I hadn’t expected Kerouac Alley and the bookshop to move me so much; the emotion of it all took me by surprise. Truth be told, I don’t often think about Kerouac these days. I read other authors, other genres, and when I write I don’t try to sound like him anymore; I feel I’ve found my own style, more or less. I had my phase and I moved on – left it behind, along with all the other stuff I left in my twenties, voluntary or otherwise. But despite all that, being there did something to me – something visceral. It felt exactly how watching the Lion King on TV feels, even after all these years: it felt like nostalgia, it felt like loss, it felt warm, it felt like a hug.
We left the shop in the rain and took photos outside, then crossed the street to go inside Vesuvio for a couple of beers. Annie, however – to my quiet, aching dismay – had left her ID at home. The doorman was having none of it.
“It’s literally my 30th birthday in a few hours. I was born on the 26th of November 1994, my star sign is Sagittarius.”
“No ID, no entry,” he said, shaking his head in that emotionless nothing-to-be-done way that doormen so enjoy.
“Can we show you a photo of it?” I asked. “Or we could call and get her partner to show you it on video call?”
“No can do. Needs to be a physical copy.”
“Are you sure?” said Annie. “My friend’s come a long way to see this place.”
“I’m sure,” said the doorman, bored.
Apologising profusely for forgetting her card, Annie suggested I go inside and have a look around, at least. And I did; I stepped inside and felt almost as if I’d gone back in time. Almost, I say, because while the cigarette-stained walls and lampshades and booths and the rickety chipped wooden chairs were all dragged straight from history, the men sitting at the bar were in modern clothing. I also doubted that when my old heroes drank in this bar there’d have been quite so many pictures of them adorning the walls – but otherwise, it was damn near perfect. I wanted to stand there a while and imagine it all, taking my time to fold away the anachronistic drinkers in their windbreakers, tucking them beneath the floorboards like a rotating set in the theatre, replacing them with curling smoke and knapsack wanderers and scrappy poets with crazy eyes. I wanted to – but there was no time.
I couldn’t just stand there staring of course – I looked insane – so I wandered around the bar, upstairs onto the balcony, and downstairs to the bathrooms. The bathrooms, more than anywhere else in the place, looked as though they hadn’t changed a bit since 1957. Old posters on the walls, multi-coloured stained tavern-glass, exposed scarred brickwork. I stood and had a wee, staring at the bricks, thinking: they all looked at these same bricks. They stood here and peed and looked at these same exact bricks. I wondered if we’d have been the same height.
I left the bar before I’d really had my fill, because it was spitting a little outside and I didn’t want to leave Annie alone in the rain. She apologised again when I came out and I told her not to worry about it as we mooched away, taking turns to slag off the bouncer.
We stopped only a couple of blocks down the road, at another bar – this one of no famous name and no repute, but crucially, lacking a doorman. Annie took a seat and I bought two beers. I sort-of wanted the girl behind the bar to ask about my English accent, or at least seem vaguely intrigued by it, but she just handed me two beers with clipped, measured politeness.
I sat with Annie at the back of the gloomy place, empty save for one dishevelled, lumberjack-looking guy sitting at the bar, flirting casually with the bartender. Annie had to text someone for a minute, so I sat and looked around the room.
American bars are like American everything: bombastic, collegiate, macho. We sat beneath the saturated glow of four separate TV sets showing basketball, bowling, the NFL and a cowboy movie, Young Guns. On the walls were US and Irish flags alongside old mounted baseball mitts and grainy team photos of the long-dead players of some long-forgotten sport. Guitar solos wailed overhead, Led Zeppelin’s Good Times Bad Times and Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Fortunate Son. It was – and I say this as someone very fond and defensive of English pubs – brilliant.
Until that point, I never really got America’s obsession with flashy bigness. All that ‘FUCK YEAH’, all that exploding and handbrake skidding, all those fighter jets zooming over a saluting President in Ray Bans on the steps of the White House. But after a few days in the country, it was starting to make sense: the USA is a nation founded by loonies. I don’t mean that disparagingly; I am often very fond of lunatics. But come on – you’d have to be at least a little bit nuts, wouldn’t you, to get on a wooden boat one day with your spouse and kids and sail away into fuck knows what with the hope that it might be, in some broad and not particularly articulable way… better.
