From What Happened Later, published by Thomas Allen in 2007.

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

Even Jack had to laugh at that.

Flat on his back and soggy drunk, lying across the North­port 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 Stanley knew what he meant.

Right back to the bright, clear days of New York in the fifties, backslapping double shots of Jack Daniels at the Cedar Tavern with Pollock and de Kooning and Kline and all the rest, 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 1oo percent 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 a while, 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. Mémère 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 used by Jack Kerouac, King of the Beats, Time magazine tells us so.

And now Jack wouldn’t get up.

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

Finally:

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 Stanley headed back toward Gunther’s, the fisherman’s bar where they liked to drink. He put his arm around Stanley’s shoulders as they crossed the road.

Ah, 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.