My grandmother’s story about Jack Kerouac is two-fold: the first is in high-school, where the location is the locker and the conversation is this:
“Give me a kiss.”
And my grandma — bless her heart — taps her cheek, Jack booms, “You won’t let me kiss you on the lips?” and he stalks away.
The second part — outside of parenthetically adding that my aunt nearly married the brother of Kerouac’s third wife, but the husband-to-be was shot down in WWII (or that my Grandpa later used to throw Jack out of bars) — is that when Kerouac died, Grandma invited my Ma to the funeral, and being the shy, get-away-from-me-you-parent type, she declined, so — later — when Grandma comes home and my Ma asks how it went, she’s floored when she hears:
“I sat next to an … Alan Ginesburg? I can’t quite remember the name, but he was such a nice young man. I flirted with them all, though. They were all so cute!”
