orion's belt

highways, the beat generation, and what happened to baby jane

I was kidding when I said I’d be leaving to Wyoming or whatever in three days once I came home from California. Mostly. I do have a tendency to up and leave whenever someone with a car is available to take me somewhere different, but I was fully expecting to stay in town at least until December 1st before leaving again.

It’s November 28th, eight days later. Jack is on my left, in the driver’s seat. We’re passing through Battle Ground, Washington, on our way to a farm in the Columbia Gorge. I can see the sign of the Starbucks parking lot I threw up in when I was 11 glowing green in the dark like an exit sign, blending in with all the other neon. Melted snow on the window streaks it all to nothing more than a Pollock painting of light, Reflection of the Big Dipper flung onto the glass by a careless hand. It gets dark real soon these days. The stars are out. I was always shitty at astronomy, but Jack isn’t. If I asked, he could probably name all the constellations that are out.

I’m watching him watch the road.

I used to tell people I wanted to be an anthropologist because I liked people watching and human behavior. I used to tell people I wanted to be an anthropologist, but someone asked why and I said that I’d be qualified because I’ve been playing dress up as a human my entire life. Always, always studying.

He’s nervous twitching. I don’t know if it’s me, the snow, general anxiety, or the fact that we’re hurtling 80 miles per hour down a massive strip of stone in a tin box and could die at any second if someone fucks up, and ultimately our lives are in the hands of complete strangers. It’s enough to make me nervous— I almost never drive because I hate that responsibility. I don’t think it’s the car. He’s always been twitchy like he is now, as far as I know, but he’s more unsure than usual. Could just be an unfulilled nicotine addiction. Could just be that we’re in a confied space. It’s none of my business, but if curiosity kills the cat, I’ve got at least three more lives in me before I kick the bucket for the last time, so might as well blow it on something dumb.

Scenes from the road flash in front of us, surreal in their unremarkable typicality. You could see this every single day and it’d never be the same. It would always leave you with something different. Something new. Everyone is going about their lives in a location, and I am also going about my life in a location, and Jack is going about his life in a location. I’m un chien andalou— I don’t question anything I see on the highway. If I saw it on the highway, a dead horse dragged across a piano could be so commonplace that it would be my everything, a new normal. It’s just the highway magic. God is a highway, death is a highway, an orange peel is a highway. Everything means nothing which means that everything means everything. I don’t know any other teenager that thinks about dadaism and surrealism as much as I do.

We make a brief stop at a pawn shop in the middle of nowhere, where I watch Jack sell the pieces of his mother’s jewelry his other friends and I didn’t want. She’s been dead for about a year now. He’s not selling them for the money; he just sees no reason to keep them useless if they can do something for him. Practicality for practicality’s sake.

I walk around the store as he haggles with the man behind the counter. The fluorescent lights wash them both out, turning them into background characters in a David Fincher movie, green and unrepentant. There are rows and rows of diamond wedding rings, shining like polished bone in the case. Bone and diamonds both lose a bit of luster when you know where they come from, though. All that secondhand blood.

Nobody cares that someone wants to marry me because both of us are all used up. Pawn shop purchases— we’re all just a bunch of fucking swingers at a swingin’ party, going breakneck down the highway.

Jack walks out with a couple hundred dollars in cash, and I walk out with an Anne Rice book that I got for 50 cents. He puts his Meat is Murder CD in. If I squint, I can make myself believe that we’re synched up, Dead Ringers style. It makes me think about the wedding rings and cannibalism and love, diamond hard boys for the eating. It also make me think about going vegetarian. I can’t do it for health reasons, but I like to think that it’s an option for me, to live a guiltless life. There’s a billion reasons for me to be guilty, so there’s really no point, but I’ve always loved pointless indulgences. Hedonism is an absolute doll once you get to know her.

Jack’s fingers thump the wheel in time to the bassline. He’s talking about the importance of claustrophobia in Gothic literature, a favorite topic of ours and something that we’ve discussed at length. It’s just funny, you know? We’re talking about claustrophobia in a car. There are two bodies in this hearse. I don’t think I’ve ever been more aware of the space I take up within a space. Speak of the devil (gothic motifs) and he shall appear, and that’s exactly what I tell Jack, that we’re in a Gothic novel of our own.

He looks at me with his crooked mouth. Spending time with Jack is a little bit like being a medium, I reckon— any time you say something he hasn’t thought of yet, he looks at you like you can see a ghost behind him. I see dead people, he doesn’t. Score: Holly 1, Jack 0. God knows I love him, but he does think of himself as an intellectual, and I take it upon myself to knock him down a peg every so often.

