by Jack Kerouac
“Like a big ideal memory for both of us, cant you give me just that?”—“I would if I could” I’m muttering around like a fussy old nut inside the cabin looking for a match—I cant even light my cigarette, something sinister blows it out, when it’s lit it mortifies my hot mouth anyway like a mouthful of death—I grab up another batch of bags and blankets and start piling myself up on the other side of the porch saying to Billie who’s sighing now realizing it’s hopeless “First I’ll try to take a nap by myself here then when I wake up I’ll feel better and come over to you”—So I try that, turning over rigidly my eyes wide open staring full fright into the dark like the time in the movie Humphrey Bogart who’s just killed his partner trying to sleep by the fire and you see his eyes staring into the fire rigid and insane—That’s just the way I’m staring—If I try to close my eyes some elastic pulls them open again—If I try to turn over the whole universe turns over with me but it’s no better on the other side of the universe—I realize I may never come out of this and my mother is waiting for me at home praying for me because she must know what’s happening tonight, I cry out to her to pray and help me—I remember my cat for the first time in three hours and let out a yell that scares Billie—“All right Jack?”—“Give me a little time”—But now she’s started to sleep, poor girl is exhausted, I realize she’s going to abandon me to my fate anyway and I cant help thinking she and Dave and Romana are all secretly awake waiting for me to die—“For what reason?” I’m thinking “this secret poisoning society, I know, it’s because I’m a Catholic, it’s a big anti-Catholic scheme, it’s Communists destroying everybody, systematic individuals are poisoned till finally they’ll have everybody, this madness changes you completely and in the morning you no longer have the same mind—the drug is invented by Airapatianz, it’s the brainwash drug, I always thought that Romana was a Communist being a Rumanian, and as for Billie that gang of hers is strange, and Cody dont care, and Dave’s all evil just like I always figured maybe” but soon my thoughts arent even as “rational” as that any more but become hours of raving—There are forces whispering in my ear in rapid long speeches advising and warning, suddenly other voices are shouting, the trouble is all the voices are longwinded and talking very fast like Cody at his fastest and like the creek so that I have to keep up with the meaning tho I wanta bat it out of my ears—I keep waving at my ears—I’m afraid to close my eyes for all the turmoiled universes I see tilting and expanding suddenly exploding suddenly clawing in to my center, faces, yelling mouths, long haired yellers, sudden evil confidences, sudden rat-tat-tats of cerebral committees arguing about “Jack” and talking about him as if he wasnt there—Aimless moments when I’m waiting for more voices and suddenly the wind explodes huge groans in the million treetop leaves that sound like the moon gone mad—And the moon rising higher, brighter, shining down in my eyes now like a streetlamp—The huddled shadowy sleeping figures over there so coy—So human and safe, I’m crying “I’m not human any more and I’ll never be safe any more, Oh what I wouldnt give to be home on Sunday afternoon yawning because I’m bored, Oh for that again, it’ll never come back again—Ma was right, it was all bound to drive me mad, now it’s done—What’ll I say to her?—She’ll be terrified and go mad herself—Oh ti Tykey, aide mué—me who’s just eaten fish have no right to ask for brother Tyke again—”—An argot of sudden screamed reports rattles through my head in a language I never heard but understand immediately—For a moment I see blue Heaven and the Virgin’s white veil but suddenly a great evil blur like an ink spot spreads over it, “The devil!—the devil’s come after me tonight! tonight is the night! that’s what!”—But angels are laughing and having a big barn dance in the rocks of the sea, nobody cares any more—Suddenly as clear as anything I ever saw in my life, I see the Cross.
37
I SEE THE CROSS, it’s silent, it stays a long time, my heart goes out to it, my whole body fades away to it, I hold out my arms to be taken away to it, by God I am being taken away my body starts dying and swooning out to the Cross standing in a luminous area of the darkness, I start to scream because I know I’m dying but I dont want to scare Billie or anybody with my death scream so I swallow the scream and just let myself go into death and the Cross: as soon as that happens I slowly sink back to life—Therefore the devils are back, commissioners are sending out orders in my ear to think anew, babbling secrets are hissed, suddenly I see the Cross again, this time smaller and far away but just as clear and I say through all the noise of the voices “I’m with you, Jesus, for always, thank you”—I lie there in cold sweat wondering what’s come over me for years my Buddhist studies and pipesmoking assured meditations on emptiness and all of a sudden the Cross is manifested to me—My eyes fill with tears—“We’ll all be saved—I wont even tell Dave Wain about it, I wont go wake him up down there and scare him, he’ll know soon enough—now I can sleep.”
