by Jack Kerouac
Old Bull Baloon (speaking of loneliness and the diaphanous ghost of days) a singularly lonely man, and most ephemeral, along about one of these years went broke and became so beat that he went into temporary partnership with Pomeray. Old Bull Baloon who usually went around clad in a poker-wrinkled respectable suit with a watch chain, straw hat, Racing Form, cigar and suppurated red nose (and of course the pint flask) and was now fallen so low, for you could never say that he could prosper while other men fell, that his usually suppositious half-clown appearance with the bulbous puff of beaten flesh for a face, and the twisted mouth, his utter lovelessness in the world alone among foolish people who didn’t see his soul in other words the hounded old reprobate clown and drunkard of eternity, was now deteriorated down to tragic realities and shabbiness in a bread line, all the rich history of his soul crunching underfoot among the forlorn pebbles. But his and old Pomeray’s scheme was well nigh absurd; little Dean was taken along. They got together a handful of greasy quarters, bought wire, screen, cloth and sewing needles and made hundreds of flyswatters; then in Old Bull’s 1927 Graham-Paige they headed for Nebraska to sell door to door. Huge prairie clouds massed and marched above the indescribable anxiety of the earth’s surface where men lived as their car belittled itself in immensity, crawled eastward like a potato bug over roads that led to nothing. One bottle of whiskey, just one bottle of whiskey was all they needed; whereas little Dean who sat in the rattly back seat counting the lonely pole-by-pole throb of telegraph lines spanning sad America only wanted bread that you buy in a grocery store all fresh in a happy red wrapper that reminded him speechlessly of happy Saturday mornings with his mother long dead—bread like that and butter, that’s all. They sold their pathetic flyswatters at the backdoors of farms where farmers’ wives with lone Nebraska writ in the wrinkles around their dull bleak eyes accepted fate and paid a nickel. Out on the road outside Ogallala a great argument developed between Pomeray and Old Bull as to whether they were going to buy a little whiskey or a lot of wine, one being a wino, the other an alcoholic. Not having eaten for a long time, feverish, they leaped out of the car and started making brawling gestures at each other which was supposed to represent a fistfight between two men—so absurd that little Dean gaped and didn’t cry. And of course the next moment they were embracing each other, old Pomeray tearfully, Old Bull raising his eyes with lonely sarcasm at the huge and indefatigable heavens of life with the remark “Yass, wrangling around on the bottom of the hole.” Because everybody was in a hole during then, and felt it. They returned clonking up Larimer Street with about $28 which was promptly that night hurled downward flaming in the drain like Milton’s fallen angel—a vast drunk that lasted five days and was almost humorous as it described crazy circles around town from the car, which was parked on Larimer at 22nd, little Dean sleeping in it, to the old office over a garage in a leafy side street that Old Bull had once used as headquarters for a spot remover venture and where pinochle at a busted dusty rolltop desk consumed thirty-six hours of their fevered reprieve, to the Glendiver farm outside town (now abandoned by the family and left to Old Bull) and where drinking was done in barns and ruined livingrooms and out in cold alfalfa rows, finally teetering back downtown, Pomeray migrating back to the railyards like the meek-eyed pigeons owned by sadistic trainers to collapse beneath Rex in a pool of urine beneath dripping ramps while Old Bull Baloon’s huge pukey tortured bulk was finally reposed on the plank in the county jail, strawhat over his nose. So little Dean woke up in the car on a cold clear October morning and didn’t know what to do, Gaga, the beggar without legs who clattered tragically on his rollerboard on Wazee Street, took him in, fed him, made him a bed on the floor like a bed of straw and spent the night thundering around in bulge-eyed excitement trying to catch him in a foul hairy embrace that would have succeeded if he’d had legs or Dean didn’t.
