by Jack Kerouac
G.J. and I stopped in front of a wagon all covered in gilt angels, a house on wheels, with windows and curtains, some little portable steps that went up. In the door there was a man with a cigar. It was the boss of the circus. He reminded me of Mr. Miller, he also looked like a tout from Havre de Grace, a man who plays cards in horse stables at night, who leans on the far turn on misty mornings with a clocker’s watch. He gave us a big smile.
“You boys want to go to California with the circus or are you staying around here at your mother’s apron strings?”
“You going through Kentucky too?” I asked him. I dreamed of going to see the Kentucky Derby with him, I’d meet the trainers and the jockeys with him.
“Kentucky! Boy, I got to see my grandma ever’ blessed Fall. We pitch this big tent right outside Lexington, the first thing I do is go and pay my respects, bless her dear heart. You boys come along with us and get three squares a day with pay and you’ll see the whole country inside one year. We’re pulling out for Kentucky tonight.”
Me and G.J. looked at each other with mouths wide open.
“You come on back to this wagon when the show’s over and I’ll put you to work. Climb up here & sign your John Hancocks.”
We climbed up immediately; we wanted to see the inside of the wagon. It was all set up for living; there was a bed, mysterious flags, strongboxes of cash. We signed our names and our social security numbers.
“Ain’t no life like circus life, boys,” he said with a slap on the back.
We walked around the circus with fat cigars hanging from our lips; all of a sudden we were mysterious & romantic men. “Zagg,” G.J. said, “I know I should see my mother before I go but it’s too late.” He looked sad. We no longer looked at the girls, we were too old for them. All of a sudden I thought about all that great darkness of the America in front of me and G.J. and that filthy circus, and the cold mornings we’d work, and it made me want to go in my trousers. We went to see the cook tent to see the food we’d be eating across America. The two cooks were sitting at a table planted into the ground with a bottle and some cards. A Negro with hair like a Portuguese spoke angrily to them; he was drunk, his eyes were red. He spat on the ground when the two old men didn’t listen to him. I watched the Negro, he went to lie down and he started to sleep on a dirty canvas behind the big tent. I’d have to get used to doing things like that.
After eleven the show was over. A big bunch of guys came out of their hay-hideouts all around and they started to bring down the tent even before the people were out. You could see the big tent collapsing like a balloon. They worked fast; they didn’t say a word. The merrygorounds, the bumper cars, the ferris wheel, the places where you threw baseballs, everything was taken down. The lights went out, it started to get dark. A big cloud of dust climbed up to the stars. It looked as if the men were hurrying because they’d stolen something. We found the boss and he brought us to an oldtimer who was taking out big canvas bags from a wagon. “Just stand there and hold these bags,” he said. That’s what we did, one on each side. G.J. sang crazy people songs. We waited for someone to come throw things in the bags. All of a sudden comes a big elephant with a man dressed like a Turk on top. We started to move apart for it to pass. “Stand still!” he yelled; and he started to take off his hat, his rags, big things that were on top of the elephant and throw them in the bag.
“Zagg! Zagg!” G.J. cried. “The elephant’s going to step on my foot!”
“No, no” I cried, “don’t worry, the elephant’s trained.”
“That’s what you say but look at that damn huge paw near my toes.” Then just when I looked the elephant moved a little closer to George. He was standing there wide-eyed looking at the side of the elephant with a fear of death. You saw the large eye of the elephant, the big curved trunk; it looked like it was watching George. George was holding on to the bag but I don’t think he even knew. Suddenly he dropped the bag and lit out. “No, no,” he was saying, and shook his head, “I’ll be a sonofabitch if I’m going to stand for it.” He disappeared in the darkness. I was all alone with the bag. The man on top cursed. “Where’d that damn boy go?” He was completely undressed and he looked like a cabdriver, he wasn’t a “sultan” anymore. I left to find George. The man yelled after me, I was done too. He was waiting for me behind the ropes, George, pale as a lenten fart.
