A 10,000 Maniacs Song
by Jamie Zerndt
is playing on something my son is watching on his phone, and I ask him if he knows who Jack Kerouac is. He shrugs, says, “some dead grunge singer?” When I left home at nineteen to hitchhike across country and chase after a girl who’d just moved from Illinois to Arizona, my older sister would chide me by singing, “Hey, Jack Keroac, I think of your mother….” I tell him this, but he’s only vaguely interested in what I’m saying. “He wrote the entire thing on a giant roll of toilet paper,” I say and he says, “Nice.” “I saw the best minds of your generation destroyed by Instagram,” I say, and this earns me a, “What are you even on about, bro?” “Nothing,” I say, “I’ll just put it in a bad poem and you can read it in a few years if you want.” “You do you,” he says and goes back to scrolling. So here I am, writing because I hope someday you’ll find this when you emerge from the fog of certainty you’re in now. I want to tell you how I was not always like this, not always weighed down by worries about money, a drinking problem always lurking behind me, new aches and pains setting up camp in my body every week, the groans my father used to make when getting up from the couch somehow magically travelling across the years to find me (psst…they’re coming for you). I want to tell you that that line about the best minds of a generation was by a different guy named Ginsberg who was friends with Kerouac. I never liked Ginsberg much. Even back then (think, the gay Harvey Weinstein of poetry). Much of it still reads like something written by a high school kid who was just gifted a dictionary. Which, honestly, is how some of Kerouac reads now, too, but there’s so much more there than with Ginsberg. I know if I showed you Howl you’d call him a try hard and you wouldn’t be wrong. All his mad holy this and Benzedrine that. If they were young now, would they be writing about Fentanyl? Would it have the same mythic appeal? I doubt it. Ginsberg wanted the spotlight, embraced it, unlike Kerouac. I remember seeing a video of Kerouac drunk on stage with Ginsberg in the audience. Ginsberg: the Grohl to his Cobain, the Ike to his Tina, The Dandy Warhols to his Brian Jonestown Massacre. All references you wouldn’t get right now, but my point is that our heroes change over the years. Kerouac came off as a drunk uncle on the program. It was sad, awkward, and somehow endearing all at the same time. He shouldn’t have been up on that stage. I sometimes wonder what he would have been like had he gotten sober before he died. Would the sweetness or bitterness have won? My point here is that I was reading books back then that I have little interest in now. A bunch of Carlos Casteneda books. Henry Miller. Celine for some reason. It was all so incredibly cliché in retrospect, but I don’t care anymore because it was my youth. And what is youth for but to make mistakes, to fall in love with the wrong people, the wrong books. When I left home, it was the late 80s and I wanted to be a writer...or, no, I mostly just wanted to write. All this time has passed, and I still think about that trip. The girlfriend I hardly ever think of, though I can clearly remember the feeling of loving her because it was so wonderfully pure and all-encompassing. I’ve felt it again, with your mother, but as a much deeper version of young love. I think for some love can be like the first hit of a powerful drug. Maybe you just chase after that feeling for the rest of your life, but some never really reach it again. I don’t know. I’ve seen so many people settle into strange, comfortable marriages. I’ve never matured enough, I guess, for that. Anyhow, I can still remember most of the people who gave me a ride back then. There was the guy in this ridiculously crisp and huge cowboy hat in Texas driving a new Lincoln Continental who placed a twenty-dollar bill, along with his big hand, on my thigh and said, “It’s just that sometimes young men need money and will do certain things to get it.” Before I left home, I’d strapped my dad’s hunting knife to my jean belt. I took it out, gripped it tight on top of my other thigh. I can’t remember now what I said back to him, something like, “I don’t need money that bad,” but I do remember the slow “whoahhh” he drawled as he pulled over onto the gravel shoulder without another word like a completely calm, big, unbothered, male heterosexual. I got out. I had never seen it coming, had never even considered that my scrawny, young, dirty ass was something grown men would want. It happened a couple of other times, too. One guy asked me, out of nowhere, if I wanted to go back to his place and watch videos and eat sandwiches. Another guy asked me if I knew what swingers were. I hadn’t any clue at the time. He invited me to a party and explained how it worked, that I’d be popular, but that it would be