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| The author, circa, 1983-184, pretending he’s The Boss. |
I thought I was a beat, but I was just a boy
Notes on Re-Reading Kerouac in my 50s
There is an old bank building on Route 130 in North Brunswick, next to the county correction facility. It houses a dog grooming business now, but back in the 1970s, our friends Glenn and Donna rented it and lived upstairs in what likely were the corporate offices.
The building has been on my mind the last couple days for two reasons — my reteading of On the Road and our visit to the annual Carnevale Italiano with my sisters-in-law and grand nieces. The Carnevale is on land adjacent to the jail between the jail and the old bank. As we approached, Annie pointed to the dog grooming place and said to everyone in our car, “Our friends used to live there. We used to have big parties there.”
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| Beatnik wannabe in my Army surplus jacket. |
The first one — which is the party I associate with Kerouac — was a going away party for Annie’s cousin Gerry. She had lived with Annie for several years while attending college, was now finished and was going back to Long Island. We were at Glenn and Donna’s and realized that the first floor — where the public portion of the bank used to be — would be a perfect place for a bash, except that it was full of junk. The building’s owner apparently used the bottom floor to store all manner of uselessness, including used fluorescent bulbs, shelving, paper, lots and lots of paper. There was garbage and beer bottles, lumber, broken cabinets, and so on. The place was a mess, and unusable — unless we cleared it out, which is what we did, just as Sal and his buddies did in Central City, a former mining town above Denver where Sal and friends traveled for a weekend.
Babe Rawlins “knew of an old miner’s house at the edge of town where we boys could sleep for the weekend; all we had to do was clean it out. We could also throw vast parties there. It was an old shack of a thing covered with an inch of dust inside; it had a porch and a well in back. (52)
They cleaned up the shack. Sal and Babe went to the opera and, when they returned, the party began, the night “getting more and more frantic” (54).
Our party was less frantic, but still a massive bash. I don’t know how many people attended, but it was a full house. We didn’t gave a porch or a view of the mountains, but we had a vault recently cleared of trash and a working drive-up teller booth, a massive open floor, and a keg, and we gave Gerry a great send off.
Author: hankkalet
Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.
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Hank Kalet 