American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light by Iain Sinclair Read Free Book Online

to city, never settling, endlessly perching, recording, remembering, suffering: to gain his ‘foothold in heaven’.

John Sampas
    Remember the scene in
The Godfather
? The neighbourhood trattoria, the garlic-and-tomato ooze of the kitchen, the tightness of the tables? The gun hidden in the toilet cistern? Large men with heavy elbows. Big white plates. Wine bottles. Cones of laundered napkin flicked open, bibbed around bullish necks. All that screwed-down testosterone rage, liable at any moment to send bread rolls, forks, spoons, water jug, cigarettes flying into the air in a Futurist explosion. Marinetti meets Mario Puzo. Which would, Hollywood style, cut into a montage of spinning newspaper headlines (a vortex), final editions soaking up lung blood.
This was not like that.
The restaurant, chosen by John Sampas, was deserted. Even by Sampas. Maybe it was too wet for him to come out. A long, low room with tables in regimented lines lit like the interior of a satin-padded, diamond-pattern coffin. A soundproof immersion-chamber for a wealthy narcoleptic who wants just enough light, should he wake up, to read
The Premature Burial.
It is rumoured, as I’m sure John Sampas, a cultivated man, would know, that Edgar Allan Poe visited the Lowell tavern known as the Worthen House, where he composed part of ‘The Raven’. This town was also the birthplace of Bette Davis and James McNeill Whistler, both of whom got as far away as possible as soon as they could.
    The spaghetti joint where little, broken-mouthed Al Pacino proves himself by blowing away Sterling Hayden (in life, a disgraced leftist namer of names) is square on to a working street in a part of the Bronx unvisited by restaurant critics. (Relocated for convenience to the Luna Restaurant on White Plains Road, off Gun Hill Road.) From a midway table, keeping your back to the washroom, you face a wet window, slithery with neon, passing traffic.
Nothing passes in Lowell.
We’re downtown, close to the civic centre, and it’s
reasonable to expect a knot of black suits with expense accounts, relaxing dealmakers, worldly priests and patrons.
Nobody
. Efficient staff come straight at us for our drinks order, then vanish. Grape-bulb lights depending. Icy-white cloth. Pink napkins. Tall menus like Orders of Service at the crematorium. Red-rimmed chairs with curved backs. No windows, no street. Reproduction French posters advertising drinks they don’t serve. Empty mirrors innocent of breath.
    Knowing something of the period when Kerouac, having married Stella, John’s sister (as a surrogate for his soulmate, Sammy), was sheltered, indulged, adopted by the Greek clan, I formed the impression of a group of local fixers who worked hard and got lucky. They always had a stool for Jack in Nicky’s, the Sampas-owned bar managed by Manuel ‘Chiefy’ Nobriga. John’s father, George, back in 1941, got into some bother with a man called Peter Apostalakos. ‘That guy is
stalking
me.’ He responded to this annoyance by shooting him dead. The argument between the two men had been running since 1920. John Sampas explained that the Lowell community turned against his father because he had once led strikes in the local mills.
    The first physical attribute that struck me about John, when he was led to our table, and after he had removed his cap, was the permanently raised eyebrows: lightly pencilled accents. Punctuation marks signalling a certain fastidiousness of discourse. This man had endured many such conversations, clearly; biographers, thesis brokers, bounty hunters circling around the Kerouac archive. He demonstrated immaculate, almost military, grooming: clipped white moustache, low-slung attentive ears, and high, thin neck. Careful, wounded eyes. A dark corduroy jacket with blue-check, button-down shirt. The spectacles on a string were brought into play to interrogate a menu with few surprises. He ordered, with an imperceptible sigh, what is always ordered. He ate slowly; cutting,