All that road rolling and all those people dreaming in the immensity of it.
âJack Kerouac, on
The Steve Allen Show
, 1961
Â
I could begin with sitting at the kitchen table on the way to Mexico, speeding on uppers, and typing to the sound of Stosh's Merc circling the block. But it seems only right to start with the dawn. So I'm going back a year earlier, to Stosh and me fasting from sleep at the counter of the Economy restaurant on the first night that Stosh smuggled Dexadrine out of the Rexall where he worked after school. It's two a.m. and everything looks brilliant. The scuffed Formica sparkles with blue-green iridescence, the buzzing neon of ECONOMY in the window radiates a halo I've never noticed before and reflects like flame across the nickel-plated coffee urns. We're dipping fries in salsa and drinking from bottomless cups of coffee, not that we need the caffeine. My heart is pounding as if I've run a 440.
“Call this salsa? It ain't hot,” Stosh complains, then blasts his fries with lethal green splats of El Yucateco. “Ah!”âhe exhalesâ“that cleans out the sinuses. Now I'm ready.”
“For what?” I ask.
“To party like this till dawn.”
“You ever actually seen the dawn?”
“Now that you mention it, no,” Stosh admits.
“Ever notice how everyone's always writing songs and poems about the Dawnâcapital
D
âlike it's this big magic moment, but I just realized I never seen it either.”
“So, let's go find it,” Stosh says.
We drive to an alley behind a high-rise that overlooks the lake, and pound on the metal doors until Stosh's uncle Hunky lets us in. He's the night watchman, and Stosh occasionally does him a favor and pulls his Merc up to the same back entrance so Uncle Hunky can fill the trunk with stolen goods.
We ride the freight elevator to the roof. Neither of us knows what time dawn is supposed to arrive, but we figure we'll wait it out, although the wind, unimpeded twenty-five stories up, cuts into our enthusiasm. Backs against a chimney, collars raised, hands jammed in our pockets, we take turns peering out to see if anything is happening yet to the east over the black expanse of water.
To the west, the city sprawls sketched in light. I sort out the expressways, and try to trace the unlit gap of the Sanitary Canal back to where I guess our neighborhood lies, twenty blocks to the southwest. I want to know what it looks like from the Gold Coast.
“Katman, check this out,” Stosh calls. He's gone over to the edge of the roof in order to piss on the world below.
Far out over the dark lake, where the horizon might be, there's a reddish aura as if an enormous coal we still can't see is glowing.
We stand watching, waiting for the coal to peep over the rim of black water and crack into crimson and gold. But dawn seems stuck, glimmering just out of sight beyond the curve of the planet, whose rotation we can feel in the numbing wind that buffets the chain-link fence bordering the roof. The speed in our systems makes us shiver faster. We're staring out, not so much
shivering as vibrating like the fence, when Uncle Hunky joins us, and we point out the glow.
“Dawn? Dawn ain't for at least two hours. You're looking at the furnaces across the lake in Gary,” he starts to explain, then pauses, snorting laughter. “You two
dupas
thought Gary, Indiana, was the dawn!”
Â
We were going to Mexico.
Every day brought the border a little closer. We were getting ready to cross: practicing our Spanish by reading aloud the signs over the bodegas, cantinas, and taquerias as we cruised along Twenty-sixth Street in Stosh's Merc with the Brave Bulls blaring on the tape deck.
Hot afternoons, we'd sit before the window fan in Stosh's upstairs room listening to flamenco guitar, Miles wailing on “Sketches of Spain,” or Jack Kerouac reading to the tinkle of blues piano on the Heathkit stereo that Stosh had built in electronics class, and drinking Tecate with limeâReaLime, actually, squeezed out of the plastic green fruit his mother kept in the fridge. A Tupperware lime, Stosh called it, as in, “Toss that Tupperware lime over here, amigo.”