“How so?” he asks.

“We are limited spaces occupying a limited space, and a space is a space is a Rothko. There are rectangles everywhere,” I say. His brow furrows. Here he goes, trying to see the ghosts.

“How does Rothko factor into that?”

I wish we had a more effective way of communication than words. One day, we’re going to be rotting in the ground and we’ll achieve a perfect form of communication though the mycelium networks around our graves, but today is not that day.

“Modern art is more open to interpretation because it exists as a space. People are spaces, too, everything is a space. It’s a matter of… perspective. If you bring something to a space, it’ll bring something to you. You bring a shovel to a Rothko and it’ll look like a grave, you bring entrapment to real life and you get Gothic motifs in your life. We are constantly existing in a confined space, Jack. It doesn’t get more Gothic than that.”

He looks at me again. I look at the ghosts again. “Everything about everything is open to interpretation,” I say.

“Perspective.” Jack presses his forearm against the window like he’s testing the boundaries of a space, cracks his knuckles, turns up the stereo. “You know, Holls, I think I’m starting to understand you.” He’s the only one who calls me that. My name is also a space that is open to interpretation.

“Am I difficult to understand?” I don’t think I’m hard to understand, as long as you can wrap your head around the concept of a hypostatic union.

“I don’t know. I think you’re unknown— I don’t think many people see all of your… self.”

“More than 95 percent of the ocean remains unexplored,” I say.

“I don’t understand how you tick, but I get you as a person. I’m just not capable of making the jumps in logic that you make.”

“Well, I’m also a portion of unexplored infinity within a limited space. So are you. So is everyone. And so is the ocean.”

His fingers twitch again. He’s definitely more of a habital smoker than I am. Nicotine’s got it’s claws in him. At least he’s not smoking in the car— his manners are too good for that.

“It’s just how I sort and store information,” I add. “I can’t control the jumping around.”

He barks out a laugh, shaking his head. “Holly, how does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?”

“How does anything feel?”

“You ask a lot of questions,” he says.

“How does it feel to not ask a lot of questions?”

He laughs again. “I don’t know. I’ve got no fucking clue,” he says, and then we both laugh and pretend like relative experience is joke and not one of the mysteries of life, and he presses the gas pedal a little harder as we fly through Portland. We only stop for non-corporate owned coffee because we like to pretend we can make a difference, and fast food because we know we can’t.

We arrive at the farm at 9:43 p.m. As Jack pulls into the driveway, gravel cruching under the tires, it strikes me that I have no idea why we’re here. That’s not unusual, as I usually have no idea why I’m going to a specific place. Most of the traveling I do is for the hell of it. On the other hand, Jack is the type that always has a reason for doing something, so I figure we’re here to fulfill a specific purpose.

My immediate thought was that he’s going to try to sacrifice me to some minor god to try and bring inspiration. My second thought is that we’re about to fuck the week away, but that seems about as unlikely as him sacrificing me— Jack tends to go more for self restraint rather than hedonism. I know he’s more devout than I’ve ever been, and the Church has never been big on pleasures of the flesh. Not like that’s ever stopped him, but I don’t think he could spend more than a day fucking around. Internalized Catholocism or whatever.

“What are we supposed to be doing here?” I ask.

Jack opens the trunk of the car to pull out our duffel bags and his guitar. “You know how Mary Shelley and Lord Byron and their whole group spent a rainy day indoors writing and telling stories?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s what we’re doing. Creativity retreat or something along those lines. We’re just going to pursue creative habits for however many days we can. No social media or outside influence or whatever, just making whatever art we can until we can’t.”

“So we write until we drop, effectively.”

“That’s right,” he says, unlocking the door. It creaks open. Nobody’s visited the farmhouse for a while, clearly, because there’s a strong smell of dust emanating from inside.

“Right on.” It’s right up our alley— creation until we can’t possibly create more. “Spontaneous. Like the Beat Poets.”

“Like the Beat Poets,” he repeats. “You know, I’m named after Jack Kerouac.”

“When I was twelve, I wrote as much of On The Road as I could on my bedroom ceiling in permanent marker. I think I got part of the way through Part 3 before I ran out of room,” I say. Jack, cigarette in mouth, slips his hand into the front pocket of my jeans for a lighter and hums in acknowledgement. “I was… twelve was a good year, but it was also the year that I divorced myself from my peers. I was out of town for seven months. Almost had to repeat the grade because of how much school I missed. I didn’t have any friends my age. I think I wrote it on my ceiling because I was trying to make sense of my life.”