“Zagg,” he said, and grabbed hold of my arms, “I’m telling you that damn elephant wasn’t any farther than that from my toe. Not only that, she was lookin’ at me. I’m telling you she was lookin’ at me. Not only that, she’s got skin thick as rock. It’s not an animal, it’s a mountain. Not only that, these damn things remember everybody everywhere. Me I’m leaving, I’m going home. You can go to the circus if you want. I’m satisfied just going to sit in my chair, I’ll never cry about anything for the rest of my life.”
“Okay George,” I said, “me too I’m going home,” and we left. We crossed the great tragic field of the circus. We started to laugh when we were on the bus. It was going to be a great story for the guys. We went home in the beautiful summer night.
Something queer happened. There was a soldier in the bus, he heard us laugh. He looked angry. He started talking with us; he told us he was from Alaska. I had just read about Jack London and the Gold Rush and I knew some Alaska names. I said “Were you stationed up in Juneau?”
“Juneau? What do you mean Juneau?” he said angrily. “You a wise guy or something, Juneau?”
“What’s wrong with Juneau?” I said (I was scared, I didn’t want to fight, I was too young for a soldier like that).
“So it’s Juneau is it? You goddam little wise guy punk,” and I thought he was going to hit me, I never understood why.
He didn’t let us be until we got to town. I was to meet another soldier from Alaska the following year and it was to be even worse. I guess that Juneau is too far up North and people from Alaska speak of it like Russians speak of Siberia. It’s not my fault their damn Juneau. G.J. had been so afraid of the elephant that he wasn’t afraid of the soldier. To each his fear in the frightful world. When you’re young like that the darkness expands faster than you grow up. Yet you still see a star from your bed at home, and it lasts until you’re strong enough and you no longer need stars to strengthen your heart.
* * *
My old childhood chum Jack found me that summer. He came to my place one afternoon and we took a walk over to the saloons outside of town and he told me his story. He’d gone into the Army but one night all of a sudden he and the other guys they decided to go take a ride in an Army truck. Jack was at the wheel. There was a sentry at the fence; he went through the fence. They went to New York. On the way Jack stopped at filling stations that didn’t run at night, and they broke some cigarettes from out the cigarette machines with a wrench. When they arrived in N.Y. Jack was taken by the police but not the others; because he didn’t want to say their names and what they’d done they put him in the Raymond St. jail in Brooklyn. It’s an old jail made of blackened rock full of rats. Poor Jack, he was always in a bind, his whole life. He’s always been like a brother to me. He was thrown out of the Army. His unit had left for the Philippines; summer of 1941 . . .
But now he knew where there was a good job for us. I told him about the cookie factory and the circus and he laughed his head off. “Yoo-hoo-hoo-hoo! The same old Mike!” The job was digging ditches for a local construction company that had a contract in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, right near Maine, to build a fence around a Navy hospital. A bunch of guys from Lowell were already working; they went in cars at 6 in the morning, every day, and returned at 6 in the evening. Two of the guys were sons of the contractor, the Bergerons. Jack had a car; he was to pick me up at home and charge me $2 a week for gas. It made me feel a little sad, I could see that Jean had grown up and picked up the manners of the world. I’ve never understood the world anyway, but I had understood Jack once.
Jack picked me up at 6 o’clock Monday morning. I had sta
yed up practically the whole night reading and writing because I couldn’t sleep. It was a grand morning, I could see it through my tired eyes. It made me think of the mornings when Jack and I were kids and we’d get up before the sun to go play far into the woods, when we’d follow the mad cry of the crow into the heart of the forest, and we thought we were Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. The sky was raw blue with clouds like honeycomb all connected together in little pierced pieces all the way to the end of the horizon. It was as beautiful as the day the Good Lord created the universe. I heard the birds in the cemetery. I looked and I looked and Jack talked. We went up to New Hampshire through shortcuts of old roads I hadn’t seen since the times my father had brought me this way to find apples in Autumn. We started to sing.
“Daddy—you want a diamond ring—brand new car—everything—Oh Daddy—you’re gonna get the best of me.”