Stosh spent his evenings behind the counter at the Rexall where he'd worked part-time since junior year. He'd already won the scholarship offered to employees, and he'd been accepted into the prepharmacology program at the University of Illinois for the fall. When he wasn't working, he was scavenging for parts and tinkering with the 383 Chrysler engine he'd dropped into his Merc. It was the car we were depending on to take us to Mexico.
There was no point looking for a full-time job until I got my diploma, so I was “landscaping,” which meant that each morning I'd wait on the corner across from the projects on Twenty-sixth for the day labor truck from Manpower that drove through the
neighborhood rounding up an assortment of illegal aliens, laid-off guys, borderline winos, and teenagers. The truck, if and when it showed, never came to more than a rolling stop, and I'd swing aboard the lowered tailgate and find a place among the guys smoking and sipping carryout coffees, using the mower engines as seats. Trailing the scent of yesterday's cut grass, we'd rattle down the Eisenhower out to the western burbsâOak Park, Elm-wood, River Forestâwhere the truck would drop us off armed with mowers, weed whackers, and hedge trimmers, then pick us up again in the late afternoon. All it paid was minimum wage, but at least it kept my father off my back. I'd even started a travel fund, not that I'd saved much, but I'd heard things were cheap in Mexico.
Evenings, I'd head over to the cinder field under the lights at Harrison Park looking for a pickup softball game. It felt like my last summer for playing ball. I'd get back home after everyone was in bed, and then it would be time to set up my Smith-Corona at the kitchen table and get to work on the semester's worth of term papers I had to finish before St. Augustine High would grant the diploma they'd withheld and set me free.
It felt vaguely disorienting to be sitting at the Smith-Corona that was supposed to have been my graduation present, typing, to the accompanying clack of summer insects, papers that had been due months earlier when I was still in high school.
I couldn't recall those months back in winter without envisioning them as a private world opaque with frost and breath-steamed windows in which I wandered lost in dreams of Laurel Elaina Levanto. The temptation was to daydream about her now, except that the last time I'd seen her had been so humiliating it was painful to think about her. I'd awakened abruptly from my dream state just in time to tally up the damages: in the few months since I'd met Laurel, I'd managed to fail most of my subjects,
mess up my college entrance tests, and lose whatever slim chance I had for a track scholarship. Fortunately, she had no idea.
She didn't know that instead of memorizing Spanish verbs or writing a civics paper I had stayed up late at night working on songs about her that I never managed to finish, ballads I sounded out on the sax I'd inherited from my uncle Lefty and wrote down on music paper note by painstakingly tooted note. She didn't know I lost races I should have won, coming slow motion out of the starting blocks, floating over the high hurdles in a self-induced fog, while the coach raced after me along the inside oval of the track yelling, “Get your head into it, Katzek!” Nor did she know how I'd wait in the cold just to board the Archer Avenue bus she rode to her dance lessons. If she wasn't on the first bus, I'd get off at the next corner and wait for the next one. Sometimes, I'd have to board three or four of them before I timed it right. I must have had a reason, but looking back I no longer knew why I'd thought that meeting her had to continually seem like a coincidence, or fate.
It was on the Archer Avenue bus that I first saw her. She was wearing leg warmers and pinning up her hair, lifting the dark, silky weight of it in both hands in a way that exposed her neck and made me feel I'd seen something I shouldn't have. Later, she'd tell me that Miss Lilli, her dance teacher, required her students to wear their hair up. I worked for weeks on a song called “Bus Girl,” and one of the few things I still felt thankful for was that I'd never mailed it to her, as I almost had any number of times.
The way your arms raise over your head
kinda knocks me out
kinda knocks me dead
And when you sweep your hair up
offa your neck
my heart starts pounding, hey, what the heck â¦
I tested the lyrics out in the Economy one night on Stosh and Angelâfortunately, I wrote them on a napkin rather than singing them aloud. My friends exploded into laughter, anyway.
“Try it this way,” Angel said, scribbling on a napkin.
When you sweep your hair up
offa the floor
it-a always makes-a me pound offa more.