“Well, look at that, Holls,” Jack says. “Now only 94 percent of the ocean remains unexplored.”

I watch him tap ash into the snow, pulling my coat tighter around me. It’s a real deep sort of silence out here— no cars, no people, just us and the animals and the wind and the fuzz of the porch light.

“We gotta start a fire,” I say. There’s wood already stacked on the porch from whoever was here last. I think that pile has been there for as long as I’ve been coming to the farm. The entire house is heated by a woodstove, and it takes forever for it to heat up the entire space.

“In a minute,” Jack says. The door is still open, the smell of disuse emptying out of the house. We sit on the porch swing together, leaning into each other and letting the silence overtake us again. We’re the same height— twin primes.

“What happened to it?” he asks.

“What?”

“Your ceiling. What happened?”

“We painted over it a year later. Fixed up the plaster, too.” He offers me the cigarette, and I take it.

“Well, isn’t just that how life goes,” he says. “Repaint and move on.” He takes another pull and laughs. “Isn’t that just how life fucking goes!”

Somewhere in the woods behind the house, an owl hoots. Nocturnal animals must feel great about winter— all that nighttime, all that dark. Jack gets up and passes me a few logs. The fire starts without much fuss.

There’s a dead mouse inside that we hold a funeral for. Jack names it Baby Jane so he can know what happened to her, and we use a stick to dig a grave in the half-frozen ground. We almost make a cross out of twigs, but then realize that Baby Jane probably isn’t religious because it’s a mouse. I put a stone over the grave instead. Jack says the Lord’s Prayer, arguing that funerals are more for the living than the dead, and I begrudgingly cross myself, my other hand playing with the rosary in pocket. It’s a somber affair, only the flashlight and Orion’s Belt bearing witness. My lucky stars; I always liked the symmetry of them. In a scattering of salt, three grains can form a perfectly straight line.

With a scatterbrain, I can make a sentence.

I pencil three stars on Baby Jane’s gravestone. That can be a religion, if Baby Jane wants it to be. The night sky is probably the closest a mouse has ever gotten to Jesus. Jack pours a splash of whiskey on the grave, and we go inside and drink the rest of it in memoriam. With a half-dried Sharpie, Jack writes Jane on his bicep in an arrow heart.

“I should totally get this tattooed,” he says, head in my lap and eyes closed to the heat of the woodstove.

“Do not get that tattooed,” I say. A pause. “At least get better linework for it.”

“I’ll get better linework, then. And Baby Jane will stay forever in our hearts. Long live vaudeville.” He takes another drink. “We should start a vaudeville act.”

“You’re not nearly flexible enough.”

“That can change.”

“It’s not going to, though.”

“No, it isn’t.”

I run my hand through his hair, again and again.

“We could really do this, Holls,” he says into my stomach. “We could really be something big. Write the next great American novel. We’ve written songs together, we could do something with them. Top the charts.” The crickets chirp in the dark outside, barely heard over the fire. “We really could do it. We really could.”

“I don’t see any way that would go well,” I say. “I don’t think either of us would really be good at being famous.”

“I think we’d be great at it. It’s about crowd manner, you know? We have crowd manners.”

“But would we like it?”

He pauses, as if to let another speaker into the conversation. “I don’t think we’re supposed to.”

“Oh, honey.” I run a fingertip down the bridge of his nose. “Why would I do something if I didn’t like it?”

He looks at me again, quirks his mouth like he’s got a cigarette in it. “I think only 93 percent of you is unexplored now.” Sighs. “I see things differently now, and I finally understand you.”

“I love that movie.”

Jack whoops. “90-fucking-2 percent and she’s my kind of freak!”

“You’d let me poison you?”

“I’d want you to poison me,” he says. He’s got pretty eyes, big and hazel and long-lashed, and I run my fingers over the soft skin around them. “I’m flat on my back and tender and helpless right now. Do it.”

I laugh, folding over to look him in the eyes. “You mean all this time, we could’ve been friends?”

He sits up, grasping my face in both his hands. “You know, Holly Marie, I think you’re my Dean Moriarty. I think I’d love you even if you had three wives at the same time and a hundred unfulfilled obligations. Let’s get all of our blissed-out friends and bring them to New York and make a new Beat era.” His face is red from the fire and his hands are icy. He sniffs. “I really do think we could do it.”

I kiss him.

“Pax proposed, you know,” I say.

“Yeah, I know.”

“I said yes.”

“I know,” Jack says. “I know.” His mouth is still crooked, smiling to the left.

“For what it’s worth,” I say. “I think we could do it too. I just don’t know if I’d trade this for it.”

He knows. It’s enough for me.