understood how you felt but he had done what he could do. You told him you appreciated his attempt but it didn’t matter.
You hear the cable car coming behind you and ignore it. You start walking up the hill that will take you to Powell and Hyde and Van Ness and beyond. The empty car passes. You look down at the pavement and pretend you’re going downhill. You start making a plan.
First, you’re going to talk to an accountant and finally file your taxes. It’s been four years and you haven’t done it because you’ve been making less than thirty grand a year while living in one of the most expensive cities in the country and figure you’ve got to milk every penny out of that paycheck until you write your first novel and make it big.
Then you’ll get car insurance for the rusty Bronco you just bought off your co-worker for five hundred bucks, the one that was impounded last week because you were pulled over for speeding and given a ticket for driving without insurance.
It might take a month to get all of this paid off, and you might have to swallow clever words as the mere thought of the “raise” simmers in your stomach while you edit the drivel of writers you know will never be as good as you, but you’ve been sending out resumes every day and one of them is going to stick.
When it does, you’ll walk out the door on the same two feet that are moving under you on this night, and you know the pitter-pat of your steps down that hallway for the last time will boom victoriously in your ears and maybe even ring with enough dissonance that the hopeless hacks you’ve been working with will be jarred from that dusty newsroom themselves, escaping additional decades of defeat.
How great it would be to be Sal Paradise or Dean Moriarty or Jack Kerouac, you think. You wouldn’t pay $4.60 for a BART ticket from Pleasanton every night and you sure as hell wouldn’t be forced to run from the building to make sure you didn’t miss the last train at midnight. Come to think of it, you’d never set foot in a soulless, Wonder-bread town like that in the first place, let alone have to actually go there every day to work for someone else. Paradise, Moriarty and Kerouac didn’t care about bills. They said, “Fuck it,” and didn’t pay them and then wrote great books and bedded beautiful women and did whatever they wanted. Some day that’ll be you, but not now. Not tonight.
You’re sitting in a bench in Huntington Park at the top of the hill, sweating from the climb, looking at the clouds, which are still swirling, but a hole has been punched through a particularly billowy one and you can see the crescent moon smiling down through this fleeting window, surrounded by stars. You go back to your plan.
By the time your insurance is taken care of, you’ll have a new job. Maybe you’ll make more money. Then you can fix the transmission on the Bronco and look for a better place to live, maybe in Marin, maybe closer to the ocean.
You’ll get a little studio with enough room for your queen-size futon, a chair and a desk for your computer. That’s where you’ll sit down and write your first great novel, as the waves crashing outside and the foam and the salt and the marine air mist your windows and moisten the wooden deck that overlooks the Pacific. Your book will come to you at once, like it did for Kerouac. It’ll hover over you and pour down like a warm winter rainstorm blowing in from a tropical island.
You’ll have your own writing drink and writing robe. You’ll have your own writing routine. Your interruptions — simple pleasures like a bowl of soup and a hunk of bread from the deli down the street, a baseball game on TV or a well-earned Sunday afternoon nap — will calm the soul that shapes the words. But not too much. There will be work to do.
And the women? Well, they’ll appear with the chapters as the defining moments of your life are splayed out and set into typeface, and later they’ll be prominently positioned in between the covers to the left of Isak Dinesen on the Barnes and Noble shelves. You’ll have to write them as they go.
But at least you know where you’re going tonight.
You’re trying not to run as the hill crests and you’re going down and you’re passing Jones and then Leavenworth and you see it all before you now — the sharp descent, the gradual rise back up, and all the turns and corners and neighborhoods you’ll pass by on the way to the cliff that overlooks the cold, angry sea.
You’ve already come this far and your favorite clouds are keeping you strong. You might as well walk the rest of the way.
***
(Italicized quotations from On The Road by Jack Kerouac)
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