Jack Kerouac's underwear

I have never owned an autographed baseball or a basketball jersey with some guy's name on the back. I have hundreds of books, but none of them are signed.

I'm not a fanboy. I like boxing, but when I met Muhammad Ali in a hotel lobby, I didn't ask for his autograph.

For about 50 years, I've loved the writing of Jack Kerouac.

Who is Jack Kerouac?

Just say “On the Road,” and people will know.

Kerouac, a French-Canadian American from Lowell, Massachusetts, drank himself to death when he was middle-aged and I was a kid. They called him “The Father of the Beats,” although he said he had nothing to do with beatniks.

His chaotic, soaring, beautiful writing was energetic, scrambled and self-indulgent, and he had a transparent love of America that has always touched me.

I read him first as a teen, when you're supposed to read about hitchhiking and sex without commitment and cheap wine, but I had the good sense or the good luck to read his other books, particularly the ones about his growing up in Lowell in the 1920s and 1930s.

And I still read him. I have a lot of his books, and some biographies, and on the anniversary of the day he died, I creep into a nearby Catholic church, and I put flowers at the feet of Ste. Anne's statue.

OK. So, I'm a sentimental dope, which goes with writing a newspaper column like Champagne goes with the $5 Taco Bell Classic Luxe Cravings Box.

And it gets worse.

The other night, chilling on the couch while my wife, Deborah, watched a murder mystery on television, I was cruising eBay for Kerouac books I don't have and there was a guy selling a three-by-three-inch square of one of Kerouac's white T-shirts, one he'd worn in his last years, when he was finishing the job of dying from whiskey.

The scrap of T-shirt was $40, and $6.20 for shipping. It came with all kinds of papers detailing the item's “provenance.” Provenance is a French word meaning, “It's legit.”

I bought it as fast as I'd buy one of those big cans of $1 iced tea in a corner store.

It showed up four days later, and I held it in my hand and showed it to Deborah.

“He wore that,” I said.

“You don't want to get the oils from your skin on that,” she said. “Put it in a baggie.”

I did, and it's on my coffee table across from an ashtray next to a tobacco pouch and directly on top of the provenance stuff, which is on top of a box of eight bright pink Peeps, those chick-shaped all-sugar marshmallow candies people eat at Easter. It's some kind of shrine, maybe.

And I'm happy. I sometimes touch the T-shirt through the baggie, and I'm going to get some kind of frame, and I finally understand people who stand in line to get Taylor Swift's autograph.

I didn't buy the Donald Trump golden sneakers. I bought a piece of Jack Kerouac's final underwear.

The country might be changing, but I'll be me until my final underwear.

I like that about me.

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