Big Country

The plan was to recreate Sal and Dean’s road trip from Kerouac’s On The Road. Jack said he wanted to be Hunter S. Thompson instead. I told him that was the wrong book. We had a fierce argument for three miles (roughly twenty thousand corn fields) until I realized he was just trying to piss me off. He threw his head back and laughed, closing his eyes briefly to enjoy the morning sun before refocusing the road. I yanked on his ear and he laughed again, running his hand through his bleached blonde hair, he was too beautiful to be mad at. Too beautiful for a lot of things.

Jack was certainly too beautiful for Des Moines, Iowa. He had to get out, he told me, we’d die there, he’d say. But we’d live there too, I once retorted. I hadn’t meant to be funny but Jack cackled ‘till his eyes watered. My ability to amuse Jack was just one of the ways he’d improved how I saw myself. When Jack wandered amiably into my gray, country life in Grade Eight, I was in awe of him; I had never seen anyone as pale and glowing as he was. He floated to my desk, returning a pencil I had dropped, and said in a whisper, his voice dripping with a wonderful out-of-town strangeness, “Great doodles, man.” And that was that.

In the months that followed, I didn’t see any of my other friends, becoming ever more infatuated with Jack and his shining energy. One summer sleepover, I took advantage of Jack finishing up his chores and slipped into his leather jacket, drinking in his scent from the lapels, when he walked in behind me. Nothing was said at the time apart from a mumbled apology accompanied by flushed cheeks and a hasty disrobing but in the morning, he asked me gently if I was in love with him in any way. Faced with the alternative, I was forced to admit my obsession; that I didn’t want to be with him. I wanted to be him. His eyes searched me, trying to understand, but I knew he never would. Ever since, Jack has made it his personal mission to get me to fall in love with myself, to get me to see the guy he insisted everyone else saw, the guy he did. And to some extent, it worked. That was the wonder of Jack Montreux.

The persnickety side of me wanted to go to New York and start our journey from there, just as Sal Paradise had. Jack had said sure, if I wanted to pay for gas and do all the driving. I had been tempted to consent to these terms, just for the sake of being thorough. No, Jack resolved, Des Moines was the third stop on Sal’s itinerary, we’d pick it up from there. Besides, all this was fun but we had to remember that we weren’t Dean and Sal, that we would never be, we were ourselves and wasn’t that enough for anyone? I reluctantly agreed that it was. It was under this good-natured contract that we made our way to North Platte, Nebraska, squabbling over control of the radio and waving goodbye to Farm Country, counting off the things we’d never have to do again.

Eventually we’d have to figure out something for money, our paper route savings could only get us so far and we couldn’t panhandle our way across the country on a couple of dollars like Sal had. Different times, I sighed, equal parts yearning and relief. We had enough to get us to Reno, the sixth stop, if we were careful. Jack suggested we make our money in the casinos. He was joking, I think. It’s hard to tell with Jack sometimes. I’m the worrier of the two of us unsurprisingly, but even I was caught up in the clichéd Open Road feeling. It was a big country, and I needed to see it. There was no denying now that there was more to the world than our own little lives. It was thrilling.

Given our shared loathing of the farm country of our home state, Jack had tried to haggle for missing out our Nebraska stop. He wasn’t the Beat Poets obsessive that I was, though he had never scorned me as others had for being so consumed by youth culture that was never my own but that of two generations before. Unlike me, Jack had always been comfortable enough in his own skin not to waste half his life wishing himself into that of a fictional other. He had offered me various combinations of Steak ‘n’ Shake, extra hours of driving, and his beloved leather jacket. I was desperate for that jacket but I couldn’t make him part with it. Plus, I had this feeling in my bones that we should start things out right. I stiffened my resolve; we were heading to North Platte.

It was a testament to Jack’s trust in me that he acquiesced. We were lucky to have that in our friendship. It made up for a lot of inadequacies in the rest of our lives. Though there came a point when the monotony overwhelmed, when we weren’t able to save each other, or even ourselves, not if we had stayed where we were. Like a sordid affair, or other such uncomfortable truth, we had to get out. We didn’t stop driving until we crossed the state line.

