On the Bus

by Rod Drake

Climbing onto the Number 7 bus near Columbus in North Beach, I was surprised to see Jack Kerouac riding it, eating a greasy hamburger and humming contentedly to himself, sitting alone in the back, newspapers spread out all over his lap. I said surprised because Jack had been dead for 38 years now, yet he looked as fresh and full of energy as he must have in his prime, back in the early 1950s, when he was the voice of the beat generation. The bus took off with a jerk, and I wobbled my way through the bus, dropping down into a seat next to him. I pulled out a tattered, much-read copy of On the Road and flashed it at him; he spoke not a word, but grinned at me like a madman, and nodded, apparently acknowledging our brotherhood on the road, or on the bus as it where. I had a million questions to ask him, not the least of which was how he could possibly be here, alive, young again, riding the city bus like any regular San Francisco commuter. Just as I started to ask all those burning questions, Jack jumped up, swung down into the bus’s stairwell exit, turned back to wink knowingly at me and then got off at the intersection of Experience Avenue and Eternity Boulevard.

6S - C1

Rod Drake, author of Making a Point, has been a technical writer, a corporate communications writer, a copywriter, a website content writer, a documentation writer, but enjoys being a fiction writer the best. Check out Rod's longer stories in Flashes of Speculation, Fictional Musings, Flash Flooding, Flash Forward and MicroHorror.