“No,” Stosh said. “Better like this.” He grabbed my napkin and scratched out my lines so that the verse read:
When you sweep your hair up
my pecker thinks, Hey, aw, shucks!
How about it if we fucks?
I crushed the napkin, which made them laugh all the harder.
“I'm worried about you,” Angel said. “You're getting carried away.”
“Yeah, wake up, Katman, before you're in over your head,” Stosh said. “I mean,
what the heck
, I don't know if you're ready for an older woman.”
They were kidding, but it was true. I was seventeen, younger than they, and Laurel had graduated from high school the year before and was enrolled part-time at Loop Junior College. She worked as an organist at weddings and funerals. I couldn't deny it: my still being in high school
did
have something to do with the way I was acting around her, which is probably why I suddenly
told Stosh, “Fuck you,” and fired the balled-up napkin in his face, then stood up. We'd been sparring partners when we were both freshman lightweights on the boxing team, but I'd dropped boxing for track, and Stosh had gone on to win the CYO middleweight championship. He had a fierce temper that he'd learned to harness and could probably have mopped up the Economy with me, but he remained seated in the booth, holding his bowed head in disappointment.
Now, sitting before the typewriter in the middle of the night, my jaws grinding on Dexadrine, I listened to the 383 engine backfiring at stop signs as Stosh circled the neighborhood. Maybe he was high on some potion he'd concocted in the pharmacy, and probably he was grooving to Beethovenâhe'd gone from Ray Charles and the blues to Beethoven with nothing in between. Then his tires would squeal and I'd hear him revving through what seemed like an infinite number of gears, playing the Merc like a virtuoso as he faded off into one of his exploratory drives toward the blast furnaces of South Chicago or north along the dark curve of the lake to the place we called Baha'i.
I was down to my last paper, a report on a book I'd chosen about a Frenchman named Marcel Libert, who, while still a college student, had trekked alone down the coast of Quintana Roo, discovering what he called “the lost world of the Mayas.” Marcel hiked along blazing beaches and hacked through jungle, coming upon overgrown ruins of temples and hidden villages with names that sounded like the cries of tropical birds: Xcalet, Yalcu, Xcalak.
I wanted a cry like that for a postmark on the letter I'd write to Laurel when I made it to Mexico.
Usually Stosh would stop by late to see how the typing was going. Ever since the beginning of summer, he'd been on a sleep fast. It was his contention that sleep was something Theyâwith a
capital
Tâ
had conditioned you to do ever since kindergarten nap time in order to keep you quiet. He claimed it could be cut back like any bad habit.
“It's holy to fast from food, so why not sleep?” he argued. “Think about it, man, it's a plot against us. For all practical purposes sleep is a rehearsal for being dead.”
“Sleep is the opiate of the people,” I agreed.
Stosh estimated that with the two of us conditioned to stay awake and driving nonstop we could make the border in three days.
“One drives while the other sacks out,” he figured.
“Save on motel bills,” I said.
“
Motel
bills! Are you kidding, hombre? Spend money on motels when we can sleep in the car if we have to? What kind of bourgeois, gringo idea is that?”
“Maybe Angel will come, then there'd be another driver.”
“Yeah, don't count on it. Angel's doing the van Gogh,” Stosh said, making a sound like a tubercular old man hacking up a gob of phlegm, which was how we uttered van Gogh's name after Angel corrected our pronunciation.
Angel Falcone, Stosh, and I had hung around together through high school, but Angel had been expelled in the middle of senior year, and we hadn't seen much of him ever since he started taking classes at the Art Institute.
Stosh didn't need to go to Mexico to sleep in his car. He'd been getting into fights with his father for the last year, and sometimes rather than go home he'd park the Merc behind a factory and sleep in the backseat. Some mornings, when I'd wake up to catch the Manpower truck, I'd find Stosh sacked out on the sagging musty couch on our back porch. I'd make us a couple of instant coffees to start the day.