by Jack Kerouac
Pomeray was Bull’s brother-in-law; he had married the sad and sick woman, the dead one, the sister of Old Bull. She had left Canada to marry a man from the Middlewest, a minister of a man with a big hat, Smiley Glendiver; after his death married the bum. There had been sad voyages in the old cars in the West in the 1920s under the telephone wires that make the children fall asleep, mirages, fights, warnings.
“Pain isn’t dead,” said the mother Henrieta in her bed. They swallowed her in her box, they lost her in the earth; they wanted to put a stone on her ground but they forgot, like she.
Bull’s real name was Guillaume Bernier-Gaos, he came from Quebec. His brother-in-law was the father of Leo Duluoz who was coming from Boston now with his little son of thirteen, Jean, to meet the parents in Chinatown, and had with him the key to the apartment Pomeray was going to occupy. It was a mixup of black old men, a dotty tenderness.
The old Chinese was called Ching Boy, his brother Sam Boy of Boston was a friend of Bull’s; Old Bull knew everybody, lived here and there from New York and Boston and Butte Montana and everywhere, a real worker; he was a gambler, operated hand printing presses when he wanted; for his living was a conductor on the railroad, an oldtime boomer, went from one railroad to another following the important seasons; it had been a long time since he worked. He found himself every year a little worse than the year past, he felt sad.
Rolfe Glendiver was the only man there who wasn’t all bowled over and scared for advantage, the winnings, the losings—the pain of death—except the Chinese gentleman. “At the carnival where you can’t lose you’ll learn losing was your only hope, you bunch of beasts!” Rolfe more or less thought.
It was night when they arrived at 18 Pott Street. It had taken them all day looking, in the Bronx, Greenwich Village, they’d eaten lunches in the car. Night on Chatham Square. The October wind was starting to rise like a phantom in the streets. There were some streets cobblestoned—some black like the dog. The elevated was overhead, dirty, crashing, dropping sparks. They were around the corner from Bowery Street, not directly under the El. Bouge, Saloon was written on the little stick-legs of old women who passed, their mouths bite-bottle broken. Workers came out of nearby shops, pessimistic because of facts. Over the old roof of the loft could be seen high office buildings with white and blue profound lights; below, the red neons of bars made red creams on the sidewalks of dust and spit. It seemed there were phantoms climbing the sides of the buildings that were like Italian palaces. There was a big brown sick light quivering and eating in the sky in little pieces like rats in the wind of God; that was high over the city, it told a story funnier than dramatic; New York wasn’t as bad as the angel of its rainbow that jumped out of all the sad lights and arranged itself in the Profundity as if to see what it had lit; a cloud a bitch to understand when you look. Little Pott Street was illuminated a queer rose, half Chinatown and half the Bowery of warehouses.
“Listen, Bill,” said Pomeray, “I know you think I’m just a damn bum—after the last time we got out of the car in Butte when you was working your Blackjack table and I told you the boys was waiting for me in Cheyenne—that’s another story—I’m gonna hit all the barbershops in New York tomorrow, we’ll see if I’m just a drunk without no hands—mm?”
“Think nothing like that,” Bull told him. “My sister told me to help you when I could—you and little Dean—”
“Okay, alright!” the old man cried, almost in tears, leaning to hear, little Dean watching his father full face in wanting to understand.
“—and so I don’t think no bad thoughts about you”—Bull said not listening—“but I believe you try like you can, even though it don’t work a hell of a lot—Come, my friend Ching Boy has a bed for you upstairs, on the floor but you can sleep there tonight if we don’t find Leo and the key to the rooms.”
“Where are the rooms?” demanded Pomeray, finger stiff so’s not to forget.
Bull looked at him with his calm air, “On Henry Street, not far to here.”
Pomeray wobbled his head; you could see he was thinking something else; that he’d already begun to forget, to tell himself not to forget, to see strange dreams that rose like walls in front of his mélange of images of what was going to happen. He had thought it out in dreams, head-on-hand, in big rooms.
They took their stuff out of the car, brought it upstairs. Rolfe was smoking a cigarette in the street, hands in pockets; a woman passed on the other side of the street, Chinese, Rolfe said “Fweet fweet angel, you goin home?” and watched her hurry home, his eyes pure and laughing, his mouth turned under as if hidden. He laughed. “Hyoo hyoo hyoo!—she shore ran off when I said that, damn!” He was laughing.