There came a time much later, after years of hopping around with his father like this and on freight trains all over the West and so many futilities everywhere that he’d never remember them all, when Dean had a dream that changed his life entirely. He dreamed he lived in an immense cosmic flophouse dormitory located in the Denver High School auditorium; that one night he was walking across the street in an exhilarated state, carrying a mattress under his arm; all up and down the street with its October night lights glittering clear swarmed the bums, with his father off somewhere doing something busy, excited, feverish. Then Dean realized he was fifteen years older; he wore a T-shirt in the brisk weather; but his beer belly bulged slightly over the belt. His arms were the muscular arms of an ex-boxer growing flabbier. His hair was combed slick but it was thinning back from bony frowns and Mephistophelean hairlines. His face was his own but it was strangely puffed, beaten, the nose in fact was almost broken, a tooth was missing. When he coughed it sounded harsh and hoarse and maniacally excited like his father. He was going somewhere to sell the mattress for wine money: his exhilaration was due to the fact that he was going to succeed and get the money. And suddenly his father wearing an old black baseball cap with a witless peak came stumbling fumbling up the street with a convulsive erection in his baggy pants, howling, “Hey Dean, Dean, did ya sell the mattress yet? Huh Dean? Did ya get thirty cents for it yet?”—and ran clutching after him with imploration and fear. This was the dream from which young Dean woke with a repugnance only he could understand; it was dawn; he was eight.
It was dreams; reality was more tender. His father let him put his hands in the pockets of his own coat, to keep warm, the same coat; they laughed and shivered together. “Paw don’t do that in his dreams,” little Dean told himself, understanding himself.
Some gamblers arrived to play cards with Ching Boy and Bull, young Chinese, one with a sharp blue suit and black shiney shoes; from time to time he raised his head from the game to ask questions in Chinese from Ching Boy, about the man and the boy sitting on the blanket in the corner. Every time Ching Boy told him something swiftly—because he didn’t want to talk about it—Bull looked at both of them with an expression of curiosity as if he understood Chinese. He did not understand it but was trying to understand what was going on and saw clearly.
They all waited for Leo Duluoz.
Leo was driving from Boston in his 1934 Plymouth, with his son Ti Jean, 13.
“We’ll go eat in a good restaurant, we’ll do our business, we’ll see a coupla shows, maybe the rodeo and then we’ll come back, after a little sleep in a hotel. Eh? Your mother won’t even almost know. We’ve got to help those poor devils, Bill told me and Omer told me, they’re as poor as Job. Maybe we’ll be able to go and see a coupla races at Belmont, ah?—But coming back we can always go by way of Narragansett. In any case,” coughing, choking on his cigar smoke, “in any case we’re gonna try to have a good time if we can.”
The father Leo Duluoz was talking like that, driving the car across the night of Connecticut. He was dressed in a brown suit, brown hat, he was a big fat man; the little boy was dressed in corduroy pants, long ones, with a sweater and a jacket of black cloth. Death was falling into their ears, in the angels, the future of their mortality; in the fog of the night you could smell the miguelle universe of St. Michael honey of the Guardian Angel. But both of them thought of the great city burning on the shelf of America ahead in the big darkness. And after the city, all the long United States, the big woman sleeping on the earth beneath the moon, one white leg in the North, one rose leg in the South, and all the great railroads that crossed her grand belly.
“Imagine driving all that way from Denver to New York,” Leo was saying to his son, “those are great distances, across profound spaces of earth, it’s not like our little trips to Vermont in New England, you know, it’s not buying clams like at Cape Cod.”
