by Jack Kerouac
We decided to eat breakfast, spend a little money. The sun came up. We ate our bacon and eggs in the pretty yellow light. All of a sudden I was happy again. It’s always like that, it catches the heart, you raise your head to look and all things seem to be trying for the better, a minute ago they were overwhelmingly aggravating or harassing.
We went in the trolley to see the apartment. My poor father had committed to the apartment by phone; it was in an old brick building in the Negro neighborhood where there was swill everywhere on the sidewalks. That morning he was already working in New Haven, he was sitting somewhere at his work with a serious look, and he knew nothing about this latest grotesquerie. My mother looked at the house, the gas tank at the end of the street, the yards full of cans and bricks, completely appalled. There we were with our suitcases in the street; even worse, the movers arrived on time with all our furniture and the paltry things of our lives. We inspected the inside; it was worse than outside, there were broken windows, a nice view of a brick wall, and something on the ceiling that looked like shit. I was young, it scared me. The big movers from Lowell were nice to my mother, we knew their cousins. There we all were in that pig sty trying to figure what to do. My mother absolutely refused to move in there. We decided to bring the furniture in a storage house, and to leave it there until we found something. My little mother had a determined face. We went with the movers. In a big warehouse in the middle of that complex and noising day all the poor furniture that I had seen my whole life with the eyes of a simple child was being dragged out of the truck like the entrails of my family and thrown across a huge dirty platform to be stacked into heaps with the similarly sad furniture of other poor nomadic families. I watched all this with the realization that death was possible. Prior to this I had always thought that death happened only to others. But when I saw my poor little green desk pushed into a corner with the other things in their dust (on the back of this desk there still were the chalkmarks of my brother dead fifteen years) I understood the great engulfment of the universe—“and I found her bitter.” I looked at my hands, I understood that one fine day, one fine evening to be precise, they would no longer be hands but some other awful thing. That one day they’ll say, of this here book, the bigotries of an idiot, “writ by hand a hand no more.” I looked at my mother’s desk; in the top drawer she always kept scarves, boxes of pins, powders; and now there was her drawer in the middle of the entire world half open, lost, in the ponderous darkness. It made me want to cry. At nineteen you can’t start having gray hair but you can have your senses lacerated, and your eyes widened and become more like the stone of the tomb. Thus, always death in youth, like in the springtime.
My mother and I started our big trek around New Haven. It was still 10 o’clock in the morning; we walked until 6 o’clock. We had our paper with the ads circled in crayon, the paper that’s always ripped and covered in sweat at the end of the day. There weren’t enough apartments and they were too expensive. We walked in the sun as in the desert, from one side of town to the other, we went across dusty parks full of Italian children that splashed in fountains, wide streets that went for miles with only trolley tracks and houses on each side with flower pots on the porch, narrow streets behind downtown like alleys through which traffic went by like some big irritated parade. I no longer felt like an athlete, that and my dreams had all melted in the brillianting afternoon, forever.
Yes, but we saw my father in the evening anyway, and it seems that I’ve always seen my father in the evening after the damned heat of the mad day, I can see him coming down the street in his straw hat, a solid figure in the sad redness of the setting sun, and it makes me so happy, a brave man that has performed labors like my little labor of that day a hundred times in his life. And it has not changed him. I look into his eyes for counsel about all these things. I only see a kind of united front between those two eyes, and the kind of pride that is necessary in a man, the kind that I myself do not have. He was looking at me with affection; I didn’t understand why he loved me. He was proud of me.
We all sat down in the hotel’s tiny room to figure what to do. My mother made sandwiches with the paltry little things we’d purchased in a grocery. While they talked I looked at the brick wall outside the window and at the city lights that played upon it. I recalled my dream of the ‘son of the gentry’ up in his nice fancy window. Then, well, I changed my dream: now, we were a poor vaudeville family in a strange new big city, and I was to save them from their unfortunate circumstances with some heroic feat.
