Big Sur

by Jack Kerouac

  ME:- “The angels Devas monsters Asuras Devadattas Vedantas McLaughlins Stones will hue and hurl in hell if they dont love the lamb the lamb the lamb of hell lamb-chop—”

  ARTHUR:- “Why did Scott Fitzgerald keep a notebook?”

  ME:- “Such a marvelous notebook—”

  ARTHUR:- “Komi denera ness pata sutyamp anda wanda vesnoki shadakiroo paryoumemga sikarem nora sarkadium baron roy kellegiam myorki ayastuna haidanseetzel ampho andiam yerka yama chelmsford alya bonneavance koroom cemanda versel—”

  ME:- “The 26th Annual concert of the Armenian Convention?”

  21

  INCIDENTALLY I FORGOT TO MENTION THAT DURING THE THREE WEEKS ALONE the stars had not come out at all, not even for one minute on any night, it was the foggy season, except the very last night when I was getting ready to leave—Now the stars were out every night, the sun shone considerably longer but a sinister wind accompanied the Autumn in Big Sur: it seemed like the whole Pacific Ocean was blowing with all its might right into Raton Canyon and also over the high gap from another end causing all the trees to shudder as the big groaning howl came newsing and noising from downcanyon, when it hit there was raised a roar of noise I didnt like—It seemed ill omened to me somewhere—It was much better to have fog and silence and quiet trees—Now the whole canyon by one blast could be led screaming and waving in all directions in such a confused mass that even the fellows with me were a little surprised to see it—It was too big a wind for such a little canyon.

  This development also prevented the constant hearing of the reassuring creek.

  One good thing was that when jet planes broke the sound barrier overhead the wind dispersed the clap of empty thunder they caused, because during the foggy season the noise would come down into the canyon, concentrate there, and rock the house like an explosion making me think the first time (alone) that somebody’d set off a blast of dynamite nearby.

  While I woke up groaning and sick there was plenty of wine right there to start me off with the hounds of hair, so okay, but Monsanto had retired early and typically sensibly to sleep by the creek and now he was awake singing swooshing his whole head into the creek and going Brrrrr and rubbing his hands for a new day—Dave Wain made breakfast with his usual lecture “Now the real way to fry eggs is to put a cover over them so that they can have that neat basted white look on the yellows, soon’s I get this pancake batter ready we’ll start on them”—My list of groceries was so all inclusive in the beginning it was now feeding guerilla troops.

  A big axe chopping contest began after breakfast, some of us sitting watching on the porch and the performers down below hacking away at the tree trunk which was over a foot thick—They were chopping off two foot chunks, no easy job—I realized you can always study the character of a man by the way he chops wood—Monsanto an old lumberman up in Maine as I say now showed us how he conducted his whole life in fact by the way he took neat little short handled chops from both left and right angles getting his work done in reasonably short time without too much sweat—But his strokes were rapid—Whereas old Fagan pipe-in-mouth slogged away I guess the way he learned in Oregon and in the Northwest fire schools, also getting his job done, silently, not a word—But Cody’s fantastic fiery character showed in the way he went at the log with horrible force, when he brought down the axe with all his might and holding it far at the end you could hear the whole tree-trunk groaning the whole length inside, runk, sometimes you could hear a lengthwise cracking going on, he is really very strong and he brought that axe down so hard his feet left the earth when it hit—He chopped off his log with the fury of a Greek god—Nevertheless it took him longer and much more sweat than Monsanto—“Used to do this in a workgang in southern Arizony” he said, whopping one down that made the whole treetrunk dance off the ground—But it was like an example of vast but senseless strength, a picture of poor Cody’s life and in a sense my own—I too chopped with all my might and got madder and went faster and raked the log but took more time than Monsanto who watched us smiling—Little Arthur thereupon tried his luck but gave up after five strokes—The axe was like to carry him away anyway—Then Dave Wain demonstrated with big easy strokes and in no time we had five huge logs to use—But now it was time to get in the cars (McLear had rearrived) and go driving south down the coast highway to a hot springs bath house down there, which sounded good to me at first.