I turn over but it’s only begun—It’s only one o’clock in the morning and the night wears on to the wheeling moon worse and worse till dawn by which time I’ve seen the Cross again and again but there’s a battle somewhere and the devils keep coming back—I know if I could only sleep for an hour the whole complex of noisy brains would settle down, some control would come back somewhere inside there, some blessing would soothe the whole issue—But the bat comes silently flapping around me again, I see him clearly in the moonlight now his little head of darkness and wings that zigzag maddeningly so you cant even get a look at them—Suddenly I hear a hum, a definite flying saucer is hovering right over those trees where the hum must be, there are orders in there, “They’re coming to get me O my God!”—I jump up and glare at the tree, I’m going to defend myself—The bat flaps in front of my face—“The bat is their representative in the canyon, his radar message they got, why dont they leave? doesnt Dave hear that awful hum?”—Billie is dead asleep but little Elliott suddenly thumps his foot, once—I realize he’s not even asleep and knows everything that’s going on—I lie down again and peek at him across the porch floor: I suddenly realizing he’s staring at the moon and there he goes again, thumping his foot: he’s sending messages—He’s a warlock disguised as a little boy, he’s also destroying Billie!—I get up to look at him feeling guilty too realizing this is all nonsense probably but he is not properly covered, his little bare arms are outside the blankets in the cold night, he hasnt even got a nightshirt, I curse at Billie—I cover him up and he whimpers—I go back and lie down with mad eyes looking deep inside me, suddenly a bliss comes over me as the sleep mechanism takes sinking hold—And there I am dreaming me and two kids are hired to work in the mountains on the same “ridge” as Desolation Peak (i.e. Mien Mo Mountain again) and start with a cliffside river crew who tell us two workers have apparently sunk in the cliffside snow and we must lean over sheer drops and see if we can “dump them out” or haul them in—All we do is lie there on crumbly snow a thousand foot fall to the river crumbling the snow off in slabs so big you wouldnt know if men were trapped in em or not—Not only that the bosses have special shoes on sliders that are holding them to the safe shore (like ski clamps) so I begin to realize they’re only fooling us poor kids and we could have fallen too (I almost do)—(did)—(almost)—As observer of the story I see it’s just an annual ritualistic joke to fool the new kids on the job who are then dispatched to the other side of the river to slump off more snow from sheer banks in hopes of finding the lost workmen—So we start there on a big trip, downriver first, but en route all the peasants tell us stories of the God Monster Machine on the other shore who makes sounds like certain birds and owls and has a million infernal contraptions enough to make you sick with all the slipshod windmill rickety details, as “Observer of the story” again I see it’s just a trick to make us scared when we get there at night and hear actual natural sounds of birds, owls, etc. thinking as green rookies in the country it’s that “Monster”—Meanwhile we sign on to go to the main mountain but I promise myself if I dont like the w
ork there I’ll come back get my old job on Desolation—Already our employers have shown a murderous sense of humor—I arrive at Mien Mo Mountain which is like Raton Canyon again but has a large tho dry rot river running in the wide hole and down there on many rocks are huge brooding vultures—Old bums row out to them and pull them clumsily off the rocks and start feeding them like pets, bites of red meat or red mite, tho at first I thought the eccentric old town bums wanted them to eat or to sell (still maybe so) because before I study this I look and see hundreds of slowly fornicating vulture couples on the town dump—These are now humanly formed vultures with human shaped arms, legs, heads, torsos, but they have rainbow colored feathers, and the men are all quietly sitting behind Vulture Women slowly somehow fornicating at them in all the same slow obscene movement—Both man and woman sit facing the same direction and somehow there’s contact because you can see all their feathery rainbow behinds slowly dully monotonously fornicating on the dumpslopes—As I pass I even see the expression on the face of a youngish blond vulture man eternally displeased because his Vulture Mistress is an old Yakker who’s been arguing with him all the time—His face is completely human but inhumanly pasty like uncooked pale pie dough with dull seamed buggy horror that he’s doomed to all this enough to make me shudder in sympathy, I even see her awful expression of middleaged pie dough tormentism—They’re so human!