Requiem for Neverland: Kerouac as Pan

Neverland you left me, part boy and pirate and crocodile. I come back to you like a squalling child in momma’s kitchen, hiding behind your tassels to ask, “Will I un-age from these memories that you hide in me?”

The boys lost in Neverland jazz band at six pm, Squit on drums, immaculate vibes by Poke. The swarthy mysterious toddler on sax and his brother, though you’d never know it; one a camel trader, piercing eyes and weary tone, the other a boy’s boy, enthusiastic and both knees scraped, blowing his unexamined phrase until it gathers like lazy morning Saturday, dripping into his spit valve. 

They hear Miles Davis in their heads, improvise like pros, they’re all here in my place on Sunday, Yesterday, Everyday. It’s all the same and now the tune they’re playing is All The Things You Are and I know it’s a jab at me, my Peter Pan-ing panacean dignity. I feel their loss in my bones, old man’s bones I stole from the boy I was. And the skeleton of old Hook long dead, hanging next to my Sunday clothes, priestly garb, a sacrament of conflict, this do in remembrance of me.

I pull him out of the closet and we talk. It’s a return to the sea and I know it. Old dead pirate with pearl-earring teeth and gold cufflinks, he whines like a geezer and yes I hear, the stale old whale song in my ear quotes Nietzsche, “…battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster.” I sidle up close to Hook and finish it, “Surely if you gaze into the abyss the abyss gazes into you.” And there it is, standing like a ticking clock, nursing a drink at the bar. Nervously I glance at the abyss. The abyss glances back. Damn me if Hook didn’t smile at that. Or maybe it’s just Smee at the door, knocking. A little fish-eyed bloke Smee, like that small medieval actor from the glory days, fish eyes and reedy voice like a cat’s smoked opium…you know, always thinking he’s the goods when actually it’s Bogart or Gable or Raft who has the game sewn up…LORRE! Peter Lorre, the insinuating German, that’s our Smee, last old fellow who pours drinks and sometimes plays a mournful tune on the concertina. 

On stage Poke takes a solo. I can hear from my room the crowd get tight. A bit of a rough neck Poke, if he doesn’t get it like he wants you might get pegged on the tank with a rum bottle.

Empty by three a.m. like endless shards of the last light year, the bar now lonely in a tree, the only monkey to not evolve. I’m hung over and wet from the rain that comes in over my head, roof open so I can see the stars and upside down English countryside at morning. We dawn at dawn. The sun comes up and down at once and forever for dead Michael, dead John.

If my calendar’s right they marched into German mortars ninety years ago, slogging through trenches with Milne’s Christopher Robin and the Michael from Poppins too. They sat cold in the mud of the Somme and told each other extraordinary stories. “I heard it from a boy,” it went ‘round the nests, “that he might never have grown up and once fought pirates and slept with mermaids.” And maddened unnamable already these boys believed it and charged into fire for my name, for Neverland, forever.