It was Leo and Jean, a man and his sad son, they didn’t seem to make themselves happy in the action of their lives in the New England town, they wanted to take a big trip but they bit the nail doing it. It had started with Jean sent by the mother to meet the fat
her at Revere Beach where he was fishing for a week, by car with Omer Leclerc, the guy the family knew who drove for the father, worked in the shop. But at Revere Beach everything broke, Old Bull hadn’t waited long enough on the fisherman’s porch, he had left in a rowboat to get clams, drunk, with two thin men who looked exactly alike who wore old hats with buttons who worked for the fisherman, and he disappeared in the bars on the other side of the rollercoasters. Omer couldn’t find Bull, had lost Leo; Ti Jean took a long walk on the beach with his hands in back of him and was completely lost from the others; Omer got mad and took the bus for New York, he wasn’t going to spend his big weekend looking everywhere for everybody on Revere Beach—if they were going to New York get going! He too was drunk. Once he’d almost swallowed his tongue and turned blue and everybody thought he was dead. Baloon, in the abominable destruction of their plans, took the train, not finding Leo; Leo was at the wrong pier anyway; in the train Old Bull played cards, with the boys, his big necktie hanging low, making statements to his partners like “I see the mystery of your trouble!” looking at the man seriously and willing to tell him if he wanted to know but the man not asking being charmed by the suave audacity of that idea, and not wanting to start a big talk in the little current of the game. Leo and Jean all alone on Revere Beach found their way and came out for New York; “They were taking themselves a trip anyway. Tell your mother we lost the others; that’s what happened.”
And they put their faces to the darkness of the road and came, through Hartford after much trouble, and came down to New York. It was a big night in their lives, it was their first trip together to New York in a car; the father had already come on the Boston–New York boat, and once by train; but now it was the big road, the actual black carpet of the city.
“Ah Ti Jean, and what you thinkin now, all wrapped inside your head? Ah,” stretching, “your old man ain’t able to drive all night like he used to—My rheumatism bothers me this week.” He made a little face, looking for himself in the legs for pain. Ti Jean had a constant fear of crashing, the mother’d told them to be very careful, warned them; the old man wasn’t such a good driver; but he had done a lot of driving, on many occasions panicked by something, the whole family crying out, but nothing happened; the old man watched what he was doing. The danger was supposed to come from his fatal tragedy, some accident. Everybody believed it—especially Omer, he always drove when he got in that sad car. The old man now sent the car headlong to the bottom of a hill of great distance with a white line in the darkness more frightening than a ghost. All the bumps of the road picked up the car and placed it like a boat: after many hours it seemed safe. “Oh it’ll pass. We started our lives in cemeteries, eh?” looking at Ti Jean the kid to see if he understood, licking himself. “Oh I shoulda played that damn Prevaricate the other afternoon, you weren’t with me, you remember”—seeing his little movement—“I started with a show bet of ten dollars on a 6-to-1 shot in the first. Came in, paid $3.20, I picked up a nice six bucks. I put six dollars across the board to place my damn black bum, the ten on the nose of the poor goat who missed Prevaricate by a nose. The black bum was third.”
“Third? It was close!”—looking at each other surprised that they understood each other’s interests.
“You don’t think I was sore Ti Jean!—your mother’d cry if she knew, I played my last twenty bucks on the top of the card in the third, didn’t come in, I left, I drove in the damn traffic of Lawrence, it was her twenty dollars for the stove—I’ll have to take some out of the shop again, I don’t like that taking out of the shop.” You could see the black brooding expression that Omer Leclerc was imitating in Leo.
“Ain’t it just the lil life! When I think about my father’s family—”:
His father Jacques Duluoz was a carpenter from St-Hubert, Quebec, who built his own house in Nashua; his grandfather was from the mouth of the St Lawrence River, bay of entry for the Bretons of the net from Armorica, the wanderers and fishermen from the last plâge of Europe, Ti Jean’s ancestors.
The L’Heureux were Norman, with an English name in their forest of humanity tree, but the Duluozes were Bretons as far back as anybody could remember, one hundred percent through, to the village of Duluoz itself at the cape of the Gaulic Celt, from Father Duluoz to Mother Bernier-Gaos who was a relative of Bernier the Atlantic explorer though god help her in her own dispositions among the floors and kitchens of our everyday cookpots and Fellaheen pans.