“What’re you thinking my little man,” my father said in French, tenderly.
“I’d really like to be capable of helping you, mautadit, in a manner in which I would be capable.” You have to talk like that when you bring out your most cherished dreams honestly, you can’t just come out with it cold.
“Poor tourlipi, don’t be afraid, we’ll manage, don’t worry your little head.”
“But poor mama she walked all day, she’s tired, there’s nothing here for nobody. Why didn’t we stay at home?”
My father made a face. “Don’t ask me,” he said in English, “it was her idea.”
“Leo,” she said. “I didn’t want to stay all alone in Lowell while you worked here and Ti-Michel went to school in New York. There!”
“Allright, allright, we overturned it, the pot, now’s not the time to talk. We’ll manage. Come, we’ll go have a glass of beer, we’ll have a little fun, if we can’t have anything else.” We all laughed. We went out, we went to a bar. Like in the old days in the Chinese restaurant back home, my father was happy, my mother had her little blushing joy—but they were a little older, that damned darkness was laboring away.
Yes, the night is my woman, but I was so angry it cracked my teeth when she started making eyes at me in those days. I could see her big legs spread out across the night’s sky: I searched for the middle far, far on the other side of the lights. I thought I was going to find some thing there, I had all sorts of names for it; not only did I never reach it; but when I do I’ll be too old and it’ll be death that I’ll find, old bitch bee “vieille gieppe chiène.” Come, big unhappy woman, I’m embracing you; take care of your boy.
* * *
Believe it or not we found a paper house on the sea shore. It’s no lie, I climbed into the attic to store some boxes and my foot went right through the cardboard and I got skewered on a beam. I cried like a baby, naturally dammit.
It was a French Canadian who owned the shack. It was on the shore of the Long Island Sound in West Haven. It was a vacation house but the old man said it would be comfortable in the winter. Bradley Point, it was called, with the houses boarded up for the winter (it was September) and the stores a mile up the highway. But the fresh air, the sea, the great vistas of the sun!! It was pouring violently outside when we went to the storage house, my father, my mother and I, to get the furniture with two old mover characters who had an ancient truck. They didn’t charge us much; so, my father brought a bottle of whiskey for the gang. It became an adventure. When we arrived we parked the truck in the mud in front of the porch, we put down some boards, and we all carried things through the torrential rain into the house. It was a beautiful little cottage, all the same. I liked it right away. The sea smashed against the rocks in front of the house. My mother said, “I dunno, one of these days this here house is gonna get swept out to sea.”
“No, no” I said, “that was only the Sound, they’re not big waves here. Rich folks come here. Come on, you’re afraid of everything.”
The movers were smoking cigars, they were making jokes, they were old characters of life. They said they knew the old character in the shack across the marsh, that he sold clams and didn’t give a damn about anything. His name was Popeye. My father was interested. “By God, I’ll sell clams myself, the hell with the work. My ancestors were Breton fishermen.” We all drank straight from the bottle. My mother was using a tiny paper cup. It really was an awful downpour; we weren’t interested in
keeping dry anymore, only in having fun. In the middle of the adventure I looked sharply into the gray heavens and I said “Thank you, Good Lord.” I thank Him to this day.
I was so drenched that it didn’t make any difference, I put on my bathingsuit and I went for a swim. I was half drunk; I was swimming like Tarzan. I went 100 yards and climbed onto a small anchored rowboat that threw itself into the big waves like a cork. What a name—“WE’RE HERE.” I sat down. My mother was in the door of her little cottage and she was waving her hand at me; she was afraid. I hollered over the storm: “Don’t be afraid, I’m a Breton! The sea is my sister, she loves me, all is well!” It was impossible to hear me. I went back. I headed to the bottom and turned toward the deep and looked at the great darkness beneath the water with my bewildered eyes: I wasn’t afraid, I wanted to see it personally. Toward the beach it was clear, toward the deep it was dark: such is life. I wanted to be a writer, I tried everything.
