I always start missing Ronny in October. These blues last until his birthday, which I am never quite sure of… I thought it was the 19th of January, but I guess it’s the 11th, according to the obit.

Alone in my studio I talk with Ronny fairly often. As anyone who knew Ronny can attest, it’s a poor substitute for talking with him in person. I wonder how he’d feel about Brian Williams ascendency to anchoring the NBC Nightly News–he always made a point of being near a television when Williams was doing his daily report on MSNBC. I wonder how he’d feel knowing that Jack Shea, film documentarian, recently died in Scotland, apparently falling down a flight of stairs, his body undiscovered for days. Jack had asked Ronny for an interview, more than once.

I know how he’d feel about the country being Bushwacked, and I daresay, if he had lived, something would have happened in Florida to assure a fair election in 2004–not this crap that actually happened.

A lot of people stepped up immediately after Ronny died, as pitiable people do, and tried to make larger their actual relationships with them while he lived. In truth, Ronny had very few friends, but he was a friend to all who sought him out–including me.

What follows is what I wrote in the raw, freshly informed four years ago that my friend had died. I reprint this in hopes of starting a new dialog, I guess. . .

As I sit here looking at this blank screen, my stomach churns, my heart races, my breathing comes shallow. By writing this long-overdue letter, I’m finally admitting my dear friend is dead.

No one in Florida called me, although I know Ronny would have wanted someone to contact me. I heard about it through James Grauerholz, who had read it on the Subterraneans mailing list. The not knowing what was going on with Ron and the length of time he spent dying in a hospital underscore how helpless people are in the face of life and death.

Ronny Lowe (born 1/11/42) died in a hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida, on 27 December 2001. I don’t know if he died in the same hospital where he held his friend Jack down on the table in the emergency room on 20 October 1969. After talking at length with one niece, I don’t have the stomach for the details of his death. I’ve been putting off making the other phone calls I need to make. Since I heard he had died, I’ve been dodging his ghost around my house, feeling stupid about weeping while Jacky and Ronny stand in the corner of my dining room, jawing about writing and baseball and Memere and Stella, arguing over scholarly questions and political issues on my couch, standing at the foot of my bed while they make me dream of them and their corporeality.

http://www.tampabay.com/aboutbooks/previouscolumns.cfm?colid=31919&col=margo

But I have to say something about Ronny; it’s part of the process of acceptance and moving on, after all. I’m just still so pissed about the whole thing, it’s hard. The link above is to an obit written by his good friend, Margo Hammond, book editor of the St. Petersburg Times. Margo gave Ron great encouragement and made it possible for him to have a little dope money by asking him to review books for the newspaper, which he did with great aplomb, in a booming stentorous writer’s voice only a great statesman should possess. Margo’s memorial to Ronny Lowe offers readers a vivid picture of Ron Lowe, Floridian, r&b musician, radical, champion of civil rights, mad bomber of police cars.

Then there was Ron Lowe, the kid who gave Jack Kerouac a ride home from a bar one night in 1964, who became his companion and guardian and confidant, Jack’s “300-pound Syrian buddy,” (SL2, pp. 468-69) who told him the best dirty jokes, set the wilting Kerouac up with young women who followed Ronny and his band around, the Ronny Lowe whose photo was tucked into the inside breast pocket (by a grieving Memere) of the sports jacket in which Jack was finally buried.

I first contacted a suspicious Ron Lowe late in 1997, when I was researching the background of THE CULT OF KEROUAC, my collection of writings about the controversy over Kerouac’s estate and the power of the cult of celebrity to profit and harm a shy writer. It took some doing to get him to talk to me, but he did talk to me, and as in the best moments of life, what began as research turned into a rich friendship and working relationship that enriched my life beyond expression.

In retrospect, Ron’s role in the tableau of Jack’s death seems trivial, although he was the person Jack called when he began vomiting blood on the 20th of October 1969, asking Ron to come get him and take him to the hospital. The ambulance ended up taking Jack, and Ron met him there as quickly as possible. He stood next to Jack in the emergency room as Jack bled to death, sometimes holding him down as the doctor tried to force blood into his body, only to have it come spurting back out. It was Ronny’s role in Jack’s life–and Jack’s role in Ronny’s–that is the best story of all.

