The Subterraneans

by Jack Kerouac

  We woke up late, she’d not gone to her psychoanalyst, she’d “wasted” her day and when Adam came home and saw us in the chair again still talking and with the house belittered (coffee cups, crumbs of cakes I’d bought down on tragic Broadway in the gray Italianness which was so much like the lost Indianness of Mardou, tragic America-Frisco with its gray fences, gloomy sidewalks, doorways of dank, I from the small town and more recently from sunny Florida East Coast found so frightening).—“Mardou, you wasted your visit to a therapist, really Leo you should be ashamed and feel a little responsible, after all—” “You mean I’m making her lay off her duties … I used to do it with all my girls … ah it’ll be good for her to miss” (not knowing her need).—Adam almost joking but also most serious, “Mardou you must write a letter or call—why don’t you call him now?”—“It’s a she doctor, up at City & County.”—“Well call now, here’s a dime.”—“But I can do it tomorrow, but it’s too late.”—“How do you know it’s too late—no really, you really goofed today, and you too Leo you’re awfully responsible you rat.” And then a gay supper, two girls coming from outside (gray crazy outside) to join us, one of them fresh from an overland drive from New York with Buddy Pond, the doll an L.A. hip type with short haircut who immediately pitched into the dirty kitchen and cooked everybody a delicious supper of black bean soup (all out of cans) with a few groceries while the other girl, Adam’s, goofed on the phone and Mardou and I sat around guiltily, darkly in the kitchen drinking stale beer and wondering if Adam wasn’t perhaps really right about what should be done, how one should pull oneself together, but our stories told, our love solidified, and something sad come into both our eyes—the evening proceeding with the gay supper, five of us, the girl with the short haircut saying later that I was so beautiful she couldn’t look (which later turned out to be an East Coast saying of hers and Buddy Pond’s), “beautiful” so amazing to me, unbelievable, but must have impressed Mardou, who was anyway during the supper jealous of the girl’s attentions to me and later said so—my position so airy, secure—and we all went driving in her foreign convertible car, through now clearing Frisco streets not gray but opening soft hot reds in the sky between the homes Mardou and I lying back in the open backseat digging them, the soft shades, commenting, holding hands—they up front like gay young international Paris sets driving through town, the short hair girl driving solemnly, Adam pointing out—going to visit some guy on Russian Hill packing for a New York train and France-bound ship where a few beers, small talk, later troopings on foot with Buddy Pond to some literary friend of Adam’s Aylward So-and-So famous for the dialogs in Current Review, possessor of a magnificent library, then around the corner to (as I told Aylward) America’s greatest wit, Charles Bernard, who had gin, and an old gray queer, and others, and sundry suchlike parties, ending late at night as I made my first foolish mistake in my life and love with Mardou, refusing to go home with all the others at 3 A.M., insisting, tho at Charles’ invite, to stay till dawn studying his pornographic (homo male sexual) pictures and listening to Marlene Dietrich records, with Aylward—the others leaving, Mardou tired and too much to drink looking at me meekly and not protesting and seeing how I was, a drunk really, always staying late, freeloading, shouting, foolish—but now loving me so not complaining and on her little bare thonged brown feet padding around the kitchen after me as we mix drinks and even when Bernard claims a pornographic picture has been stolen by her (as she’s in the bathroom and he’s telling me confidentially, “My dear, I saw her slip it into her pocket, her waist I mean her breast pocket”) so that when she comes out of bathroom she senses some of this, the queers around her, the strange drunkard she’s with, she complains not—the first of so many indignities piled on her, not on her capacity for suffering but gratuitously on her little female dignities.—Ah I shouldn’t have done it, goofed, the long list of parties and drinkings and downcrashings and times I ran out on her, the final shocker being when in a cab together she’s insisting I take her home (to sleep) and I can go see Sam alone (in bar) but I jump out of cab, madly (“I never saw anything so maniacal”), and run into another cab and zoom off, leaving her in the night—so when Yuri bangs on her door the following night, and I’m not around, and he’s drunk and insists, and jumps on her as he’d been doing, she gave in, she gave in—she gave up—jumping ahead of my story, naming my enemy at once—the pain, why should “the sweet ram of their lunge in love” which has really nothing to do with me in time or space, be like a dagger in my throat?