Jacques Duluoz was father to a fantastic, intemperate clan. His potato farmer parents from the Gaspé Peninsula in the North, by Rivière du Loup, which is up above Maine and New Brunswick near the mile-wide St Lawrence maw in those awful Baffin sweeps, a plain Mongol and bleak and harsh like Abraham, with all of them descendants of a Breton captain of Montcalm’s-versus-Wolfe armies of the City of Quebec; descendants of him, a Breton of land, and of the original New World American mother of their new soul, an Indian squaw. Her Old World Fellaheen heart was lodged in the Iroquois Nation, the Tribe of the Caughnawaga, whose fires were never warm enough, and whose blankets, pots, and horses were sorrowful like March when it drizzles in the morning ground. Crystals of the ice mesh on the mud in the stone, the gray blanket moves, vapors rise from the pitiful village of the original life.
There had been seven or eight Duluoz brothers, only four survived; that many sisters, most of them dead in childhood; one maniac, several cripples; figures fantastic and impossible to believe. The stamp of the wild Duluozes was the snub nose, and a batted mouth with the lower lip, curled, moist and pathetic, like great crybabies tormented, people for weeping and speechifying, with big throatbroken sobs, at the lips of cold graves, for sighs and wonderment, choking for too much, for rage, black sadness, baggy dumbfoundment in the face of the ever alien, the mortal truth; all gabbling with broken mouths in eternity rooms of life. “A-bwa, a-bwa!” Ti Jean used to say, at the age of four, on the porch steps of littlekid afternoon, imitating the sound of the Duluozes when they got together, when Uncle Joe drove in from Nashua in his old flap top Reo for a session in the parlor. “Oh mon pauvre Leo, my poor Leo, you’re looking worse every year, your rheumatism’ll kill you, we’ll bury you in the rain like all the others. Me, I cant sleep nights any more, I have to sit up in the dark—O death, death, la mort, la mort!”
Most known stamp of the crazy Duluozes, least appreciated, was the inclination to “talk too much,” bavassée, jabber all the time, a-bwa a-bwa, to which the incrustation of a few years’ midnight death-understanding and loss of a thousand autumns of sorrow would tend to bring tears, tears, tears—that inclination, dumb to prove sorry—The poor Duluozes well known for their excess soul. People in French Canadian patois said “The damn Duluozes, all they can do is jabber and eatin and chewin life to death, and it’s cry, and it’s cry—they’re all afraid to die.” And people said “They’re all a-scared to die but they all want to swallow everything in sight, round tous rond, ils veul envalées la vache tous rond, the whole cow”—the whole hog, pigs of life, with great pink tears in their eyes, if you hated them.
The original descendant of 1760 had been Baron Louis Alexandre le Brice de Duluoz and was presumably a baron’s son from a baronetcy in stormbrow-y Brittany sent back to honor the squaw of his barracks days, and to occupy a land grant on the Wolf River, his from the British because he was an officer. And if he was a Paris fop when his father yelled at him to go back and make a man of himself in the cold new world (that was the story) he nevertheless fathered a horny handed human beast of toil made fit for these howling New World winter voids by hot dull blood and pocky skin—Amadeus Duluoz. And Amadeus begat Guillaume, and Guillaume begat Joseph, and Joseph begat Ovila, and Ovila begat Henri, and Henri begat Jacques. And Jacques begat Ti Jean’s father, the dark moody Leo, and all those contemporary Duluozes. A string of tough farmers five feet tall with necks bent back in gales and eyes blue snow.
And Jacques begat Leo’s brother; Ernest. Ernest Duluoz had thin lips and an icy face, he had no particu
lar feeling for his brothers; he walked away from their funerals talking about his house. In fact he smiled at their funerals. He was a railroad brakeman and then a carpenter; there never was an American white garage putterer with tools and hobbies like the original Canuck with his miserly cold dead calm; no Yankee to out freeze him, to make a better fire on a cold day, use less wood, save more words. He outlived them all.