After that I asked Jean to sing his old childhood songs—“As I was walking in the streets of Laredo one day—I spied a young cowboy—all wrapped in white linen—all wrapped in white linen—and cold as the clay.” Jack had always dreamed of the West.
It was about fifty miles to Portsmouth. When we arrived I was sleeping and Jack drove with his eyes half closed. There’s always something rotten in a job, if it isn’t the pay it’s the boss, if it isn’t the hours it’s the distance, if it isn’t the work, it’s something else.
We found the other guys; they were all in a big mud field by the water, it was sea water, an inlet. On the other side was Maine, Kittery, Maine. There were shovels and large cement mixers. There was some kind of ironworks in the building at the end of the field with greasy oldtimers sitting out front smoking the pipe. It’s always impossible to understand everything we see with our eyes in America. Behind the pines there were Marine barracks. Out came a guy with his bugle and, tara tara, wake up. All of a sudden I wanted to join the Marines. I did the following summer. I saw them come out, strong young men, blackened by the sun, placid in the beautiful military morning with flags and guns racked with handsome black wood. There, in the water comes the finest apparition, a new submarine. The sailors in white were standing on the blue iron deck; the officers in white were in the conning tower. They all talked, they smoked. They had all eaten their nice breakfasts. The cook was there with his cigar in hand. The boat passed through water like a serpent. The length overall of the hull caressed the eyes like when you look at the long legs of a woman. We saw it leave toward the ocean. They were to submerge it that morning. What mystery! Moby Dick was a meditative whale; this is a whale of precision, of modern “know-how,” five times worse and ten times more treacherous. I was to learn that the following summer. Oh Ahab!—your poor spear tonight!
We all got on board a truck and we crossed the island. They gave us special shovels to dig deep and narrow; we drove them in with a foot kick then we closed the grip at the top to clamp the sand and lifted it like that. We all worked without shirts. We were in a long line, we passed each other from one hole to another like a game of leap frog. There were some nice fresh breezes from the sea on the other side of the island. I could see a big summer resort by the waterfront far, far away. I thought about all the old geezers that were sitting there in their chairs with tinted glasses that made the waves rosy, their sea thoughts, the little children who dug holes in the sand with tiny colorful shovels, the beautiful girls with bodies of silken white gold waiting for love on the beach. There, we were all in the world together. I wanted to go over there and rip their bathing suits off. I wanted to go in the middle of the green sea on a boat. I wanted everything.
At noon it was hot, me and Jack were already starting to turn red like lobsters. Me I was singing songs from that time, “W.P.A.,” about lazy guys who work slow, slow. We worked slow, we all had a cigarette in our mouths. The guys told stories—in English, a curse word at each end, as though they were afraid of being sissies speaking French. In two years they were all going to be on the beaches of the South Pacific.
We ate our lunches at noon sitting around trees, and at one o’clock we started again. In the afternoon the men who work in the earth would surely like to rest their head on the warm sand and sleep. I think the first men they did that, they all caught their meat in the morning.
At five o’clock we all got on board our cars and went to Lowell 50 miles. The Marines asked us for rides; they were dressed in the blue tunics of summer, they were going to Boston to have a good time. In the car they took off their tunics and rode in their shirttails like the rest of us.
Jack and I were so burnt by the sun that we decided not to go to work the next day but to wait for Wednesday. We did that the whole month we were on that job, we worked every other day, it was too far and too exhausting. That night with my red back and no shirt I had 3 hits in a baseball game.
One morning me and Jack were digging alone on the shore of the inlet. After we’d eaten our lunches we laid down around the beautiful trees, near the wooden boards, and Jack told me the story of the girl he was to marry. The boss found us there, sleeping, at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. He was angry as the devil. “What the hell do you think we’re paying you for? You guys just don’t have any sense of fairness. From now on I’m going to keep an eye on you myself. Come on, start digging those post holes.” We didn’t say nothing, we hadn’t slept on purpose.
“Sense of fairness!” Jack said when the man had left. “You hoo hoo hoo!” he was laughing his head off.