rude to turn anybody down if I went. The man was not attractive in any sense of the word, but he assured me that there would be plenty of young, beautiful people there. I passed. Then there were the racist jokes told to me by other friendly little white men who mistook me as one of their own (“You know what Pontiac stands for, right?”). The decent people I met, though, and this is important, far outnumbered the creepy ones. There was the trucker who after telling me I smelled “rank” (I did), gave me a bar of soap and drove me to a pond he’d spotted off the side of the road. He complained about the narrow road because there was no place for a semi to turn around, so later we had to drive a long ways just to get back on the main highway. But when I was actually in the pond and bathing, he stood on the banks and pointed to something floating near me: “Watch out for that snake! I think it might be a Water Moccasin!” I started to freak out and splash water around, and he nearly doubled over laughing. It was, of course, just a stick, but when I got out of the water and was drying off with a towel he’d given me (he looked the other way without my having to ask), I realized I’d taken my shoes and socks off in the water to clean my feet. I’d hidden most of my money in my sock because I’d read somewhere that that was the safe thing to do, but the water had been so murky I never noticed the money coming free, and when I’d realized what had happened I nearly started to cry. The guy felt bad for me since the bath was his idea, so he prepared a special joint for me as we drove, something he pulled from a little plastic storage box he had where all the different strains were labeled. “Here, smoke this and you’ll be sound asleep in no time.” In my journal I wrote down a few of the names. I think I smoked either “Night Ninja 4000” or “Suicide Pussy,” but he was right: I soon forgot that I only had ten dollars left on me to make it through the remaining 1,000 miles or so of the trip. I’d borrowed the staggering amount of one hundred dollars from my best friend before the trip. I remember his mom getting upset, saying I would probably just spend it on drugs. I mean, she wasn’t entirely wrong, but I was on a quest. A quest for true love. How could she begrudge me a measly hundred bucks? Later, again in Texas (Texas is really big since I know you’ve never been), a woman who was the manager of a truck stop gave me the job of shining some of the semi’s chrome gas tanks using something called Mothers. She was the definition of tough love. If I wanted a ride from one her truckers, I’d have to work for it. Which was fair. I remember actually banging my head on one of the roadside signs while walking down the highway that said Don’t Mess With Texas (later I found out these signs were part of an anti-littering campaign with musicians like Stevie Ray Vaughn promoting it) which somehow perfectly encapsulates the people there. And I don’t mean that in a bad way, though I mostly hated Texas back then. But they were right, and I was an idiot. The ride I eventually got was with Bones and Yellow Rose, possibly the two sweetest people I’ve ever met. Yellow Rose talked excitedly about Grateful Dead shows but not in the annoying way a lot of the more flighty worshippy deadheads did. We all got along for whatever reason, and, at one point, Bones tried to teach me how to drive the semi in an empty parking lot. I was frightened because I didn’t want to mess up his trailer or anything, but he cooly explained the different pedals and shifters, and the next thing I knew I was inching this behemoth across the lot at about one mile an hour as Bones smoked his Camels (he was always smoking) and grinned from ear to ear like it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. Yellow Rose got a little mad because he’d never let her drive it. I probably made it about twenty feet before I stopped and thanked him and told him I was good. When we had to go our separate ways, I remember thinking they were two of the best people I’d ever met but would have trouble explaining exactly why to anyone. (*Bones was the one who told me that sometimes cars would turn their lights on and off to let the truckers know it was okay to change lanes in front of them. As a thank you, truckers would blink their brake lights twice once they’d safely changed lanes. I still do that to this day and every once in a while I’ll get that coded thank you. Try it someday when I’ve crossed over to the "golden eternity." If the brake lights blink, that’ll be me telling you I love you and that you’re going to be okay. I know it’s dumb, but humor me.) The way Yellow Rose spoke of the air in Arizona feeling different, like how it would make her skin tingle and how the desert was a special mystical place, stayed with me and turned out to be true in a way. I remember hiding in the