Over time I urged Ronny to write his book about Jack, his memoirs, his observations of the dying man, post-fame, contemptibly familiar in his myth. He had known Kerouac in the rarest sense: as a friend, not a cultural icon. And Jack, who always sought beauty, tried to practice kindness, adored gentleness found plain honesty and complete acceptance in his friendship with Ron, in a world where he was either used or villified for who he was and who he had become.

I made phone calls to Sterling Lord and others, hoping to pique interest in Ron’s memoirs, get him an advance so he could worry less about surviving poverty and spend more time writing longhand on yellow legal pads, as was his wont, in that long, beautiful script of his, slowly stringing together his anecdotes which were the best anecdotes I’d ever heard about Kerouac as a friend, Kerouac as a man, Kerouac as a drunk, Kerouac as a had-been–Kerouac in near-complete surrender to time and circumstance, careening toward an ending he had created while claiming his own immortality. As I listened to Ron tell his stories of Jack, everything fell into place. Questions were answered. Things made sense.

Yes, Sterling Lord was very interested. He wanted an outline and some sample chapters so he could sell Ron’s book.

But Ronny had always had some resistance to telling such private stories, not wanting to cash in on his friendship with Jack. He was so adamantly opposed to soiling his friendship with Kerouac that he refused to sell the several autographed items Jack had given him over the years, including an annotated proof of VANITY OF DULUOZ which could have fetched him many thousands of dollars, which Ronny could have put toward medical expenses to prolong his life. Instead, he died from lack of medical care, his jackbooks and letters in a drawer in his tiny little house in St. Petersburg, for his relatives now to sell and argue over.

I can’t believe Jack would have wanted that. Ron told me a story about a night when he and Jack were out on the town, and Jack ripped Ronny’s cocktail napkin out from under his drink, signing it with a flourish, then presenting it back to Ronny as if it were a great gift. Ronny said, “What’s that for?” and Jack told him it was worth money, that everyone wanted his autograph to sell. Ronny lost that particular napkin, but Jack was always doing that–signing things and giving them to Ron so his friend would have something to show for the relationship besides the love they shared.

But Ron Lowe had a rich life, most of which he spent doing things for other people. He spent months of time helping Blacks get elected to positions in the still-racist city of St. Petersburg, running their political campaigns, going door-to-door for candidates. He helped others all the time, giving rides, money, food, support, to anyone who asked for anything. In the meantime, he remained unemployed, living in the guest house behind his late mother’s house, renting the front house for his tiny income, driving broken-down cars and receiving precious little help from the state for medical assistance. Once a week he got together with his band. They still played gigs anytime anyone asked them to.

Maybe he was avoiding doing what he needed to do to give himself a little financial comfort. He lived his life exactly the same way from his salad days until the day he went into the hospital, accountable to no person or ideology aside from his own beliefs and obligations. He just never sat down to write that book–the book that would have comprised the essential puzzle pieces to document the last five years of Kerouac’s life, the book which would have certainly made him some money.

After trying to work with him from a distance and getting nowhere, I flew him up to Seattle in June of 1999 so I could work on his book with him. Ronny seemed to think he was immortal. I was always nagging that he could get hit by a bus tomorrow, for all he knew. I bought this voice-recognition software and “trained” it with his voice. Then, for almost three weeks, I taped Ron at my dining room table, allowing him to talk for hours and hours, to tell the whole story of his own life and his friendship with Jack. My idea was that I’d play those tapes over a microphone into my computer, which would recognize Ronny’s voice, and his words would be transcribed. Unfortunately, those voice recognition programs are not worth the powder it would take to blow them up and the tapes remain untranscribed today.