I mean, imagine if we eventually do manage to set up a colony on some lush new planet. What kind of people do you think would sign up for that trip? They’d have to be a little bit… left field, wouldn’t you say? They’d have to be exceedingly optimistic, for starters, to avoid plunging immediately into ‘oh fuck what have we done we’re a billion miles from home’ existential panic. They’d need unfathomable, unshakeable levels of self-belief. They’d need to be assertive and dominating and stubborn as mules. There’d be a starry-eyedness to them too; a zealousness. And they’d be wild, wouldn’t they – because if they were satisfied with life on Earth, if they found it suited them, they wouldn’t leave.
Imagine loads of that specific kind of person suddenly unleashed upon New Earth: a seemingly endless land, brimming with natural wonders on a scale they’d never seen before. Imagine the sort of society they’d create, the values they’d hold, the culture that would develop, in a place so grand and spacious that the world back home seemed cramped and overrun and confined. Imagine that sudden insane sense of space, of independence – the eye-widening realisation, gasping like Kevin McCallister in Home Alone: we can do whatever we want out here. Freedom, the idea that started it all, enshrined over everything in gold – a freedom that would become increasingly difficult to agree on a definition of, as the centuries passed and the population rose.
And there you go: Americans.
Annie doesn’t really fit into this definition of Americans, by the way. I’ve no idea where that girl came from.
“Sorry boys,” she said, looking up from her phone. “Finished texting. What’ve you been thinking about?”
“Oh, nothing.”
We talked about Annie’s birthday party – laughing at the silly bits, filling in the blanks – and then after half a pint we took a nice jaunt down memory lane. We often revisit Berlin in our conversations; of course we do, it’s where we met, during our weirdest and most formative years. We talked about debauched days, and we talked about how coincidental our first meeting was – and how strange it was to find such an instantaneous connection.
“As soon as I met you dude, I knew you were going to be someone special in my life,” said Annie.
“I felt the exact same thing.”
She’s gotten softer as she’s gotten older, my old friend. 22-year-old Annie would have physically retched if she tried to say such words; now they tumble from her easily. It seems to be getting harder for me, on the other hand – a reluctant impulse for caution, after the sorrow of recent years.
“It’s not easy to say this stuff sober,” I laughed, “and you know it all already anyway. But… I often find it hard to believe that a person as cool as you exists. And I’m very glad you do.”
“Fuck I wish you lived out here man,” said Annie, reaching over to punch my shoulder. “Imagine just going over to each other’s houses for beers and video games, like, just stopping by a couple times a week. Can you imagine how fucking insane that would be?”
I smiled, and we clinked glasses. If I am a dog – easy to read, emotional, well-intentioned yet clumsy – Annie is a cat: she moves in ways I don’t always understand, different from one moment to the next. Hypersocial one moment, antisocial the next – bragging and being crass like a 17-year-old boy, then groaning existentially out of seemingly nowhere. And sometimes, without warning, she exudes this sudden and incredible sincerity – a giant beacon of it, enough to light up a banquet hall.
*****
For dinner we had crab cakes and clam chowder down at Pier 39 on the waterfront. It’s a long, broad, wooden promenade, with many pleasant-looking shops and restaurants, mostly nautical-themed. It was clean and picturesque in a slightly uncanny Hallmark way, and the air smelled like salt and fish and there were a lot of fairylights zigzagging over everything. We walked the length of it and stopped at the dark of the waters edge, hoping (but failing) to spot sealions.
A powerful, swooping light flashed over us from out in the blackness and the fog. It was the lighthouse over Alcatraz, the old abandoned prison, rising from the gloom like a ghost ship, far out in the bay. I imagined how it felt in the decades when the prison was in use – to stand on the streets San Francisco and look out by night to see that haunted island and the calibre of maniacs and murderers locked up there, and imagining their suffering cries and wails, drifting out over the water to be lost in the dark of the freezing fog. Even now the sight of it made me shudder.
“My dad swam it once,” said Annie. “From here to Alcatraz, for a competition. A shark swam up to him while he was halfway and he had to punch it.”
It’s no wonder Annie’s own sense of danger is non-existent.
*****
Driving home over the Bay Bridge we listened to Blink 182 on the aux and Annie tried to sing along to ‘Always’ but got the words wrong and we laughed. We opened some wine when we got home and played Super Mario Party on the Nintendo Switch, and at midnight we paused the game for a moment to share a hug.
“Thirty years old ey, who’d have thunk?” I said, my face still squashed against her shoulder. “Happy birthday, mate.”