JACK ON JACK

JACK ON JACK ACTION

(Jack Kerouac and Jack Straw)

ACT ONE

SCENE ONE

Lights up on JACK STRAW approaching a front door holding a clipboard.  He knocks.  KEROUAC answers.

KEROUAC    Here I am writing on a Spanish typewriter when the door goes knocking.  Can’t make up my mind.  Answer or no - I’m yelling with joy and madness.

STRAW          (Holding out his hand) Mr Kerouac?  My name is Jack Straw.

KEROUAC    (Ignoring the hand) Jack Straw from the Peasants Revolt?  Did Allen send you?

STRAW          No, no.  Jack Straw the Leader of the House of Commons.  Allen didn’t send me.  I work for the government and I wanted to approach you for your support.

KEROUAC    Is this a message of compassion from the centre of the universe of Essential Mind?

STRAW          Yes.  Yes it is.  Please, take this New Labour badge.  I want your celebrity endorsement to stand for party leader.  The cameras are late.

KEROUAC    (Doesn’t take the badge) I’ll write a haiku about this.  Burn it with matches.  A mighty and beautiful thing.

STRAW          Thank you.  Is that a yes?

KEROUAC    I’m dead you know.

STRAW          A party donation can smooth anything over right now.

KEROUAC    Your party.  Is it an unworldly state where my father and hope are hellish currency?

   

STRAW          You put it very well.  Things have been better and can be again.  I’m in a soft job right now and I want power, Jack, you can help me get it.  I want more than Blackburn.  We’re not so different, you and I.  I was there in the 60’s when it all went down in Chile.

KEROUAC    My good friend Huncke says we’re all ‘yipping’ in a pre-ordained world.  He’s dying from infection in a jail hospital.

STRAW          We can use that.

KEROUAC    Say that in church in Manhattan.  I’ve become a Bleak Prophet in our own poor faces.  Huncke wouldn’t like you.  He’d get you drunk and rob you.  Why should I help?

STRAW          I was sacked because of American pressure.  American pressure can get me back.  Come to England with me we can get you on some day time TV.  Have you a book to promote?  Richard and Judy would love to have you.  They like books.

KEROUAC    I don’t fell well if I leave America.  Got dysentery in Mexico City trying to rewrite On The Road and Doctor Sax into one subterranean book.  In Tangiers with Bill - had to come straight back to the tremendous and awful walls.  Tell Richard and Judy I can meet them in Denver in the fall.  You got a match?

STRAW          Would you do a TV spot?  I think that’s what you call them here.  Get you on tape saying something.

KEROUAC    You’d have to drive me there in a death car, long, black, sleek, Cadillac coffin.

STRAW          Anything you need.

KEROUAC    No.  I’m not doing it.  Buddha saith ‘it is body which moves and changes not mind’.  (Closing the door)

STRAW          The cameras are late.  Don’t go in yet.  Let me at least get a photograph.

KEROUAC    You need to be more realistic.  You’re in the wrong country.  Barking up the wrong Bleak Prophet.  Get off this pockmarked stoop.  Must write on my Spanish typewriter.  Find a match.  Write to Allen about you.  I can smell your awful perfection of doubt.

                        Door closes as a lone photographer’s flash catches STRAW alone.