French missed a lot of school back in the day; and like me, took an extra year to finish up High School. In grade 14 we called ourselves the Oldtimers Club. Both of us ended up being on the honour roll, but we sure took the long path to get there.
Once he was away from school for a couple of days. Every teacher asked the class: "Where's French?" A couple of them even added comments like, "He's just skipping again." or "He is throwing his life away". As a teenager, I thought they shouldn't talk so much shit.
I went to check on him; in person (massive paradigm shift when compared with today's kids). His dad was smoking on the porch, as usual, and said that French was "out back". I knocked on his shed door, and French yelled "come". He was sitting in a lazy boy chair with a burnt arm that Bruce Fish had brought by. French was reading a book called Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. He had a couple dozen books in a stack of milk crates. He was smoking an America cigarette and taking short pulls from a bottle of Crowne Royal.
He tossed me a book called Dharma Bums, also by Jack Kerouac, and said: "Read this, it is good shit".
I read for a while. Pretty cool book. I could see why French liked it. Good tales of parties, poems, and big jugs of wine. French was like the characters in the novel (dharma bums), but he sure had more of an edge.
My mind wandered at one point and I asked: "Why do they call you French?".
He replied: "Read your fucking book".
I missed school the next day reading with French, and I finished my first Jack Kerouac novel.
4 comments:
You really do have a way of keeping the readers attention. I mean it. I read Dharma Bums when I was young, and it was a just as you imply. Ever think of putting this French cat into a short story and getting it published? Seems like a doable plan to me.
OO,
It doesn't surprise me that French'd be into Kerouac. Beat Buddhist comtemplation with a mix of fightin' boozin' and fornicatin'.
Bums indeed. Bums in the free-est and humblest sense.
HP
As a teenager you were right, those teachers shouldn't have been talking so much shit.
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