Free You Can Say You Knew Me When by K. M. Soehnlein Page A

a poem. Or seven.
    And then it would start all over again.
    After high school, after Eric, I had avoided the touch of men. College was relatively sexless for me—a couple of girlfriends, a couple of furtive liaisons with boys. By the time I got to New York, I was ready. I discovered that pale blue eyes, freckled shoulders and red hair were a currency with an appeal that ran deep, if not necessarily wide. I learned how to court admirers. I figured out how to work it . Nathan was less of a prowler than I, but not blameless. He preferred going home with someone he’d met at a bar, which I thought of as unnecessarily entangled—you had to converse, and spend money on alcohol, and exchange phone numbers, and in the end you were more likely to let emotions seep in, perhaps deciding this new someone was more interesting than your boyfriend. I preferred the quick and anonymous; no talking beyond Thanks a lot, man. That was hot. I wanted bodies, not biographies. For a while the World of Trade men’s room was unbelievably hopping, with sex acts so blatant you’d feel bad for the poor commuter who had stumbled in needing to pee.
    The day I was flying back to San Francisco, I’d been coupled with Woody for over a year and a half, a year and a half of monogamous nesting. I’d been a model partner. Woody’s previous boyfriend had run around behind his back; cheating was the one thing Woody couldn’t abide. I didn’t even flirt with other men in front of him. Plus, having emerged from my slutty years without contracting HIV, it seemed ungracious to tempt fate.
    So what was I doing in Newark Airport Terminal C, lingering a little too long at a urinal, looking over my shoulder at every guy who walked in, hoping one of them would make eye contact?
    I zipped up and splashed cold water on my face. Before anything could happen, I got away from the temptation conjured up by the piss-and-ammonia stink of a public toilet.
    In my carry-on luggage was my father’s copy of On the Road. Its cover was frayed, its pages jaundiced, but it was dated 1958—an original paperback edition. As Nana would say, it was the genuine article.
    I’d read the book before, or rather I tried to read it, in college. I never finished; too rambling, too episodic, a self-indulgent string of adventures. Back then I was reading contemporary fiction— Bright Lights, Big City ; Less Than Zero —the self-indulgent, episodic books of my own generation. And after college my reading list tended toward old-guard gays: James Baldwin, Frank O’Hara, Gore Vidal. With time to kill, and curious about what sent my father west, I decided Kerouac was worth a fresh look.
    Ten minutes later I had plowed through two chapters, utterly absorbed. The beginning of On the Road recounts the narrator’s introduction to Dean Moriarty, an ex-con who blazes into New York full of wild energy, charming the intellectuals and the junkies alike. I knew the basics of the Kerouac legend, knew that his books were thinly fictionalized versions of his real life, and that Dean was based on Neal Cassady, who’d been a muse to the young writer. But that summary only hinted at what Kerouac must have felt for Cassady. From the moment Dean answers the door “in his shorts,” rambling on about sex, “the one holy and important thing in his life,” one idealized, sensual description after another piles up: thin and trim hipped and blue eyed and golden, “a sideburned hero of the snowy West,” “a western kinsman of the sun.” Dean can’t even park a car without being described as a “wrangler.” The Kerouac stand-in who narrates the book goes on at length about his “heartbreaking new friend”—heartbreaking! — describing him as a long-lost brother with a “straining muscular sweaty neck” whose “dirty workclothes clung to him so gracefully.” I’d never heard anyone depict a kinsman so ecstatically. Sure, there are mentions of Dean’s wife, but she’s labeled a “whore” and