“What you gonna do Rolfe?” Uncle Bull was saying descending the high stairs of the loft that were big enough for ten men shoulder to shoulder, big enough to sit a surly class of taxidrivers, with little iron rails up and down the sides for summer sitters. Bull was interested in Rolfe, he had seen him once, in 1929, in Denver, in a winter when he worked for the Burlington Railroad there, the year Omer Leclerc worked the railroad with him. He had known Rolfe’s grandfather with the white hair, old Wade Glendiver, who was killed in the crackup with his grandson after a long life in the West since the 1880s when he’d raise his big black peak-crowned hat politely to Baby Doe as she came out on muddy Larimer Street to her waiting carriage and some oldtimer’d whoopee to see her, and it. For a time Old Bull himself had stayed in the white cottage under the cottonwood in the yard, the house his brother-in-law Smiley Glendiver, his sister’s first husband, kept on the property, a few feet from the old field shack so that some times you’d have seen three lights casting relative glows in the Western night. Smiley had been mayor of a small town in his time . . .
“No,” said Rolfe, who had grown up in the big house, always had one car after another, hot rods, before he’d left to work on ranches, sick to return home, “no, I’m goin for a walk, see the city,” and was leaving.
“There’s a hotel down the street, rooms, if you want a room,” said Uncle Bull. “You got a little money of your own? We’ll make out here—I bought eggs and some coffee, bread, potatoes, I’m gonna make a big supper for the boys—We’re going to wait for Leo, my nephew from Massachusetts. You never knew him, your mother was his aunt.” Rolfe couldn’t hear what he was saying in the wind, from the hole in the side of his mouth—in the impossibleness.
Rolfe pushed his hat over his eyes and went down the street in his cowboy boots. “Yay, I’ll be back.”
How dark it was in the windows of the loft—little Dean from behind the drapes was watching the wind that had eaten Rolfe. On the other side of the street he could see a room, with a bulb, an old bed, a box on the window, a little Chinese boy who cried on a chair near a glass of water, a great shadow that walked one side of the light to the other. In Bowery Street he saw bums pass; there was one in a white shirt, no coat in the cold night, and big red nose impossibly bloated, walking lost, eight cents in hand, and his hand clenched—in back of him gangs of drunks in black clothes, one had a baseball hat, another an Army greatcoat, the generals of the dust were throwing themselves down the street to the hole.
Dean’s father was dressed in an old impossibly eaten coat, and an old black hat that looked like he’d picked it up on the side of the railroad track—a floppy hat willynilly rolled by rain, shroudy, like a cowboy with one eye and a little pointed head—He too his nose was red—his whole face, red and sad—He spoke in a little voice you could hardly hear. He had blue Irish eyes. In Denver sometimes, when little Dean stayed at the Glendivers to assuage the conscience of the grandmother, the father lived in an abandoned house under a viaduct; he read old pocketbooks there that he found among shitpiles of bums, shoes, bottles, pieces of house plaster. He was a real impossible bum. You could see him from the viaduct walking sadly among the immense six foot weeds of his yard, his piles of boards he never used, the cover of a magazine in his hand, rolling like a sad old ball in disaster. “If
I can find another paper bag to re-inforce my bag—it won’t make no difference if it’s already been wet—If I could find three!” He wasn’t forty-three years old but he looked sixty. He drank wine with hair-heavy-greasy maned Indians in the livingrooms of the abandoned houses—sometimes in the cellars when they got afraid.
