Everything that matters already happened. Everything since then is just the same thing but different. The decades and decades since your first Pixie Stick and purple Kool Aid high and your last strictly-against-doctors-orders rye and ginger ale only seem like several persons ago, are only the really nice lie we tell ourselves about how everybody – everybody including you, too, of course – grows up.

Look: when Jerry Garcia died of a heart attack while detoxing from years of heroin abuse at some California get-well nightmare called Serenity Knolls, they found him curled up in bed in the fetus position cuddling an apple and with a fat smile on his face. The guy was 53 years old. Yeah, sure he was.

• • •

Even Jack had to laugh at that.

Flat on his back and soggy drunk, lying across the North-port streetcar tracks, he’d told his buddy Stanley Twardowicz that he wasn’t getting up until either the streetcar or an automobile arrived and he was finally free of the wheel of the quivering meat conception and safe in heaven dead.

Actually, Fuck off, I’m not getting up, is what he said, but Twardowicz knew what he meant.

Right back to the bright, clear days of New York in the fifties, back-slapping double shots of Jack Daniels at the Cedar Tavern with Pollock and de Kooning and Kline and the rest of them, Jack had always enjoyed the company of painters. Painters tend not to talk about things like the pros and cons of third-person limited versus third-person omniscient narration or how much money what’s-his-name’s agent got for him for his last paperback reprint deal or who the New York Times has anointed as this week’s 100%-guaranteed wunderkind to watch out for. Jack liked to hang around Twardowicz’s Northport studio in the afternoon while Stanley was working, liked to quietly putter away and sip from a tall can of Colt 45 or sometimes spend entire hours watching Twardowicz lay down some fresh new colour and light and line.

Being at the studio was also a way of getting away from his mother for awhile, as well as a place he could retreat to to avoid the Long Island teenagers who still showed up at his front door looking for the guy who wrote On The Road. Memere would try her best to shoo them away, but Jack would yell at his mother in French and she’d yell back at him in even louder French and one of the kids would have brought along a six-pack and it wouldn’t be long before Jack would lift his whiskey bottle and put on his clown nose and be the brilliant buffoon everybody wanted him to be. He’d wake up two days later with a crippling hangover only to discover that one of his notebooks, a couple first editions of his own novels, and even some of his pencils were missing – pencils, after all, once owned and actually used by Jack Kerouac, King of the Beats, Time magazine tells us so.

And now Jack wouldn’t get up.

For nearly ten minutes Twardowicz had tried everything: reasoning, pleading, even threatening. One honking car had already swerved around him in the dark, and the streetcar was eventually going to come. It hadn’t come yet, but it was coming.

Eventually:

Well, there’s Jack Kerouac, back on the road again.

Even Jack had to laugh at that.

Jack laughed, picked himself up off the street, and he and Twardowicz headed back toward Gunther’s, the fisherman’s bar where they liked to drink. He put his arm around Stanley’s shoulder as they crossed the road.

Ah, Stash – Jack called Stanley Stash – you knew I wasn’t going to do it, you know I’m a good Catholic, you know I have to take the slow way out.

What do you mean, ‘Take the slow way out?’

Jack raised a single forefinger in the salty Long Island night air.

Suicide is a sin, Stash, you know that. C’mon, let’s get a table, let me buy you a boilermaker.

• • •

Before Jack Kerouac could change my life, Jim Morrison had to save it. Every Almighty needs an ambassador down below to do his dirty work. Mine wore tight brown leather pants and shouted out his rock and roll couplets like it somehow actually mattered.

You can read William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience or you can take my word for it, but walking on water wasn’t built in a day, every epiphany has to pay its own way. Jamie Dalzall and I were being bored together in his bedroom after school one afternoon when he slipped The Doors’ Greatest Hits onto his Simpson-Sears stereo turntable as casually as anybody who’s ever transformed somebody else’s life without trying. Forget about music videos, I’d only just discovered F.M. radio the year before. I thought Elton John was a poet. I thought Kiss were punk rock. We all had ten-speed bicycles, and the city buses snaked our neighbourhoods until six p.m. five nights a week, nine p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, and the suburbs that connected us seemed like they went on forever.

The Doors were Morrison – you knew, because it was his chiseled cheekbones and dripping black curls that crowded out the other three faces on the album cover – but the music was what made me sit down on the edge of Jamie’s bed and be quiet and listen. You didn’t have to sit and be quiet in order to listen to Reo Speedwagon. When I headed home for supper in the early-evening February grey, my red Adidas bag full of useless school stuff hanging from one hand, the borrowed album cradled tight in the other, the nightmare soundtrack organ sound of "Light My Fire" hummed me the half-mile walk back to my house.

My sneakers made crunching sounds in the snow in the frozen dark. No one over the age of fifteen worth talking to ever wore boots or hats in the winter, no matter how nasty frosty it got. The less you wore, the cooler you were. The really, really cool guys in grade-thirteen came to school in jean jackets which they let flap open in the freezing breeze in the parking lot while they smoked. That, and getting a girlfriend and scoring touchdowns and potting hat tricks in hockey, were about as good as it is was ever going to get.

I had no idea. I pulled the Doors album closer. I really had no idea.

• • •