Confidence

The ghost of Jack Kerouac came by my hotel room. I was in the midst of trying to watch a TV show called True Blood on HBO. I like vampires. When I was a kid I read Dracula by Bram Stoker. There was over 700 pages in Dracula and it wasn’t required reading, so I was verrry interested.

Kerouac said, “I once met a vampire in real life.”

I was thinking he was telling me a poem he wrote. The good poets are esoteric and their first lines are hooks. He had me.

I said, “Tell more more.”

Kerouac said, “I just finished a show at the Dirigible. It’s a bar on 7th Ave. in New York. It must have been about three am. I went down an alley way to take a leak. Someone approached me from the other end of the alley. I nodded and he nodded back and that’s when I saw his face. His skin was moon white. His eyes were sunk deep in his head. There was a little blood on the corner of his mouth. I was thinking he’d just been in a fight. He asked me if I want to live forever. The thing is I didn’t. I had a constant headache that was killing me. So I said no…”

I said, “How did you figure he was a vampire?”

Kerouac said, “I didn’t know for certain. But I thought it. That’s enough.”

I think when you’re famous and popular and everyone wants to hear what you have to say you have an impenetrable confidence. Plus it helped that he was dead.