One Day From Now

Today is Jack Kerouac's birthday, tomorrow is mine and Albert Einstein's is on Monday. Monday, the 14th of March (1964) is also the day Jack Ruby was sentenced to death for killing Lee Harvey Oswald, who incidentally went to my Junior High School, PGT Beauregard (once named for a confederate general, but recently renamed Thurgood Marshall, who was nominated by JFK to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1961. And of course, LHO supposedly killed JFK) in New Orleans. He was on the baseball team, and our P.E coach proudly pointed him out in a black and white group photo of the team, which was next to an ancient trophy case. We no longer had teams or trophies, or so many white kids as in the photo. I was 13 years old and I realized even then that I was living amongst dinosaur bones, in a dusty old museum abandoned by its curators. Jack Kerouac drove to New Orleans in 1949 to visit his friend William S. Burroughs who lived in Algiers Point, a neighborhood directly across the Mississippi from the French Quarter, where I grew up. Burroughs hated New Orleans. He hated queers too, but still fucked them. I believe sincerely that the bar he describes in Queer is located in the same location as The Oz, on Bourbon Street. In the 70’s this location was a disco that my mother hung out in, and before that it was Al Hirt’s (The trumpet player partly famous for The Green Hornet TV show Theme) nightclub. In 1992 When I was 19, I read Ann Charters biography of Kerouac, and wished he had been born one day later. I imagined I had left some faraway place to gather in the city that care forgot with other poets, who might become my lovers. Years later I realized that Kerouac was a mediocre writer, fags were just as boring as everyone else and I don’t need to go looking for adventure, because I’m not bored and middle class. I’m 32 tomorrow, and I have not yet been driven to shoot a president.

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