  But the new Big Sun Autumn was now all winey sparkling blue which made the terribleness and giantness of the coast all the more clear to see in all its gruesome splendor, miles and miles of it snaking away south, our three jeeps twisting and turning the increasing curves, sheer drops at our sides, further ghostly high bridges to cross with smashings below—Tho all the boys are wowing to see it—To me it’s just an inhospitable madhouse of the earth, I’ve seen it enough and even swallowed it in that deep breath—The boys reassure me the hot springs bath will do me good (they see I’m gloomy now hungover for good) but when we arrive my heart sinks again as McLear points out to sea from the balcony of the outdoor pools: “Look out there floating in the sea weeds, a dead otter!”—And sure enough it is a dead otter I guess, a big brown pale lump floating up and down mournfully with the swells and ghastly weeds, my otter, my dear otter I’d written poems about—“Why did he die?” I ask myself in despair—“Why do they do that?”—“What’s the sense of all this?”—All the fellows are shading their eyes to get a better look at the big peaceful tortured hunk of seacow out there as tho it’s something of passing interest while to me it’s a blow across the eyes and down into my heart—The hot water pools are steaming, Fagan and Monsanto and the others are all sitting peacefully up to their necks, they’re all naked, but there’s a gang of fairies also there naked all standing around in various bath house postures that make me hesitate to take my clothes off just on general principles—In fact Cody doesnt even bother to do anything but lie down with his clothes on in the sun, on the balcony table, and just smoke—But I borrow McLear’s yellow bathingsuit and get in—“What ya wearing a bathingsuit in a hot springs pool for boy?” says Fagan chuckling—With horror I realize there’s spermatazoa floating in the hot water—I look and I see the other men (the fairies) all taking good long looks at Ron Baker who stands there facing the sea with his arse for all to behold, not to mention McLear and Dave Wain too—But it’s very typical of me and Cody that we wont undress in this situation (we were both raised Catholics?)—Supposedly the big sex heroes of our generation, in fact—You might think—But the combination of the strange silent watching fairy-men, and the dead otter out there, and the spermatazoa in the pools makes me sick, not to mention that when somebody informs me this bath house is owned by the young writer Kevin Cudahy whom I knew very well in New York and I ask one of the younger strangers where’s Kevin Cudahy he doesnt even deign to reply—Thinking he hasnt heard me I ask again, no reply, no notice, I ask a third time, this time he gets up and stalks out angrily to the locker rooms—It all adds up to the confusion that’s beginning to pile up in my battered drinking brain anyway, the constant reminders of death not the least of which was the death of my peaceful love of Raton Canyon now suddenly becoming a horror.

  From the baths we go to Nepenthe which is a beautiful cliff top restaurant with vast outdoor patio, with excellent food, excellent waiters and management, good drinks, chess tables, chairs and tables to just sit in the sun and look at the grand coast—Here we all sit at various tables and Cody starts playing chess with everybody will join while he’s chomping away at those marvelous hamburgers called Heavenburgers (huge with all the side works)—Cody doesnt like to just sit around and lightly chat away, he’s the kind of guy if he’s going to talk he has to do all the talking himself for hours till everything is exhaustedly explained, sans that he just wants to bend over a chessboard and say “He he heh, old Scrooge is saving up a pawn hey? cak! I got ya!”—But while I’m sitting there discussing literature with McLear and Monsanto sudden
ly a strange couple of gentlemen nearby strike up an acquaintance—One of them is a youngster who says he is a lieutenant in the Army—I instantly (drunk on fifth Manhattan by now) go into my theory of guerilla warfare based on my observations the night before when it did seriously occur to me that if Monsanto, Arthur, Cody, Dave, Ben, Ron Blake and I were all members of one fighting unit (and all carrying canteens of booze on our belts) it would be very difficult for the enemy to hurt any of us because we’d be, as dear friends, watching so desperately closely over one another, which I tell the first lieutenant, which attracts the interest of the older man who admits that he’s a GENERAL in the Army—There are also some further homosexuals at a separate table which prompts Dave Wain to look up from the chess game at one quiet drowsy point and announce in his dry twang “Under redwood beams, people talking about homosexuality and war . . . call it my Nepenthe Haiku”—“Yass” says Cody checkmating him “see what you can ku about that m’boy and get out of there and I’ll noose you with my queen, dear.”

  I mention the general only because there are also something sinister about the fact that during this long binge I came across him and another general, two strange generals, and I’d never met any generals in my life—This first general was strange because he seemed too polite and yet there was something sinister about his steely eyes behind goof darkglasses—Something sinister too about the first lieutenant who guessed who we were (the San Francisco poets, a major nucleus of them indeed) and didn’t seem at all pleased tho the general seemed amused—Nevertheless in a sinister way the general seemed to take great interest in my theory about buddy units for guerilla warfare and when President Kennedy about a year later ordered just such a new scheme for part of our armed forces I wondered (still crazy even then but for new reasons) if the general had got an idea from me—The second general, even stranger, coming up, occurred when I was even more far gone.

