My whole life has been one long waiting to gain entrance.
—ALENE LEE
I never expected to find her in this unlikely place, “sitting on the fender of a car in front of the Black Mask bar on Montgomery Street.” And yet, here she was. Lingering within the first few pages of a sleek black paperback, taking up space, “saying something extremely earnestly,” setting ideas afloat.
This was my first glimpse of Mardou Fox, one of a constellation of urban intellectuals dubbed “the subterraneans”—night dwellers, “‘hip without being slick…intelligent without being corny…they are very quiet, they are very Christlike.’”
I wasn’t sure where I’d wandered, but I locked into its frequency.
At the time, the early 1980s, I was a quiet yet intensely restless English major, working shifts as a bookstore clerk in a fading shopping mall in Los Angeles. One slow weeknight, my hand lingered over a stack of slim paperbacks on our to-be-shelved cart.
The 1981 Black Cat edition of Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans featured a high-contrast black-and-white cover image offset by highlighter-yellow and green type. Beneath the title, bodies crowded together, suggesting a cellar-like setting.
I read on.
“Do you know this girl, the dark one?”
“Mardou?”
“That’s her name?”
The exchange both gave me pause and nudged me forward.
I had gone a round with Kerouac. I knew about the impact of his work. A few years before, I had visited my local library looking for On the Road. One copy remained. The others, the librarian speculated, had likely been filched, a testament to the book’s general scofflaw message.
I snatched it up. I don’t recall where I hit the brakes, but I do remember why. I couldn’t get past the mile-a-minute carnival show that was Dean Moriarty—the exclamations, the tumbling headlong after “chicks” and “kicks.” It wasn’t for me—wasn’t meant for me.
I might have returned it early.
This book, this tone, was casting a different spell.
By the second page, Kerouac reveals that the book’s beguiling central character, Mardou, is “a Negro.” That ignites a flare of ambivalence in the novel’s narrator, Leo Percepied—Kerouac’s thinly veiled fictional persona—who is a self-described “Canuck.” Mardou