In the house there was a nice little shower with hot water. What joy! My father had taken his bath, he was already sitting all dried up and clean, he was reading the paper. We had to eat. It stopped raining, the great skies were becoming red and violet. I cheerfully walked the mile to the store, I bought some hamburger, bread, milk, cakes, and came back. My father was sitting on the sea wall with his pipe. The sea gulls screeched on the beach. It was as beautiful as a dream.
“Ti-Michel, I have returned to the sea,” my father told me with tears in his eyes. “I’ve always known that some day I’d live on the edge of the sea of my ancestors from Brittany. It’s in my blood, in yours too, that’s why you swam like that during a storm. It all turned out well. Sometimes it’s worth being alive, mon ti-Choux.”
We ate a big joyous supper. Night descended upon the sea, little lights stretched out vastly over the water. The stars came out like phosphorescent grains of salt. We sat on the porch with some popcorn, and voilà, we were at home once again.
My big woman slumbered upon the calm waters.
All the way up to those tiny far-away lights, far into the following fall, this “woman” made me pass by on a war ship, and from the deck I looked with binoculars and I saw our little porch from that evening. Because the big woman does not let us remain, she sends us from one side of the earth to the other like the little marbles I used to race in my childhood room.
Some rich young friends came to get me from New York to return to college in their car. My mother made them a lunch. With them I spoke in English and I was a completely different man. They called me “Jackson.” We played catch with the football in the sand. After that I packed my stuff, I kissed my mother, and we left. When I saw the little house by the sea from afar my heart ached nevertheless. Ahead of me were all the shiny and interesting things of my college career; behind, my family by the sea and all the sadness of my real life that I had only just begun to understand.
* * *
Three weeks later I got the fuck out of college. I didn’t say a word to nobody. I got on a bus and took my first trip in the South. I had my little pencil, pieces of paper, and I was going to be a writer for the rest of my life. It took hold of me just like that. I was entering deeper into my big woman. For me she was America. New England and N.Y. were only her head.
In Maryland when the bus stopped over for a half-hour in the night, one of the Negroes who was riding in the behind of the bus started to sing me his story among the flowers and the weeping willows of evening. “Goin’ down to Richmond, boy, my grandfather died. I ain’t-a goin’ back to no Newark no more, Lord have mercy. Sick and tired of that motherlovin’ laundry. I’m goin’ to stay right where I’m at soon as I get down home and sit down and have me some buttermilk and greens. My mother make it for me in the morning . . .” It was like a song. If that man hadn’t talked like that I may well have gone back to school in a couple of days. But no—the great mystery of America “socked me in the belly.” I wanted to understand all that. I wanted to go where the train sang “from out” the valley. The stars that melted over the trees, they were the tender angels of my desire for the earth. The moon was making a face at me that I understood. The smell of honeysuckle was only the beginning of my big woman’s scent. Yes, now I was ready to come in to find what it was I wanted. I couldn’t name it. Like the Negro I wanted to “go down home,” I wanted to sit on a little porch in a rocking chair, I wanted to hear the birds of morning in Virginia.
Most of my dreams were of that romantic kind in the black bus.
We arrived in Washington in the morning mist. I found myself a cheap hotel and I started trying to sleep. The hot morning was beginning outside with all the noisings of the big city. There were bedbugs in my bed. I wanted to get away from Washington, cross the Potomac like the men had done in the battle of Bull Run (Manassas?), in the water, take the bedbugs off me, and go get lost into the great green fields off in the direction of the Blue Ridge. Someplace, in the Blue Ridge, was the grave of Stonewall Jackson, and there was a flower in the tree, and the oldtimers talked in the noon sun.
“Goin’ down home . . .” and I was only a poor little Canuck who’d read too many books.