sleeping compartments of semis when going through weigh stations (drivers who worked for certain companies weren’t allowed to have passengers), or helping shift the weight on the axles so their trucks would pass inspection. I remember drinking crap wine and sleeping under rest-stop picnic tables at night, the non-stop fluorescent lights with the mosquitoes banging off them, reading books under what Kerouac called the ten-wondered universe of dark and diamonds. In the morning I’d wake up to families staring at me as they passed by with something like disgust and maybe a touch of pity (which wasn’t much different from how I viewed most of them at the time). I remember making it to Arizona finally, to the affluent neighborhood her parents had moved to in Prescott that had an in-ground pool and geckos (which I’d never seen before) skittering around their adobe walls. It was all so strange and wonderful compared to Illinois, and all I wanted to do was talk about all the people I’d met on the road but nobody wanted to hear about it, not really anyway. I remember having sex in the pool, basically having sex wherever and whenever we could, because that’s mostly what we did back then because why wouldn’t we? We were young and ridiculously perfect. I remember telling her at night about my trip and at one point she wanted to write down what I was telling her in the journal I had. I still have it and her cursive handwriting in red ink is still there, along with some killer lines of my own poetry like swallow the clouded air of fattening apathy. Yep. I know. The girlfriend now has three grown kids and ended up marrying the bass player from the band she eventually joined there. Years later she told me he’d said I’d travelled an awful long way just to get laid. Which, at the time, hurt like hell because I thought I’d made this grand romantic gesture. But, now, I don’t know. Maybe she was right. Maybe that’s all it was. Hormones. Even at this age I don’t know. She is and was a singer and belonged with a musician. I didn’t really belong in her world then. She came from a rich family and, as you know, I didn’t. Your mother, though, was somebody I belonged with. She was my best friend for many years, and I don’t regret one minute of it regardless of how things ended. I won’t say something trite like “We got you out of it” but… we got you out of it. Ha. Anyway, the girlfriend went on to become semi-famous, opened up for the P-funk at one point. She was always a bit like Ginsberg, though. A fame hound. As chance would have it, I got to see the original singer for the band she eventually came to front a few times. She was a small woman with a huge voice that always had the audience in the palm of her hands and the entire bar dancing by the end of every set. Everyone loved her. And then one day she just up and quit. Walked away from what could have been a big career. She pulled a Rimbaud. He’s another poet I used to admire. He quit writing poetry completely and ended up running guns in Ethiopia. Read about him someday. And I’m not dropping names to try to impress you. I genuinely idolized these guys. And, yes, they’re mostly men. I realize that. Maybe I was looking for role models. I’ve always been in love with people like that, though, male or female, the ones who just don’t need or care about the fame. Anyway, a few months later, the girlfriend ended up taking over the vacant spot in the band, and I went on to… well, scribbling down things like this. I haven’t read Kerouac since then really and only really remember one thing he said about drinking: Keep running after a dog, and he will never bite you; drink always before the thirst, and it will never come upon you. The funny thing is, much later I found out that Kerouac never actually said this. It was Rabelais. Which he’d probably been quoting in one of his books, but I hadn’t realized it at the time. Anyway, I’m just happy you’re still writing the rough draft of your life, moving forward and not stopping to revise. (It is a bit of a myth that Kerouac didn’t revise, though. He did. He cared about his writing.) Right now you’re all protein shakes and creatine, hanging out with your girlfriend or at the gym, maybe climbing or snowboarding. I know your phone will not win the battle. You’re healthy. And happy. I think. I hope. How wonderful to be always writing the first draft right now. Don’t ever let anybody guilt trip you with a song. And don’t think of your mother. Or me. Just live enough so that one day you have something long and rambling to write your own kid. Is this a poem? I don’t know. I kind of hope not. I love you. dad/"unc"
Jamie Zerndt is the author of The Korean Word for Butterfly and The Cloud Seeders. He is currently working on a collection of poems called Fever of Beasts. He lives in Portland, Oregon and isn't particularly a fan of 10,000 Maniacs.
