The Unknown Kerouac

by Jack Kerouac

  “Ti Jean?”

  (AUTHOR’S NOTE:—American writers who write and speak only one language are lucky. I write in English but I speak French to my family. My French family on my mother’s side arrived in Quebec Canada a few miles north of Maine a long time ago. My father’s side 1756. So dont say we’re not North Americans. What I have to do here is transpose the French talk into understandable modern American English, and then add the exact sound-spelling of the old French behind it [the French of the Seigneurie], in italics parenthesized, in case any French people or French students are interested. The reader can skip over anything he likes, he being the Prince in this case here. Besides I want the reader to see what I had to go through and what fun it was to know 2 languages.)

  “Ti Jean? What’s the matter Ti Jean?” (Cosse qui à Ti Jean?)

  “Nothin, I was thirsty, I wanted a glass of water.” (Rien, java soueffe, j’voula un verre d’eau.)

  “Joe—Ti Jean came here to drink a glass of water.” (Okay, okay, Etc. Etc., I’ll now shut off the French and leave that to Heaven, we’ll get on with an English story, and why crowd a page?)—Uncle Joe came out, huge and fat and bald, with his great sorrowful Breton eyes, coughing as always, breathing desperately in his asthma, with his crooked pathetic grin. “I was taking a little nap, Ti Jean. How is your papa?”

  “Okay.”

  “Why dont you ask Leo why he doesnt come to see his poor old brother who’s sick?”

  “He’s only the other side of the river,” said Aunt Leontine.

  “I know.”

  Uncle Joe began to wipe a tear from his eyes. “All the struggles that poor kid and I been through in our boyhoods in Nashua and we buried our father and our mother and our sisters and brothers and he lives only less than a mile away the river and doesnt even come to see his old brother.” I didnt want to explain that my Pop was really afraid of seeing Aunt Leontine and yet I wondered too why indeed Pop didnt come see poor old sick Uncle Joe, I realized it was because he was all involved in his business and his gambling and his new friends now and didnt want to be reminded of the mournful Duluoz (let’s say Irish pioneer invaders of French Brittany) (and Scottish too) past of funerals, wood cracking in the sea when sailors and princes drowned, tears, nets, Iroquois squaws in America etc. “Tell your Papa to come see me real soon, Ti Jean.”

  “I’ll do that, Uncle Joe.”

  “I’m so happy you came to see your poor old Uncle” and Uncle Joe gave me a big sick sweet kiss and I loved him but I was afraid of him and he lighted one of his asthma cigarettes and I was terrified because I had been smelling them since birth and they always reminded me of funerals since the few times the family got together t’was for funerals. I hurried out into the bright warm December sunshine and crossed Salem Avenue, thinking for a moment:—

  “Will I go right down here and see Joe? No he said he was coming tonight” so I went on, took a left on the wooden planks of the Moody Street Bridge, and walked home across the great sad river of eternity which is that mad beautiful Merrimac in New England.

  II

  WHEN I WAS REAL LITTLE and we lived in Centreville across the basin of the river where it swung seaward my sister Nin used to take me by the hand and lead me a mile and a half to the Royal Theater to see the old Tom Mix movies and then, when we’d cross the Aiken Street Bridge, I always did see the Moody Street Bridge and to me it seemed it led off to the ends of the world even beyond the final farthest gray mist Indian-face trees and pines I’d first seen from my crib on Lupine Road. But now I was all grown up and going right across this bridge to my new home, and not only that but I could see clear over the rail, as in my early days (later than the sister-walking days) I’d started one bright red sun morning to go to my first day of school at Saint Joseph’s Parochial and Desjardins was walking with me and said, “Ha, you cant even see over the rail of this bridge can you?” I was shorter than the rail, tho I could see thru the bars, “Well,” he’d said, “dont worry, come a day suddenly you’ll be tall yourself and you’ll be able to see over the rail of this bridge and by that time I’ll even be taller myself and it all leads to nothing” or words to that effect. I’ll never forget the philosophy of that boy’s statement that morning. And now, lo, I could indeed see over the rail of the Moody Street Bridge and indeed it did mean nothing. Too, I remember the times when I’d come home from that parochial school a few months later imagining myself a movie all in myself a movie, or being filmed by drooling rabid happy angels in Heaven with their Chaplin handcrank cameras, “The Day of Little Jean Duluoz,” how he gets up in the morning, eats his oatmeal and toast, goes to school over the Moody Street Bridge, almost beginning to be able to see over the rail, and how he comes home from classes at noon, pondering sad thoughts, jumping against the winter wood wall of the bridge with the back heel touching (a trick, of kids) and now I no longer considered myself a heavenly movie but I was sufficiently nostalgic to remember those days and too, look with special sorrow on the little boy that I had been. That Moody Street Bridge—many’s the time I’ve since dreamed of it as having holes in its planks, planks missing, you have to crawl carefully over its battered skeletal structure and beneath you the March waters rage and foam over rocks like armies of falconry horses piling on, it’s terrifying, and the dream is always by spectral dreamlight, OON, and indeed there were some planks loosening and years later when I did return to Lowell (at age 32) and took nostalgic walks over the same bridge, there they were, as prophesied in the dream, actual planks missing and a wooden sawhorse put up by the city to warn you to walk around them . . .

  On the other side of the bridge, in my own homecountry of Pawtucketville now, was the huge orange brick Textile School with its great dreamy fields all around, and the dump along the river, down to which its dreamy mowed lawns swayed and dropped, and the eternity orange brick smokestack that rose from the little powerhouse in back, and its thousands of slingshottable windows, and the whole thing in my day dreams like a vast castle full of courtiers and I cant find my way from room to room and all the rooms have high ceilings and high sunny windows and the floors are hardwood floors, a Versailles of the child mind . . . But it was on the baseball and football grounds of this school that my gang and I played all our mad after­supper pepper games and doubleplay infield games and in the fall football, as sister screamed to watch, it was the great center of our imaginations in Pawtucketville, or at least perhaps like the Wall of Avignon must seem to the children of the slums of back Avignon where winds blow dry dust on Sunday afternoons and gutters run with dirty water.