Little Dean was dressed in big jeans, torn in one knee a lot, and sneakers and a little Navy pea coat for children given to him by the Glendivers. He almost looked like his father but only in the eyes. He had passed his boyhood between his father and the Glendivers. It was only eight years before, in 1927, that Dean was born, in Salt Lake City; at a time when for some Godforsaken reason, some forgotten pitiably American restless reason his father and mother were driving in a jalopy from Iowa to L.A. in search of something, maybe they figured to start an orange grove or find a rich uncle, Dean himself never found out, a reason long buried in the sad heap of the night, a reason that nevertheless in 1927 caused them to fix their eyes anxiously and with throat-choking hope over the sad swath of brokendown headlamps shining brown on the road . . . the road that sorrowed into the darkness and huge unbelievable American nightland like an arrow. Dean was born in a charity hospital. A few weeks later the jaloppy clanked right on; so that now there were three pairs of eyes watching the unspeakable road roll in on Paw’s radiator cap as it steadfastly penetrated the night like the poor shield of themselves, the little Pomeray family, lost, the gaunt crazy father with the floppy slouched hat that made him look like a brokendown Okie Shadow, the dreaming mother in a cotton dress purchased on a happier afternoon in some excited Saturday five-and-ten, the frightened infant. Poor mother of Dean Pomeray what were your thoughts in 1927? Somehow or other, they soon came back to Denver over the same raw road; somehow or other nothing worked out right the way they wanted; without a doubt they had a thousand unspecified troubles and knotted their fists in despair somewhere outside a house and under a tree where something went wrong, grievously and eternally wrong, enough to kill people; all the loneliness, remorse and chagrin in the world piled on their heads like indignities from heaven. Oh mother of Dean Pomeray, but was there secretly in you a lovely memory of a jovial Sunday afternoon back home when you were famous and beloved among friends and family, and young?—when maybe you saw your father standing among the men, laughing, and you crossed the celebrated human floor of the then-particular beloved stage to him (to put a rose on his coat). Was it from lack of life, lack of haunted pain and memories, lack of sons and trouble and speechless desire that you died, or was it from excess of death? She died in Denver before Dean was old enough to talk to her. Dean grew up with a childhood vision of her standing in the strange antique light of 1930—which is no different than the light of today or the light when Xerxes’ fleets confused the waves, or Agamemnon wailed—in some kind of living room with beads hanging from the door, apparently at a period in the life of old Pomeray when he was making good money at his barber trade and they had a good home. But after she died he became one of the most tottering bums of Larimer Street, making futile attempts at first to work as a fieldhand for his wife’s farming family outside Denver (the Glendivers) to make a home for Baby Dean but leaving him there in good hands to hop a freight for Texas to escape the Colorado winters, beginning a lifetime swirl of hoboing into which little Dean himself was sometimes sucked later on, when at intervals, childlike, he preferred leaving the security of his Ma’s relatives, which included sharing a bedroom with his stepbrother, going to school, and altar-boying at a local Catholic church, to live with his father in flophouses. Nights long ago on the brawling sidewalks of Larimer Street when the Depression hobo was there by the thousands, sometimes in great sad lines black with soot in the rainy dark of Thirties newsreels, men with sober downturned mouths huddled in old coats waiting in line for misery. Dean used to stand in front of alleys begging for nickels while his father, red-eyed, in baggy pants, hid in the back with some old bum crony called Rex who was no king but just an American who had never outgrown the boyish desire to lie down on the sidewalk which he did year round from coast to coast; the two of them hiding and sometimes having long excited conversations until the kid had enough nickels to make up a bottle of wine, when it was time to hit the liquor store and go down under ramps and railroad embankments and light a small fire with cardboard boxes and naily boards and sit on overturned buckets or oily old treestumps, the boy on the outer edges of the fire, the men in its momentous and legendary glow, and drink the wine. “Wheeoo! Hand me that damn bottle ’fore I knock somebody’s head in!”
This was the chagrin of bums suddenly becoming wild joy, the switchover from all the poor lonely woe of one like Pomeray having to count pennies on streetcorners with the wind blowing his dirty hair over his snarling, puffy, disgruntled face, his revulsion burping and scratching a lonely crotch at flophouse sinks, his agony waking up on a strange floor (if a floor at all) with his mad mind reeling in a million disorderly images of damnation and strangulation in a world too horrible to stand and yet so full of sweet nameless moments worth living for that he couldn’t say no to it completely without committing some terrified sin, attacked repeatedly by images of horrible joy making him twitch and marvel and gasp as before visions of heart-wrenching hell penetrating up through life from unnumberable hullabalooing voices screaming in insanity below, with piteous memories, the sweet and nameless ones, that reached back to fleecy cradle days to make him sob, finally sinking to the floor of some brokendown pisshouse to wrap around the bowl and maybe die as he certainly would some day—this misery with a bottle of wine was twisted around in his brain like a nerve and the tremendous joy of the really powerful drunk filled the night with shouts and who knows what huge illumination from out his bulging power-mad eyes like floodlights. On Larimer Street old Pomeray was known as The Barber, occasionally working near the Greeley Hotel in a really terrible barbershop with a great unswept floor of bums’ hair, and a shelf sagging under so many bottles of bay rum that you’d think the shop was on an ocean going vessel and it had been stocked for a six months’ siege. In this drunken tonsorial pissery called a barbershop because hair was cut off your head from the top of the ears down old Pomeray, with the same tender befuddlement with which he sometimes lifted garbage barrels to city disposal trucks during blizzards and emergencies or passed wrenches in the most tragic, becluttered, greasedark auto body shop west of the Mississippi (Arapahoe Garage by name where they even hired him), tiptoed around a barber chair with scissor and comb, razor and mug to make sure not to stumble, and cut the hairs of blacknecked hoboes who had such vast lugubrious personalities that they sometimes sat stiffly at attention for the big event for a whole hour.