That evening it was sad in my room. Outside my window there was a brick wall and a stick-like little tree. I had gone for a walk and there was nothing, only wide streets with mailboxes and trashcans. I wrote my heart out—“J’écriva mon coeur.” It made me cry. I had turned my whole life upside down just to write these paltry little things—I was looking at them on the piece of paper. I was thinking that one day someone would read this and cry with me, and it’ll do them some good, they’ll understand a little better how to live, not hurt anyone as if all men were brothers, and love the little things of our life with respect, not spit on everything, and find a personal peace for themselves made of probity and tenderness. But that’s impossible in this here world, and I knew it! Just to earn a crust of bread to eat while you live, you had to go fight and get mixed into the hatred and the shit of others, and into impossibly dirty jobs . . . (yes, there came a day when they assigned me to clean the toilets, 4 years later) . . . idiotic labors like my fudge shovel, the greasy rags of an elephant and the embittering complications of paycheck, timeclock, tax, bill, rent, interest, and a nickel to use the restroom. I already knew that most of the world was populated by morons, America just like the rest. I saw them all spitting in each other’s faces from one pole to the other. They called it life, they called it “the economy,” worse than everything they called it “necessity” and in the papers they wrote solemn editorials about it. Everything in the damned world was acceptable save for the tears of the heart; those didn’t pay, you couldn’t sell ’em, you couldn’t buy ’em. And they were all I knew, that and the dreams of the beautiful green country stretching itself from one ocean to another around the sun and around the stars of the immortal night.
I was looking at my little paper and I knew all that. I didn’t accept it. I was going to suffer, I was going to be a writer, and the Good Lord if no one else was going to thank me. I was already a broke poet. And I wasn’t afraid, and I’m not afraid today.
I was just a child and I decided to earn my living in a manner that I found honorable and honest. I was a little lazy, and I depended too much on the help of my parents, but goddam Christ of Baptism I found my own true soul at the expense of a couple of things that won’t have much importance on the death bed.
* * *
Well, I had to work and try to keep my bones together as tears escaped me from one side of the earth to the other. I returned home to the little house on the seashore. I was going to work, save my money, and cross the country in the spring.
I began once again to walk in the streets of the desert day; my communications with the night were done for the moment. I looked everywhere for a job. I didn’t find one before 4, 5 days. It was in a rubber factory 2 miles from my house and not so far from New Haven proper. One morning I got up early and I left with my lunch. The sea was beautiful.
My job was to ta
ke a new tire still gummy and hot and pass a little clamp around the ends inside to make it curve in; after that I rolled it to its place and I went and got another one. I did this hundreds of times. I learned a little how to go faster but not too much. There was a noise of hell in the place; the bosses were always right there, the boys looked bored and half dead. Well, I was caught in a factory again, and I had promised myself. I ate my lunch in the beautiful hot sun. I dreamed of my lovely southern fields. A Negro ate an orange sitting on old tires in the shade. My face fell again. I made a fist and I asked myself, “Michel Bretagne, Michel Bretagne!” It was like a voice that called me from far away, like the horns of Wagner in the Magic Fire Music that I listened to at night in my room as I watched the red water. Where? Where? “Where can I go, what will I do?” There was a force in my muscles that made me want to fly like a damned arrow over the road, no matter what direction, and as the soldiers say—Boingg!
I worked until five in the afternoon as sad as Job. I didn’t take the bus, I walked home.
I crossed the fields in the direction of the sea, I knew that I would see my house from the hill ahead. There was a pretty little cottage by the side of the road, with flowers, apple trees, a stone wall and a child’s swing. If I could only put my parents in there with a little money and myself go take a trip in a boat—to Montevideo, Luanda, Melbourne! “It’s beautiful to be rich!” I said to myself—“the damned pigs!” I climbed the hill.
There, the sea, far, far Long Island, and the little shack on the Point my house. What a beautiful September afternoon. I picked flowers, I wasn’t ready to go home, I didn’t want to tell them yet that I didn’t want to work in the damned factory. I went in the direction of the rollercoasters at the amusement park. The sun turned to a color of ancient gold.