  I passed the immense school, crossed Riverside Street, and there I was in the little French Canadian shopping center of Pawtucketville with its candy stores, hardware, drugstore, groceries, little thread shops and the particular candy store of our hangout days, Destouches’, where wheezy old mournful Destouches was always sitting panting (asthma too, I think) and when we asked for candy he’d say “Go behind the counter and get it yourself, bring me the penny after.” I always, as now, stopped there to look to see for the latest sensational display toys Destouches might have roused himself to get up and lay about, but no, if he ever did put up a new display in his dreary window it was a miracle annually. But the Shadow magazines, the latest, were there, of course I never had enough money to buy the newest, latest, freshest, most mysterious Shadow magazines, and Destouches wouldnt even let us look at them, but we could stare at the cover:—and Phantom Detective too, and Star Western and all the great magazines, pulp, that we devoured in our little lamplights of home learning the English Language as it’s always learned: by reading, no matter what the reading matter is. I went up Moody Street a little further, past the thread shop, a few tenements, and then left right into the little hole in the fence that gave egress to the famous “park” which was a kind of empty lot connecting Moody Street across three blocks of sand and grass, past cornfields and one long low concrete block garage, to my little dirt road Sarah Avenue of home where huge trees stood high and ba
re in the December sun waving gently in a growing wind and gave promise of steaming dinners at home where my mother had her usual New England boiled dinner and bread and milk waiting for me and Ti Nin (Ti Nin my sister was a sophomore at Lowell High School way downtown, she walked home too, but often got rides from boys in rumbleseats). This was the park that could scare you to death at night but in the daytime it was (now in December) nice drowsy walking, with the old grass brown beneath a few patches of old dirty snow, and our hoop up on the tree where we played our ferocious basketball games, and then the other fence, also with a hole, then the dirt of Sarah Avenue, where I took a left and walked along past Phebe Avenue which fed into Sarah (Phebe where I’d lived 3 years in my littler days when I couldnt see over the bridge rail) and down past a few cottages to my own, saddest of all, white cottage, 34 Sarah Avenue, with its neat little porch out front with white rails, the two front parlor windows, the two front bedroom windows (where Ma and Nin slept) and the little scraggle of brown grass out front separated and elevated from the sidewalk (with a little concrete wall) and the iron pole that stuck up which I always grabbed, jumping up on the wall, and swung around three times from the top portion sinking and slipping down to the bottom before my three gyrations were done, then up the little steps of the side porch and into the kitchen where the boiled dinner was steaming in a huge pot on the stove, and my mother, plump and pretty in her apron, with rouge and happy face, having listened to “Portia Faces Life” and all the other soap operas and the news on the radio all morning and washing clothes and mopping floors and singing and chatting with Irene Callahan in the little cottage next door, said to me, as a thousand times before, “You’ll have to go right back to the store and get a loaf of bread and some butter and you might as well get a quart of milk, here’s the money.”

  “But I’m tired I just walked all the way from school.”

  “You gotta go, Ti Jean, we’ve got to have the bread. You can buy yourself a Boston.” And so every day I had to turn back and go back across the same park, to buy these things, but every day I had my extra penny for a Boston candy bar.

  III

  AND SO BEGAN THE ALMOST DAILY RITUAL of my Boston candy bar. I’d always get the groceries at the same store, near the hole in the park fence, and come back with the bags and the candy bar, just a little penny chocolate covered peanutbutter bar but before opening it, and walking slowly, I’d start: “Ti Jean, we’re going to give you a candy bar and we want you to guess from the letters in its name what bar it is.”

  “Okay.”

  “The first letter is B.”

  “O boy it’s going to be a Boston.”

  “The second letter is O.”

  “O boy I cant miss now, it’s going to be a Boston? What’s the third letter?”

  “The third letter is L.”

  “What the hell? L? Why? You mean to tell me it’s going to be an old Bolster?”

  “The fourth letter is S.”

  “O durn it I dont want it.”

  “Alright, we’ll give you another candy bar, the first letter is B, the second letter is O.”

  “A Bolster!”

  “And the third letter is S.”

  “Well then it cant be anything else but a Boston, it’s the only candy bar in the world with the first three letters are B O S.”

  “That’s right, and here’s your Boston, son, eat it.”

  “O boy,” so, strolling slowly with the groceries across the park, I’d slowly open the paper and start in sucking on some of the chocolate at the end of the bar and then bite down into the rich peanutbutter material and chew slowly and savor and it was always drowsy noon and the taste of milk chocolate and peanutbutter in my mouth, how crazy children are, and it was always the dream of the Saviours sending me the letters spelling my bar, just like the old cartoon I’d seen in the Boston American funnies long ago about the little prince of the far away island who refused all the desserts that the worried court advisors brought to him: puddings, sweets, even ice creams, and ices, fruits, taffies, then finally pheasants under glass and still he wasnt hungry and wouldnt eat anything then finally you see the funny little Jello airplane landing in the outside dream Gretchen fields and out comes the Jello Boy with an inverted Jello rilled all red on a platter and rushes to the palace (cherry Jello!) and the little prince pitches right into it and saves the Kingdom with his announcement of the celebration of the Jello Kingdom or some such fantastic story I never forgot. By the time I’d reach the other hole in the other fence on Sarah Avenue the Boston bar was gone down the way of the princie’s jello and I’d walk home happy.