By
Boy--it looks like a trip to the New York Public Library--at least to the Jack Kerouac Archive there--could turn out to be a lot like a trip to the dusty storage boxes in my old bedroom. As Charles McGrath wrote in an NYT piece on Friday that I only just now ran across, among the relics Kerouac left behind from the inside of his burning mind were not only the endless Benzedrine scroll manuscript ofOn the Road, but a heap of notebooks and hand-drawn "publications" recording decades of made-up baseball seasons and horse-racing campaigns. What a thrill and a relief to discover that a literary A-lister--and all-time hepcat--was also as fully sports-dorked (actually, more so) than a full-on sports dork like me.
And old Jack did it up right. The hook for the Times story is a new book by Isaac Gewirtz, a NYPL curator, Kerouac at Bat: Fantasy Sports and the King of the Beats, but the term "Fantasy Sports" is a bit of an anachronism, since these days it refers to those armchair leagues in which civilians hitch their wagons to the real-life performances of flesh and blood athletes, which makes it sound as if Kerouac was just logging in to his Yahoo account and hitting refresh. But his old-style brand of sports fantasy was nearly flesh and blood itself: he named all his teams and players, wrote the rules and the wire-service game summaries, and played all the games by flipping over cards or throwing darts to determine each play's outcome. (With 40 to 50 games each in a season for an eight-team league, you do the math on the time commitment involved. I guess that's where the amphetamines in handy...).
Check out these evocative lineup illustrations from the archives (and note the name of the manager of the Pittsburgh Plymouths):
The Times has a great slideshow of such items, my favorite of which is a sheet of notebook paper reading
(Book stolen by thieves in Mexico City July 1961
--but Cincinnati Blacks were in first place,
Detroit Reds in second place--
Batting Champion: Wino Love, App.[?] .342
Homeruns: El Negro, StL
Pitching: Bob Cold, Cin (12-1)
Stolen Bases: Pancho Villa, StL
Doubles: Lefty Murphree, Pitt
E.R.A.: Bob Cold, Cin )
World Series: Cincinnati vs. Detroit, next page
There's a lot to love there (names like Wino Love and El Negro, almost as good as the moniker he invented for his greatest pretend racehorse, Repulsion), but what I love most is the reminder ("stolen by thieves in Mexico City"!) that he was doing all this in the middle of his crazy Beat life. This wasn't just an adolescent obsession put aside with other childish things: by 1961 On the Road had been out for a few years and Kerouac was a major literary celebrity, for better or worse. But apparently he kept this particular pastime hidden from his Beat pals, which shows the level of shame associated with this dark, D&D side to being a sports fan. There was plenty you could cop to as a Beat--shooting your wife, for instance, or taboo-at-the-time things like sleeping with men (although Kerouac was not without shame there either)--but playing a made-up baseball game? Keep weird stuff like that in the closet, please.
The parallel between the fantasies of fiction and sports has been made before, in Robert Coover's Universal Baseball Association, Inc. most vividly. In his memoirHand to Mouth, Paul Auster included the baseball game he tried, at his most professionally hapless, to market. And you gotta figure Philip Roth played a few tabletop games in concoctingThe Great American Novel. But with Kerouac you get the sense that his subversive, but still more socially acceptable, creative outlet--his novels--wasn't enough to satisfy his urge to fabulate (and, most appealingly for this kind of narrative, to leave his creations at the mercy of the dice roll, card turn, or dart throw that determined their fate--maybe a relief after the God-playing of fiction).
And you also have the lovely, humbling image of what he and Neal might have really been doing on those long cross-country drives: not just vibrating with holy joy at the existence around them, but flipping over a card to see if Frank Goff would get a hit for the Pontiacs with two on and two out in the fifth (and really caring!). Oh wait--that was how I spent my teenage cross-country road trip, as my patient, bewildered family can confirm. --Tom
P.S. The Times article reports that Gewirtz's book is only available for now at the NYPL gift shop (although an Amazon search reveals one copy currently for sale by a third-party outlet, at the publicity-inflated price of $69.95). As it happens, I'll be in NYC next week, and I now know one shopping stop I'll have to make.
Comments