—But suddenly me and the two kid workers are taken to the Vulture People respectable quarter of town to our apartment where a Vulture Woman and her daughter show us our rooms—Their faces are leprous thick with softy yeast but pamted with makeup to make them like thick Christmas dolls and dull and fuzzy but human expressions, like with thick lips of rubber muzz, fat expressions all crumbly like cracker meal, yellow pizza puke faces, disgusting us tho we say nothing—The apartment has dirty beatnik beds and mattresses everywhere but I walk thru the back looking for a sink—It’s huge—An endless walk thru long greasy pantries and vast washrooms a block long with single filthy little sink all dark and slimey like underground Lowell High School crumbling basements—Finally I come to the Kitchen where we “new workers” are s’posed to cook little meals all summer—It’s vast stone fireplaces and stone stoves all rancid and greasy from a month-old Vulture People Banquet Orgy with still dozens of uncooked chickens lying around on the floor, among garbage and bottles—Rancid stale grease everywhere, nobody’s ever cleaned it up or knew how and the place as big as a garage—I push my way out of there pushing a huge greasystink foodstained tray of some sort hurrying away from the big stinky emptiness and horror—The fat golden chickens lie rotten upsidedown on littered stone slabs—I hurry out never having seen such a dirty sight in my life. Meanwhile I learn the two boys are studying a hamper full of Vulture Food for us and one of them wisely says “Blisters in our sugar,” meaning the Vultures put their blisters in our sugar so we’ll “die” but instead of being really dead we’ll be taken to the Underground Slimes to walk neck deep in steaming mucks pulling huge groaning wheels (among small forked snakes) so the devil with the long ears can mine his Purple Magenta Square Stone that is the secret of all this Kingdom—You end up down there groaning and pulling thru dead bodies of other people even your own family floating in the ooze—If you succeed you can become a pasty Vulture Person obscenely fornicating slowly on the dump above, I think, either that or the devil just invents the Vulture People with what’s left over out of the underground Hell—“Beans anyone?” I hear myself saying as thump! I’m awake again! Elliott has thumped his foot just at that moment on the porch!—I look over there!—He’s doing it on purpose, he knows everything that’s going on!—What on earth have I brought these people for and why just this particular night of that moon that moon that moon?
I’m up again and pacing up and down and drinking water at the creek, Dave and Romana’s lump figures in the moonlight dont move, like hypocrites, “Bastard has my only sleeping spot”—I clutch my head, I’m so alone in all this—I go fearfully casting about for control back inside the cabin by the lighted lamp, a smoke, trying to squeeze the last red drop out of the rancid port bottle, no go—Now that Billie’s asleep and so still and peaceful I wonder if I can sleep just by lying beside her and holding her—I do just this, crawling in with all my clothes which I’ve put on because I’m afraid of going mad naked or of not being able to suddenly run away from everything, in my shoes, she moans a little in her sleep and resumes sleeping as I hold her with those rigid staring eyes—Her blonde flesh in the moonlight, the poor blonde hair so carefully washed and combed, the ladylike little body also a burden to carry around like my own but so frail, thinnish, I just stare at her shoulders with tears—I’d wake her up and confess everything but I’ll only scare her—I’ve done irreparable harm (“Garradarable narm!” yells the creek)—All my self sayings suddenly blurting babbles so the meaning cant even stay a minute I mean a moment to satisfy my rational endeavors to hold control, every thought I have is smashed to a million pieces by millionpieced mental explosions that I remember I thought were so wonderful when I’d first seen them on Peotl and Mescaline, I’d said then (when still innocently playing with words) “Ah, the manifestation of multiplicity, you can actually see it, it aint just words” but now it’s “Ah the keselamaroyot you rot”—Till when dawn finally comes my mind is just a series of explosions that get louder and more “multiply” broken in pieces some of them big orchestral and then rainbow explosions of sound and sight mixed.