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Jack was convinced we should be using this trip for some higher purpose – to do Good, he said. For someone to whom life came so easy, Jack thought a lot about those less fortunate than him, he was drawn to society’s no-hopers. So far his only project had been me. As worthy as his plan to build my confidence had been, Jack was destined for bigger things. This drive combined with his nose for adventure made for a noxious but alluring mix that you couldn’t quite resist, no matter how unstable it made you feel, and how uncertain you were of the ingredients. It was hard to say which of these elements of Jack’s personality, the benevolent or the reckless landed us in trouble this time but I fear my own inaction played a large part. Not everyone’s anxiety issues lead them to crouching underneath a window of a crack den just outside of Sacramento, waiting for the blue flashing lights to pass, I’ve been forced to concede upon reflection. But like much of our time together, especially on that trip, I’ll chalk it down to experience, shut the memory up in a box, and only open it when I’m alone.

The car had been struggling since we entered the Golden State and it wouldn’t make it to San Francisco like that; windswept, sunburnt and running out of cash, in all reality, neither would we. For the first time in our lives, we had seen real cities, met wonderfully strange people and had the kind of times that would seem almost dull to city folk but to two Midwest kids, they were dizzying and terrifying and beautiful. It was with this newfound boldness that we stepped from our wheezing Ford and onto the sidewalk in downtown Sacramento. Jack slung his leather jacket over one shoulder, pushed his drugstore sunglasses up his blistering nose and led the way down the street. Even then, as he lit the last cigarette we had between us, he made the whole thing look like a Milan catwalk. But before I could even contemplate resentment as I bumbled along behind, he turned to me with an unguarded smile, showing his gapped teeth, and gave me the first drag.

It wasn’t too long before Jack had sniffed out some beer and bummed a few cigarettes; resourcefulness is not the only quality on which you should build a friendship but it certainly helps with longevity. I have been tempted to blame the people who gave us the beer for what happened next but I don’t think they were part of the same group. Plus, we were alone and throwing stones at the Capitol, trying to hit the dome, before we decided to take the guy up on his offer. If we’d have found more beer, or been able to sneak into this party we’d seen some pretty girls arrive at, we wouldn’t have ended up where we did. But at the time, it honestly seemed like the better option. I’ve heard that what you do when you are frightened truly defines who you are. What you are made up of. But I think it’s what you do out of boredom – that sticky, dark treacle state of mind – that makes you see what you’re capable of.

The house looked like nothing we were used to, even the fleabag motels we had been sleeping in were a world away from this type of place, but we puffed up our chests and rolled in, feigning composure. The beer helped and Jack had the lighter to occupy his hands, I stuck mine in my pocket. We were in and out in ten minutes, one bag heavier; Jack took charge of it of course, underneath the buzz was a strong sense that he was responsible for me. I had sobered up enough by then to realise the whole mess of it but Jack had been sneaking shots and was still at the invincible stage of youthful inebriation. That two-block walk when we were alone was my final chance, the last time he might have listened. But I have never been a “carpe diem” guy, not then, not now. I stayed silent. We trudged on. I had never considered doing anything but returning to the house as promised with the cash. We had been warned about being watched the whole way and I was out of my depth enough to believe that was true. As hard as it is to get any read on Jack, even in a normal situation, even when he hasn’t been sucking down whiskies, I don’t think he ever planned on running until he did it. But that’s the problem with people like Jack, they don’t think, they don’t plan, they’ve never have to. They could always get out of any fix they got into.

Even when I open up the box where I keep the memory of this night, and I have had plenty opportunity for solo reflection since then, I can’t put my finger on why I did what I did, why I didn’t follow Jack like I had done for years, why I picked that moment to draw a line, to put a final period and end mark on our relationship. But I do know how I felt as I watched his blonde hair disappear from the light of the street lamp and into the black, and it was equal parts terror and release, joy and misery, yearning and relief; a confusing mixture of emotions for an eighteen-year-old farm boy from Iowa but something I had gotten used to as a one-time friend of Jack Montreux.