  Manhattans and more Manhattans and finally when we got back to the cabin in late afternoon I was feeling good but realized I was going to be finished tomorrow—But poor young Ron Blake asked me if he could stay with me in the cabin, the others were all going back to the city in the three cars, I couldnt think of any way to reject his request in a harmless way so said yes—So when they all left suddenly I was alone with this mad beatnik kid singing me songs and all I wanta do is sleep—But I’ve got to make the best of it and not disappoint his believing heart.

  Because after all the poor kid actually believes that there’s something noble and idealistic and kind about all this beat stuff, and I’m supposed to be the King of the Beatniks according to the newspapers, so but at the same time I’m sick and tired of all the endless enthusiasms of new young kids trying to know me and pour out all their lives into me so that I’ll jump up and down and say yes yes that’s right, which I cant do any more—My reason for coming to Big Sur for the summer being precisely to get away from that sort of thing—Like those pathetic five highschool kids who all came to my door in Long Island one night wearing jackets that said “Dharma Bums” on them, all expecting me to be 25 years old according to a mistake on a book jacket and here I am old enough to be their father—But no, hep swinging young jazzy Ron wants to dig everything, go to the beach, run and romp and sing, talk, write tunes, write stories, climb mountains, go hiking, see everything, do everything with everybody—But having one last quart of port with me I agree to follow him to the beach.

  We go down the old sad path of the bhikku and suddenly I see a dead mouse in the grass—“A wee dead mousie” I say cleverly poetically but suddenly I realize and remember now for the first time how I’ve left the cover off the rat poison in Monsanto’s shelf and so this is my mouse—It’s lying there dead—Like the otter in the sea—It’s my own personal mouse that I’ve carefully fed chocolate and cheese all summer but once again I’ve unconsciously sabotaged all these great plans of mine to be kind to living beings even bugs, once again I’ve murdered a mouse one way or the other—And on top of that when we come to the place where the garter snake usually lies sunning itself, and I bring it to Ron’s attention, he suddenly yells “LOOKOUT! you never can tell what kind of snake it is!” which really scares me, my heart pounds with horror—My little friend the garter snake turns therefore with my head from a living being with a long green body into the evil serpent of Big Sur.

  On top of that, at the surf, where long streamers of hollow sea weed always lie around drying in the sun some of them huge, like living bodies with skin, pieces of living material that always made me sad somehow, here’s the young hepcat lifting them up and dancing a dervish around the beach with them, turning my Sur into something seachange—Something brainchange.

  All that night by lamplight we sing and yell songs which is okay but in the morning the bottle is gone and I wake up with the “final horrors” again, precisely the way I woke up in the Frisco skidrow room before escaping down here, it’s all caught up with me again, I can hear myself again whining “Why does God torture me?”—But anybody who’s never had delirium tremens even in their early stages may not understand that it’s not so much a physical pain but a mental anguish indescribable to those ignorant people who dont drink and accuse drinkers of irresponsibility—The mental anguish is so intense that you feel you have betrayed your very birth, the efforts nay the birth pangs of your mother when she bore you and delivered you to the world, you’ve betrayed every effort your father ever made to feed you and raise you and make you strong and my God even educate you for “life,” you feel a guilt so deep you identify yourself with the devil and God seems far away abandoning you to your sick silliness—You feel sick in the greatest sense of the word, breathing without believing in it, sicksicksick, your soul groans, you look at your helpless hands as tho they were on fire and you cant move to help, you look at the world with dead eyes, there’s on your face an expression of incalculable repining like a constipated angel on a cloud—In fact it’s actually a cancerous look you throw on the world, through browngray wool fuds over your eyes—Your tongue is white and disgusting, your teeth are stained, your hair seems to have dried out overnight, there are huge mucks in the corners of your eyes, greases on your nose, froth at the sides of your mouth: in short that very disgusting and wellknown hideousness everybody knows who’s walked past a city street drunk in the Boweries of the world—But there’s no joy at all, people say “Oh well he’s drunk and happy let him sleep it off”—The poor drunkard is crying—He’s crying for his mother and father and great brother and great friend, he’s crying for help—He tries to pull himself together by moving one shoe nearer to his foot and he cant even do that properly, he’ll drop the shoe, or knock something over, he’ll do something invariably that’ll start him crying again—He’ll want to bury his face in his hands and moan for mercy and he knows there is none—Not only because he doesnt deserve it but there’s no such thing anyway—Because he looks up at the blue sky and there’s nothing there but empty space making a big face at him—He looks at the world, it’s sticking its tongue out at him and once that mask is removed it’s looking at him with hollow big red eyes like his own eyes—He may see the earth move but there’s no significance of any particular kind to attach to that—One little unexpected noise behind him will make him snarl in rage—He’ll pull and tug at his poor stained shirt—He feels like rubbing his face into something that isnt.