At dawn also I’ve almost dimmed into sleep three times but I swear (and this is something I remember that makes me realize I dont understand what happened at Big Sur even now) the little boy somehow thumped his foot just at the moment of drowse, to instantly wake me up, wide awake, back to my horror which when all is said and done is the horror of all the worlds the showing of it to me being damn well what I deserve anyway with my previous blithe yakkings about the sufferings of others in books.
Books, shmooks, this sickness has got me wishing if I can ever get out of this I’ll gladly become a millworker and shut my big mouth.
38
DAWN IS MOST HORRIBLE OF ALL with the owls suddenly calling back and forth in the misty moon haunt—And even worse than dawn is morning, the bright sun only GLARING in on my pain, making it all brighter, hotter, more maddening, more nervewracking—I even go roaming up and down the valley in the bright Sunday morning sunshine with bag uner arm looking hopelessly for some spot to sleep in—As soon as I find a spot of grass by the path I realize I cant lie down there because the tourists might walk by and see me—As soon as I find a glade near the creek I realize it’s too sinister there, like Hemingway’s darker part of the swamp where “the fishing would be more tragic” somehow—All the haunts and glades having certain special evil forces concentrated there and driving me away—So haunted I go wandering up and down the canyon crying with that bag under my arm: “What on earth’s happened to me? and how can earth be like that?”
Am I not a human being and have done my best as well as anybody else? never really trying to hurt anybody or half-hearted cursing Heaven?—The words I’d studied all my life have suddenly gotten to me in all their serious and definite deathliness, never more I be a “happy poet” “Singing” “about death” and allied romantic matters, “Go thou crumb of dust you with your silt of a billion years, here’s a billion pieces of silt for you, shake that out of your shaker”—And all the green nature of the canyon now waving in the morning sun looking like a cruel idiot convocation.
Coming back to the sleepers and staring at them wild eyed like my brother’d once stared at me in the dark over my crib, staring at them not only enviously but lonely inhuman isolation from their simple sleeping minds—“But they all look dead!” I’m carking in my canyon, “Sleep is death, everything is death!”
The horrible climax coming when the others finally get up and pook about making a troubled breakfast, and I’ve told Dave I cant possibly stay here another minute, he must drive us all back to town, “O
kay but I sure wish we could stay a week like Romana wants to do,”—“Well you drive me and come back”—“Well I dunno if Monsanta would like that we’ve already dirtied up the place aplenty, in fact we’ve got to dig a garbage pit and get rid of the junk”—Billie offers to dig the garbage pit but does so by digging a neat tiny coffinshaped grave instead of just a garbage hole—Even Dave Wain blinks to see it—It’s exactly the size fit for putting a little dead Elliott in it, Dave is thinking the same thing I am I can tell by a glance he gives me—We’ve all read Freud sufficiently to understand something there—Besides little Elliott’s been crying all morning and has had two beatings both of them ending up crying and Billie saying she cant stand it any more she’s going to kill herself—
And Romana too notices it, the perfect 4 foot by 3 foot neatly sided grave like you’re ready to sink a little box in it—Horrifying me so much I take the shovel and go down to dump junk into it and mess up the neat pattern somehow but little Elliott starts screaming and grabs the shovel and refuses I go near the hole—So Billie herself goes and starts filling the garbage in but then looks at me significantly (I’m sure sometimes she really did aspire to make me crazy) “Do you want to finish the job yourself?”—“What do you mean?”—“Cover the earth on, do the honors?”—“What do you mean do the honors!”—“Well I said I’d dig the garbage pit and I’ve done that, aint you supposed to do the rest?”—Dave Wain is watching fascinated, there’s something screwy he sees there too, something cold and frightening—“Well okay” I say, “I’ll dump the earth over it and tamp it down” but I go down to do this Elliott is screaming “NO no no no no!” (“My God, the fishes’ bones are in that grave” I realize too)—“What’s the matter he wont let me go near that hole! why did you make it look like a grave?” I finally yell—But Billie is only smiling quietly and steadily at me, over the grave, shovel in hand, the kid weeping tugging the shovel, rushing up to block my way, trying to shove me back with his little hands—I cant understand any of it—He’s screaming as I grab the shovel as tho I’m about to bury Billie in there or something or himself maybe—“What’s the matter with this kid is he a cretin?” I yell.