Friday, August 22, 2003 Updated: August 23, 12:53 PM ET
On the road to Lowell
By Sal Paradise Special to Page 2
Editor's note: Jack Kerouac, author of the great American novel "On the Road," wrote "spontaneous prose," a stream-of-consciousness blend of his real-life adventures and his imagination. We sent a reporter to Lowell, Mass., to cover Jack Kerouac Bobblehead Night, and he came back with this report, mixing fact and fiction. Call it "spontaneous reporting."
LOWELL, MASS. -- It is the summer of the Summer League, and they lined up like dingledodies tonight at LeLacheur Park, a hydraheaded python of humanity circling around the edifice to the river. It was the night of the Jack Kerouac Bobblehead Doll.
The official reason for the gathering was the contest in Lowell, Massachusetts, pitting the local Spinners baseball club against the Crosscutters of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, two denizens of the famously, historically kicky New York-Penn League. But it was not that particular game that moved this maniacal mob to begin collecting at 11:27 of the morning of a game to begin at 7:05.
On The Ball: Jack grabs a grounder. See the photo gallery.
Only one thousand of the precious bobbling icons, these golden calves, these false idols, these dead but not dead ringers, these copies of carbon, these facsimiles, these simulacra, these spitting images were to be given away to those whose fates found them in the front of the one true line.
They lined up for many reasons. Some, to hold in their hands a ceramic image of the most renowned Lowellian of them all, the writer whose tortured, spontaneous storytelling found him famously on the road, always seeming to say that you can't go home again but you can try and try and try. Some, to watch his head bobble, 34 years after his desperate death of drink. Some, to collect. Some, to sell. Some telephoned from around the globe. One wrote from behind prison bars, proclaiming his love for Jack in a long, impassioned letter of perfect prose.
At the tail end of the line, a different tune. Fistfights and near fistfights. Arguments and threats and counterthreats. Here, far from the gates, no one knows the one true line. Mutations and splinters and men angry and women exasperated.
Once inside, the carnival began anew with a feast of ribs and sausages and corn and apple pie in the bowels of the stadium, the exclusive Gator Pit, where the legendary Canaligator lurks. Outside on the field, more Bacchanalia, with dancers and sumo wrestlers.
Before Fantasy baseball, before Rotisserie baseball, before Strat-O-Matic, before APBA, during the heyday of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and Jack Dempsey and Red Grange, during the whole wide open Roaring Twenties, Jack Kerouac reinvented baseball. In his Summer League, or leagues, which began play when he was six or seven and continued for about four decades in numerous permutations and incarnations, Cracker Jack Kerouac was sometimes the manager of the Chicago Blues, sometimes the manager of the Pittsburgh Plymouths. Kerouac played alone, with marbles, toothpicks, white rubber erasers, and cards. A former sports scribe at the Lowell Sun newspaper, Kerouac documented his leagues' play in the newsletters "Jack Lewis's Baseball Chatter" and "The Daily Ball." Thirty-four years after his death, the pack rat's game survives among his collected writings.
If you check the official scoreboard, you may find that the Crosscutters beat the Spinners 6-4 on this night. But that's not the game that has Kerouac spinning today. He saw a different game entirely, the kind of game in which Pancho Villa plays center field for the Boston Fords, rivals to the Pittsburgh Plymouths.
He saw something like this:
"On Jack Kerouac Bobblehead Night, the game itself was even wilder than the festivities, with the curve-hurling Larry Hooker squaring off against fastballer Burlingame Japes. Spinner Scooter Jordan led off the bottom of the first with a single, and Scooter stole second and scored on a double by Japhy Ryder, late of the Dharma Bums, who stand in first place in the Spinners' division. Big Bill Louis brought Ryder home, and Herb Jangraw topped Big Bill with a homer through the ice cream cone in left field. After one inning, 4-0.