His health was always a concern for me and I didn’t understand why a man in his 50s, obviously disabled by creeping heart disease, couldn’t get the help he needed in his hometown. Ronny had this horrible, something-new-every-day, state of health. I tried to get help for him here in Seattle, where I took him to see a doctor and helped him fill out welfare forms so he could be properly diagnosed and treated. But he didn’t follow through–the story of his life–and his blocked arteries and weakening heart continued to deteriorate after he returned to Florida.

The last time I talked to him was 10/21/01, or very near to that date–the anniversary of Jack’s death. We always talked on that date. He had the usual complaints and stories, but I had no idea his health was declining or would decline so quickly, even though I knew he wasn’t remotely immortal.

The day Ronny died, I got a call from a sister telling me my father was in the hospital, not expected to live through the night. I didn’t know Ronny was also in the hospital then. My father recovered. Ronny died. A few days later, still not knowing, I had a flash of Ronny doing his imitation of Jack imitating Whitman: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large; I contain multitudes!”

The day before I learned he was dead, as I was crossing a bridge here in Seattle, again I thought of Ronny and his book, resolving to phone him up and bug him about finishing it again.

The term Margo Hammond was searching for in her obit of Ron, “Kerouwacko,” was coined by a ranger at the National Park in Lowell, who used it to describe the various pilgrims who flocked to Lowell looking for something to help them feel connected to Jack. I referred to myself (tongue in cheek) as a Kerouwacko when I first phoned Ronny up in 1997, looking for an interview. But what evolved between Ronny and me had little to do with Jack, except that our mutual interest brought us together.

Still, I have to admit that one of the greatest moments I spent with Ron was when he was laughing at something I’d said, then said, “Jack would have liked you.”

I wish I could have worried less about food and shelter so I could have devoted more of my time to helping Ron write his book.

He and I were lovers-in-waiting for a while via mail and phone–Ronny never missed an opportunity with a woman, near as I could tell–and physically when he visited me. That could not last, for a million different reasons. I was worried later that without that dimension of our relationship, he might turn into an ex-something. But we stayed in touch and I expressed my fears and he said to me what Jack said to him, that quote he loved so much: “You and I, we’re friends for life.” I can hear his voice and see his face as he says it over again in my mind. It has been getting me through my guilt and regret over not being there.

I don’t know exactly what, but I am going to do something with his book. He did consider me his agent and often jested that if he died before he wrote it, it was all mine. I don’t want it for “all mine,” but it’s such an important story and Ronny’s role in Kerouac’s life was so special, his book must be written somehow. I’ve resisted phoning his brother to advise him about the value of Ron’s Kerouac items, not wanting to be a Necrosiaphiliac, making grand claims once people are dead. Life is dust, Jack is dust, Ronny will soon be dust. Those gifts from Jack to Ron are worthless ephemera compared to the fact that once, Jack and Ronny existed on this earth.

I have a story of Ronny’s that sets the tone for my own process of acceptance. In 1966 (I think), Jack went to Italy, and among the things he brought home was a rosary for his mother. Ron was visiting him one day when Jack gave him the rosary, along with $10, and asked him to see a certain priest at a certain church and have it blessed for him. Ron stuck the rosary and the $10 in his glove compartment and forgot all about them.

Some months later, Ronny and one of his friends were driving around, broke as usual, and the friend opened up Ron’s glovebox to find the $10 bill inside. He suggested they should spend it and return the rosary to Jack and tell him the priest had blessed it. Jack, after all, would not know the difference, would he? Ron refused and went immediately to the church where he had the rosary blessed and made Jack’s $10 donation, and returned the holy relic to Kerouac.

Although there was never any question in Ronny’s mind that he would keep his promise to his friend, he was especially glad he kept this one. When Jack died, this was the rosary Memere wove through Jack’s dead fingers in his coffin, at the same time as she tucked that little photo of Ronny Lowe into Jack’s breast pocket, just before his coffin was closed.

I write this hoping to find peace, or the beginning of peace, and acceptance at the death of this great guy.

diane de rooij

Poetry is lamb dust….

—Jack Kerouac