Cures for Hunger by Deni Béchard (fun books to read for adults .txt) 📗

had recommended him. But I nodded, devouring a plum tomato in two bites. Once, in a textbook, I’d read an excerpt from Magellan’s voyages, a paragraph devoted to how, starving, the crew sustained themselves with fruits and vegetables and meats entirely new to them. For me: leek soup, arugula salad, the hard ends of French bread.

“Hey,” the line cook said, “go easy on the Gouda.”

“Yeah, okay.” I slipped half a boiled potato from the counter and ate it in the walk-in fridge, garnished with olives from a plastic tub.

The next morning, I asked my English teacher if I should check out On the Road.

“You?” she said. “No, you should definitely not check out On the Road. The last thing you need is On the Road.”

So I went to the library and got On the Road and Dharma Bums.

That weekend, I read both books, sitting on the couch at a friend’s house, on the front porch, under the tree, on the picnic table, moving often as if to make myself inconspicuous. I’d have stepped into the pages: wandering, nights of camaraderie and the courting of women; the innocence and hope and longing for experience. Even in their misdemeanors, the characters remained pure. They lived in the undeniable flow of life.

But what startled me above all was the working-class world from which Kerouac came, the French Canadian family in Lowell, Massachusetts, and how he’d freed himself. There was something of the observer in him, a lack of connection, a rootless quality that denied him strength. I couldn’t help but think of my father’s disconnected life, the emptiness into which he pulled others. And yet I knew that because of him I loved Kerouac. He’d lived wilder things, a more desperate life driven by a greater longing than anything Kerouac described—a desire I sensed when he spoke of his past, but whose source I didn’t understand. No matter how I tried to forget him, his stories had first fed my imagination and made me want to travel—and when I myself had escaped him on the road, they’d returned to me, ghosting my wanderings.

✴

AS SOON AS I finished both of Kerouac’s books, I rushed through Pride and Prejudice. I’d grudgingly taken it from my English teacher for extra credit, but it surprised me. Unlike so many other characters in novels, Elizabeth Bennet seemed fully formed. Her rebellion emerged fluidly from the mechanisms of her society. I imagined meeting her, but her family would probably have hired me to dig a ditch, nothing more. An excruciating loneliness gripped my balls. Kerouac, too, I realized, would have dreamed of her—would have loved her fiercely, though eventually, unable to find his place, he’d have left, or she’d have kicked him out.

As I read in the library, Charlotte joined me and pushed a college guide across the table.

“Have you looked yet?” she asked.

She and I had hung out at a party and become close, though she refused to be anything other than a friend, no doubt wise to my life’s heedless trajectory. She’d been insisting for a week that I apply to at least one college.

“Just pick one. Everyone else has applied.”

“Nah,” I said and told her about Kerouac riding on the roofs of trains or living alone in a fire tower on a mountain for months, writing books.

She rolled her eyes. “Just apply. You don’t have to go, but you’ll have the choice.”

She had long brown hair and a classical profile, and she seemed far too good for me in the same way Elizabeth did. Rebel or not, Elizabeth would have wanted a man with at least some education. I hated the idea of it, a sort of narrow cast that would force me to write and think like everyone else, but I leafed through the guide.

“Okay, this one,” I said finally. It was the strangest I could find, the most individualistic, a school in Vermont called Marlboro College.

For the application essay, I described my upbringing, my bank-robber father and occultist mother. But I had no intention of going. Nothing I did could expend my energy. At times, it felt like bliss—exuberance filling my lungs so as to crack my ribs. At others, it was a virus in the blood, demanding movement and expression. The speed of my scribbling transformed words into hieroglyphs. I jotted on scraps that cluttered my car, which I now had to push-start, since its alternator had died.

After classes let out, I opened its door and pushed from the side, gaining momentum, and then jumped in, threw it into gear, and popped the clutch. The engine revved and sputtered, and I sped out of the lot. I drove fast, the windows down, and as I climbed a long incline, a gust blew through and carried out several scraps. The anxiety of loss startled me. I felt it in a way I never had with people. I wanted to stop and search the roadside weeds, but the car might stall and I’d be stuck. Pressing the gas, I drove on, grieving lost verse, as if finally realizing that the people and places in those words were gone.

✴

WHATEVER IT WAS that made me keep moving was unrelenting. Clear mornings, the sight of distant mountains filled me with such longing that I drove past school, wandered from town to town, or hiked.

By graduation, I was living on a river in a dome tent that I’d dug from my mother’s horse trailer and that my brother, my father, and I had camped in years before, its canvas now a Rorschach of mildew. The riverbank was remote, the land belonging to friends of my mother. I bathed naked and scrubbed at clothes filthy from construction.

My mismatched transcripts had added up, and I’d been accepted to college and even offered funding. Classes began in two months, but going seemed impossible. I didn’t have enough money for the small amount not covered by financial aid, and I was in trouble with the local police, who’d fined me for