"The Crosscutters put up two in the top of third, and everything exploded in the bottom of the third, as Kevin Beaumont led off for the Spinners with a historical clout. Next up, Wino Love, who drinks to excess but hits likewise, knocked one even farther. Sterling Lord singled, Jean-Louis Lebris beat out a bunt, Carlo Marx struck out, and Luis Tercercero reached on an error by Crosscutter shortstop Francis X. Cudley. Bases loaded, and we started to wonder if the pitcher, Johnny Keggs, were too. Next up, Hilary Holladay, who to our amazement whacked it farther than Beaumont and Love. After three, the Spinners led 10-4.
"But the Crosscutters revived themselves, with Dean Moriarty, Jack Dulouz, Zoot Sims and Sugar Ray Simms (of no relation, as far as I know), folk heroes all, hitting and racing around the bases as though though death were chasing them. When Pants Isaacs homered in the top of the ninth, the score stood Williamsport 13, Lowell 10, and the Lowell nine found itself in a furious, frantic fight. The lights were dimming.
"Bottom of the ninth, and Elliott Adnopoz and Bobby Zimmerman led off the Lowell attack with triples, and Memory Babe followed with a single. The Spinners were within one. But, then, two quick outs. Charlie Parker walked. Amiri Baraka doubled. And, one pitch away from his team's demise, the Spinners' John E. Depp reaches down deep into his soul and brings across Parker and Baraka. 14-13, final score. Our beatific countenances betrayed our deep exultancy through the night."
Meanwhile, before and during the game on the field at LeLacheur Park, we carried on with the participants and patrons. "Who was Jack Kerouac?" we asked everyone.
"Who's he?" Ace Adams, pitching instructor for the Spinners, asked back, bluntly, without curiosity.
"I'm from Australia," offered Spinner skipper Jon Deeble, by way of excusing himself.
"Never heard of him," said Andy Stewart, commander of the Crosscutters. "But I'd like to know about him. Who was he?" Alas, at that moment he ran off to confer with Deeble and the arbiters.
Likewise, the youth were in the dark. As Red Sox short-season apprentices, they may be "On the Road to Fenway," as the Spinners' slogan boasts, but they don't know Jack, as our queries proved.
Others were more hep, more down with the beat.
A local dancer named Natalie Merchant, who said she's also an aspiring singer, lamented, "Hey Jack Kerouac, I think of your mother and the tears she cried, she cried for none other than her little boy lost in our little world that hated and that dared to drag him down. Her little boy courageous who chose his words from mouths of babes got lost in the woods. Hip flask slinging madman, steaming cafe flirts, they all spoke through you."
A ragamuffin guitar player in a dingy tank top, who identified himself only as Bruce, said that his memories of Kerouac involved "Madman drummers bummers and Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat. He was blinded by the light, cut loose like a deuce, another runner in the night."
A woman named Gabrielle, like Bruce from New Jersey, told us her brother had attended high school with Bruce's wife, and had come to know her in the Old Testament way. But that's another kind of game story entirely, and we'll say no more here.
We approached an aging esquire who appeared to be eating granulated sugar straight from the jar. He identified himself as Mike Stipe and said he knew Kerouac well. Pointing to the Merrimack River, just beyond the left-field wall, he said, "This is where we walked, this is where we swam. Take a picture here, take a souvenir."
Stipe's companion, a man who called himself Truman, dismissed Kerouac's fiction with a wave of his hand -- "That isn't writing at all; it's typing." Not everyone is a fan.
Jon Goode, the maniac whose bobbleheaded brainstorm brought us all together, said that we probably haven't seen the last ceramic Kerouac, as the writer was also a star running back at Lowell High School, scoring the winning touchdown against Lawrence on Thanksgiving Day, 1938, and attending Columbia University on scholarship until breaking his leg and falling out with his coach, Lou Little. Next year, Goode half-promised, we will see Kerouac in full football regalia, bobbling again.
As fame besieged him, Kerouac said he despised the commercial excess that came with the success of the Beat Generation of writers. But he had also been seduced by America and by the celebrity his writing brought him. From wherever he is in the cosmos, did he enjoy becoming an eight-inch doll, standing serenely on a copy of "On the Road," in trademark flannel shirt and jeans, pen and pad in hand, his image available for auction?
Well, as Cracker Jack Kerouac himself said, "We love everything ... Billy Graham, the Big Ten, rock and roll, Zen, apple pie."
