“Rest and Be Kind,
You Don’t Have to Prove Anything”

For Jack Kerouac, who said this was his best advice for writers

In 1972 I sat with Stella Kerouac in her St. Petersburg, Florida, home thinking, “I can’t believe I’m really here, sitting in Jack’s lounger, Jack’s cat nuzzling my foot, I can’t believe she let me in, I can’t believe she’s putting these papers in my hands.”

Stella, who met Jack as a child. He was her younger brother’s friend. She said it felt like only moments since Jack had died, though already it had been a few years. She wanted me to read some unpublished pieces of Jack’s fluent prose into a tape recorder. She was making an oral archive and thought her own voice, after years of smoking, too coarse for posterity. My hands trembled as I recorded his words, thinking, “This is a page he really touched.” She thought papers might disappear, but cassette tapes were going to last forever.

Some sweet, quick link had been established between Stella and me weeks earlier, when I telephoned her from Texas on my forlorn twentieth birthday (also Jack’s birthday), let the phone ring at least twenty times, and finally heard her tearful “Hello?” I babbled into the phone, tentatively at first, since I’d heard she was reclusive. I expected her to hang up at any moment. She didn’t hang up. She said she’d been kneeling by Jack’s bed missing him on his birthday, wondering if anyone anywhere might be thinking about him right then. Perfect timing. I couldn’t stop thinking about him. She invited me to come visit her.

My parents drove me down. I was going to take the bus, but they were always so good about driving me. The library? Violin lessons? Jack Kerouac’s house in Florida? Sure, let’s drive.

They dropped me off and went away to the beach. For a few days Stella and I talked, ate tuna fish, pawed through closets, and didn’t answer the phone. The phone rang frequently, but she wouldn’t touch it. “It’s his phone, not mine,” she said. Indeed, the phone was still listed under Jack Kerouac in the directory, which was how I had found her. We used to call Information. There was no answering machine.

Jack’s mother, Gabrielle, still living in a back bedroom, shook a tinny bell for attention. Stella rushed off to see what she needed. Trays of food and lemonade traveled to the bedroom and returned empty. I wanted to meet Gabrielle very much, but Stella said she was “beyond meeting people.” Gabrielle sent her greetings to me out in the front room, signed a little navy blue Christmas chapbook by Jack for me, and said to take it easy.

Stella fed their cats at the kitchen table as if they were people. She set places for them. They sat on high stools, putting their mouths up to their plates. We sat at either end of the table. It seemed natural while we were doing it.

Later she would try to give me the gray kitten of one of Jack’s cats. I loved this idea. We had many phone conversations about how the cat might be sent from Florida to Texas—I recall discussing a bus trip, but the cat could not travel by itself. A plane was expensive. The whole operation seemed too stressful a prospect for the kitten, however we imagined it, and was never accomplished.

Then the phone in their kitchen rang again. This time, Stella told me to answer it. I fumbled the receiver. “Hello?”

“Who’s this?” said a faraway voice.

“I’m visiting Stella,” I stuttered.

“Well, put her on, would you? This is Allen Ginsberg.”

When I said, “Allen Ginsberg,” Stella put her hand out. She talked to him. She was friendly. I thought about the reading he’d given at our college in Texas that year, incense adrift on the air, his harmonium humming. We’d all gone into a sandalwood poetry trance, sitting with legs crossed, smiling back at him. Never had I imagined I’d be sitting in Kerouac’s house when I heard his voice again.

As Stella handed the receiver back to me to hang it up, she sighed and said, “That Allen . . . I can always tell when it’s Allen. It has a different ring.”