  His socks are thick tired moisty slimes—The beard on his cheeks itches the running sweats and annoys the tortured mouth—There’s a twisted feeling of no-more, never-again, agh—What was beautiful and clean yesterday has irrationally and unaccountably changed into a big dreary crock of shit—The hairs on his fingers stare at him like tomb hairs—The shirt and trousers have become glued to his person as tho he was to be drunk forever—The ache of remorse sinks in as tho somebody was pushing it in from above—The pretty white clouds in the sky hurt his eyes only—The only thing to do is turn over and lie face down and weep—The mouth is so blasted there’s not
even a chance to gnash the teeth—There’s not even strength to tear the hair.

  And here comes Ron Blake starting off his new day singing at the top of his voice—I go down by the creek and throw myself in the sand and lie looking with sad eyes at the water which no longer friends me but sorta wants me to go away—There isnt a drop to drink left in the cabin, all the goddamn jeeps are gone with all its healthy cargo of people and I’m alone with an enthusiastic kid on a lark—The little bugs I’d saved from drowning just because I was bemused and alone and glad, now drown unnoticed within my reach anyway—The spider is still minding his own business in the outhouse—Alf lows mournfully in the valley far away to express just the way I feel—The bluejays yak around me as tho because I’m too tired and helpless to feed them any more they’re figuring on trying me if they can, “They’re friggin vultures anyway” I moan with my mouth in the sand—The once pleasant thumpthump gurgle slap of the creek is now an endless jabbering of blind nature which doesnt understand anything in the first place—My old thoughts about the slit of a billion years covering all this and all cities and generations eventually is just a dumb old thought, “Only a silly sober fool could think it, imagine gloating over such nonsense” (because in one sense the drinker learns wisdom, in the words of Goethe or Blake or whichever it was “The pathway to wisdom lies through excess”)—But in this condition you can only say “Wisdom is just another way to make people sick”—“I’m SICK” I yell emphatically to the trees, to the woods around, to the hills above, looking around desperately, nobody cares—I can even hear Ron singing at his lunch inside.

  What’s even more horrible he tries to show compunction and wants to help me, “Anything I can do”—Later he goes for a lone walk so I go in the cabin and lie on the cot and spend about two hours groaning out a lament: “O mon Dieux, pourquoi Tu m’laisse faire malade comme ça—Papa Papa aide mué—Aw j’ai mal au coeur—J’envie d’aller à toilette ‘pi ça m’interesse pas—Aw ‘shu malade—Owaowaowao—” (I go into a long “awaowaowoa” that I guess lasted a whole minute)—I toss over and find new reasons to groan—I think I’m alone and I’m letting it all go a whole lot like I’d heard my father do when he was dying of cancer in the night in the bed next to mine—When I do manage to stagger up and go lean on the door I realize with double upon double horror that Ron Blake has been sitting there all this time listening to everything over a book—(I wonder now what he told people about this later, it must have sounded horrible)—(Idiotic too, cretinous even, maybe only French Canadian who knows?)—“Ron I’m sorry you had to hear all that, I’m sick”—“I know, man, it’s okay, lie down and try to sleep”—“I cant sleep!” I yell in a rage—I feel like yelling “Fuck yourself you little idiot what do you know what Im going through!” but then I realize how oldman disgusting and hopeless all that is, and here he is enjoying his big weekend with the big writer he was supposed to tell all his friends what a great swinging ball it was and what I did and said—But methinks and mayhap he took away a lesson in temperance, or a lesson in beatness really—Because the only time I’ve ever been sicker and madder was a week later when Dave and I came back with the two girls leading to the final horrible night.