Damn mautadit Jack, if he felt like it he’d put all the boards and the shovels in the car and he’d go home with them. When he was a kid one night he broke all the windows of a school with his slingshot, one after the other, a good fifty of them. I can still hear him laughing in the dark near the river—“Yoo hoo hoo hoo! Just wait till they see this tomorrow morning!” It struck him as so funny he had tears in his eyes. After that he put his arm around me and he said, “Wal, let’s lope along pardner,” and we went to my place.
I started to be afraid of driving to Portsmouth every morning Jack was going so fast. We’d been in a big crackup when we were 17. The guys at work didn’t like us because we only came every other day. Sometimes guys are like old ladies. All of a sudden Jack disappeared from Lowell; his mother told me that he went to get married. I didn’t see him before the fall.
I was done with the job anyway.
* * *
I think my life began to shatter that summer. It’s been raining ever since that time. I can say that one evening that summer the night became my woman. Like a Sultan who has 100 paramours in his harem I began to dream of having two hundred, never satisfied—because my life was good in those days, I knew that. My parents were set to move to New Haven to work in new jobs, they were going to be nearby. I was sitting in the hall and thinking about all the accomplishments I was going to have. I was going to be All-American in football; I was going to publish this little story that I had written the other evening about my family moving from Lowell, and it was going to be recognized as a work of genius; so, I was going to be an All-American who was also a literary genius; after that I was going to get offers from Hollywood to act, later I’d become a director and great thinker of modern films; after that, millionaire, married to Lana Turner, I was going to be thrown into politics and be a sort of different Lincoln in a time that particularly needed me; after that, before the funeral (what a queer word!) with the people in tears, there wouldn’t be a paramour left.
All of a sudden I realized in the dark parlor that I was a little crazy, nineteen years old catching myself thinking like that on a fat lazy adolescent behind. I looked around me dumbfounded.
As if to punish me the Good Lord took all that apart in 3 weeks.
To start, we moved to New Haven; my father had gone there ahead of time, he was already working, he had found an apartment. I could see that apartment in my dreams, near Yale campus, my beautiful study lamp in a window above the wet and mysterious streets of night, Ah, a son of the gentry. My mother and I packed; my sister hel
ped us, she was set to stay in Lowell. My mother went down to the basement chasing the cat and fell flat on her face; she hurt her leg. That’s how it started. En route to Connecticut in the truck the cat got out of the box with his claws and he disappeared into the woods. I loved that poor little cat. The truckdriver told me it was around Wallingford, Conn. Today I bet he’s a big fat cat on a farm; he’s better off than I am.
My mother and I rode the train to New Haven; it was a miserable & tiring trip in the night; we arrived early in the morning. “Look at New Haven,” I said, and there it was, a big dirty town like the side of the tracks, the pink sky above the piles of coal. “Well, well,” I told myself, “and the other night I was dreaming of this and that, big pink balloon in golden heavens, Lincoln but different; look how the real world is dull, and dirty, and mingled with vapor and the tired faces of people that make you sick, the discouraging faces of people who eat their own heart in the general pain—everywhere gray shit surrounding their feet. “What are we going to do in this pit of labors?, this troublous dump they call the world,” in the filth of all the sadness of eternity. There are men who stick their feet out the window, and warm their toes in the sun and they live like that: for them all things can be bought (legitimate). I looked at my mother: as always she wasn’t afraid of anything and saw the dirty world with clear eyes. I don’t understand where women take all their strength, they’re made so tender, when there’s crowds they get crushed. But when the crowd is gone they get up and they’re just like they were before, while the men have gone crazy.
Poor little woman, she got up, we took our suitcases, and I helped her go down the big iron steps on the platform full of spit. After that we went to drink ourselves some coffee in a cafeteria. We had to maneuver the suitcases so they wouldn’t be in people’s way, and go get the coffee, and hang our coats on the chair so that they didn’t touch the floor, and wipe the greasy spoons with our napkins. It made me angry because it was my mother that had to do all these things; I always saw her in her little spotless kitchen, and I would have liked it if she had stayed there.