Section VII
2022
Stumbling Upon The Town and the City mike mccormick
O
ne Sunday in late April 2021, I wandered with my friend Matt as he pointed out his favorite businesses in an upscale shopping district on Bainbridge Island, a thirtyminute ferry ride west of Seattle. As we sauntered, I remembered days during my teenage years when my girlfriend and I drove out of Haverhill to Cape Ann’s seacoast towns. We browsed art galleries and boutiques. I never found anything I wanted on those jaunts. The sun beamed brightly as we sidestepped oncoming walkers. I was ready to get out of the crowds when Matt cut a sharp turn onto a narrow passageway. “Follow me,” he commanded. “You’ll love this place.” I was far from thrilled when I realized we were entering a used record and bookstore. Since I am close to seventy years old, I am at the stage of life when I am trying to pare down oversized collections. A cardboard box full of discarded record albums from the ‘60’s and ‘70’s sat on a chair near the entrance. Seeing the beat up albums, I concluded that the store would have nothing of interest. I reluctantly followed Matt down a short hall into a large room with bookshelves and racks of used records. A thin, middle-aged woman greeted him from behind a glass display case. As Matt introduced me to the clerk, my eyes homed in on a book propped face forward on a shelf inside the case. The Town and the City by John Kerouac. I froze. I’d never seen a hardcover edition of one of my all-time favorite novels. Since discovering Kerouac’s first published novel in my twenties, I’d read and reread it countless times in a 1978 paperback edition with a green cover. Although this was my first encounter with the hardcover, the sight of it seemed familiar. I’d seen photos of it in Kerouac biographies. I asked the clerk if I could take a closer look. “Certainly,” she said, as she reached for the book to hand to me. I studied the cover. The title, printed in white blocky letters on a black field, reminded me of the introductory scripts at the start of mid-century cartoons films. Black-and-white line drawings of an imagined small town scene on a sickly green background triggered memories of a children’s book about Paul Bunyan. As I peered at the white scripted words “A novel by John Kerouac” on a rusty backdrop, I remembered that this was the only book where Kerouac did not use the name Jack. It occurred to me that the book I held might have passed through Kerouac’s hands at a book signing. My adrenalin surged. By some stroke of luck, might this be a signed first edition? The Lowell Review
135