“Well now say, Dean, how’ve been things in the hotel this summer; anybody I know kick the bucket or which. Dan was up at Chilian Jack’s when I passed through, said he forgot if you remembered that fifty cents he owed you.”
“Can’t talk right now Jim till I get the side of Bob’s head done—hold on just a second whilst I raise up that shade.”
And a great huge clock tocked these dim old hours away while young Dean sat in the stove corner (in cold weather) reading the comic pages, not only reading but examining for hours the face and paunch of Major Hoople, his fez, the poor funny chairs in his house, the sad sickening faces of his hecklers who always seemed to be eating at the table, the whole pitiful world in back of it including maybe a faint cloud in the distance, or a bird dreamed in a single wavery line over the boardfence, and the eternal mystery of the dialog balloon hiding parts of the visible universe just for speech; that and Out Our Way, the ragdoll rueful cowboys and factory workers who always seemed to be chewing wads of food and wrapping themselves miserably around fenceposts in the great sorrowful burden of a joke and of time; yet most amazing of all the clouds, the clouds that in the cartoon sky had all the nostalgia of sweet and haunted distance that pictures give them and yet were the same lost clouds that always called Dean’s attention to his immortal destiny when suddenly seen from
a window or through houses on a June afternoon, lamby clouds of babyhood and eternity, making him think, “Poor world that has to have clouds for afternoons and the meadows I lost”; sometimes doing this, or looking at the sad brown or green tint pictures of troubled lovers in sensual livingrooms of True Confessions magazine, his foretaste of wild pornographical joys to come; sometimes, though, only fixing his eyes on the mosaic of the tiles on the barbershop floor where each little square could be peeled back ad infinitum, tiny leaf by tiny leaf, revealing in wee encyclopedia the complete history of every person in existence as far back as the beginning, the whole thing a dazzling sight when he raised his eyes from one tile and absorbed all the others and saw the crazy huge infinity of the world swimming. In warm weather he sat out on the sidewalk on a box between the barbershop and a movie that was so beat that it could only be called a C or a D movie; the Capricio, with motes of dusty sunshine swimming down past the slats of the box office in drowsical midafternoon, the lady of the tickets dreaming with nothing to do as from the dank maw of the movie, cool, dark, and perfumed with seats, and as bums slept, roared the gunshots and hoofbeats of the world, baggy-eyed riders who drank too much in bars around Hollywood galloping in the moonlight photographed from the back of a truck in dusty California roads, with a pathetic human plot worked in to make everybody overlook that the riders really are themselves. What disappointment came then into little Dean’s eyes who didn’t have a dime to see the show; not even a penny sometimes to take ten minutes selecting a candy from a lovely becluttered counter in a poor dark candy store where also there were celluloid toys gathering dust as those same immortal clouds passed over the street outside; the look of disappointment he had on those nights when he sat amidst the haha-ing harsh yellings of the bums under the bridge with the bottle, when he knew that the men who were rich tonight were his brothers but they were brothers who had forgotten him; when he knew that all the doings and excited negotiatings of life which included even the pitiful acquisition of the night’s wine by his father and Rex led to the grave, in the end, in the unconscious end; and when suddenly beyond the freightyards in the mountain dark illuminated by great stars, where nevertheless and wondrously in a last hung dusk, a single red flame of the sun now making long shadows in the Pacific lingered on Berthoud’s mighty wall as the world turned silently, he could hear the Denver and Rio Grande locomotive double-chugging at the base of a raw mountain gap to begin the big climb to dews, jackpines and windy heights of the mountain night, bearing the sad brown boxcars of the world to distant junctions where lonely men in mackinaws waited, to new towns of smoke and lunchcarts, for all he knew as he sat there with his ragged sneakers stuck in the oily yard and among the sooty irons of his fate, to the glittering Alhambras of San Francisco and fogs and ships. Oh little Dean Pomeray if there had been some way to send a cry to you even when you were too little to know what utterances and cries are for in this dark earth, with your terrors in the malign and inhospitable world your every unnamable tiny pain presaging huge death, and all the insults from heaven ramming down to crown your head with rage, pain, disgrace, worst of all the snotted poverty in and out of every splintered door of days, if someone could have said to you then, and made you perceive, “Fear life but don’t die; you’re alone but everybody’s alone. Don’t you know the winner wins a ghost, the loser gains a sadness? Oh Dean Pomeray, you can’t win, you can’t lose, all is ephemeral, all is hurt.”