by Jack Kerouac
Just as I was returning indoors with my nail and ball and recordbook I saw the Kewpie my old cat merging through the fence, he was coming home for his food, we went in together and my mother saw him and yelled “Allo Kewpie, ta tu faim la?” and she immediately opened the ice box and mixed up his dinner in a nice clean plate and poured fresh milk in a saucer and laid it all down on his poor pitiful little spot in the corner of the kitchenette (off the main kitchen) where, as I lay flat bellydown watching him from underneath, he lowered his little nose and whiskers and began chomping away a big hungry happy meal. Cest tu bon? cest tu bon? I always said when I did this and he never did pay attention but just went on, with those quick movements of the head the way a cat dives into his next bite, eyes closed (like a drunkard eating) and chewing with quick satisfied jerks of his jaws and then how pitiful it was in my heart to see him finish that and move slightly on his fixed paws and turn attentions to the milk, the poor kittymilk, which he lapped sending little bubbles of milk flying around on the newspaper and sometimes on my close nose. This sight, on the floor, of a cat lapping his milk, is something a boy should never miss and always when I did this I’d slowly caress Kewpie’s back and repeat “Ah ca cest bon, ah?” and he’d agree by his silent lapping and one occasional green look of his eyes as if to say “The big nut is at it again, why doesnt he mind his own business.” But Kewpie was my old pal, about 8 years old now, the greatest cat we ever had for longevity and for general loyalty, whenever I went to bed at night he always took three turns against my chest as I held the covers up for this and then plumped himself, back to my chest, and slept till dawn with me, purring at first then subsiding with a few knocks of his purr motor into a deep easy sleep. But poor Kewpie was getting old by now and was beginning to scratch furiously at mangy ears. He was a gray cat, with white tiger stripes, and his face, with the pink nose, the white snout, I cant forget . . . After Kewpie had done eating he wandered off to the kitchen floor, stopped, bent to lick himself quickly along the back of the tail, and then a few quick scratches at his ears, balancing himself all the while with that graceful balance I think Da Vinci tried to capture in his pencilled notebook sketches, and then he wandered off to the parlor couch and turned around a few times and lay down to sleep, didnt like that (I was still watching) so sat up again and eased himself down in the cat buddhaposition, which is on all four paws looking sternly ahead eyes slitted, and thus he meditated in the gray parlor as cold winds began to blow against the window and it was time for me to go out and find G.J. and the gang. By this time my mother’d turned on the light in the kitchen and was preparing supper including a big pot of New England baked beans in the oven for tonight’s party and for my Pa’s hearty breakfast Saturday morning . . . Ma allez were mes chums, ma.” “Okay pi retrouned a 6 heurs pour ton supers, mue pit tue pit Ti Nin on va allez a Lambert cherchez les groceries pi apra cas on t va achetez laubre.” O boy. I ran out, slamming the kitchen door, aow, off I shot like an arrow leaping all three porch steps, over to my pole on the little sere lawn, where I did the usual 2 sinking gyrations, and up Sarah Avenue on the run, slamming my fingertips rat-tat-tat along passing wood pickets and left up the little dirt road called Phebe to Georgie’s house which stood there with a backyard that dropped a sheer 15 feet after the wood picket fence into a dreamy meadow owned by the rich man in the big mansion behind the trees, all fenced in and never used for anything except our big Big-Parade war battles or summer dreamings or rat-tat-tat machinegunnings. And from this parapet in G.J.’s yard you could see all of Lowell across the back Textile field and far the dump and over the river, Little Canada far away and behind that the smokestacks of the mills leading to downtown Kearney Square where now, as I stood in the dusk thinking about it, I imagined all the bright lights coming on then in the 5 and 10’s) and department stores and the people lined up for the yellow buses that revved there waiting for the scheduled time to pull out discharging Lowellians in every 10 directions of the city with big happy Xmas packages. But it was also a gloomy yard, something about the big pines that rose from the lower meadow and the general heaviness of trees to the left, something about the brown paint on G.J.’s house and especially the atmosphere and savor of G.J. himself (and his mother) made it one of the gloomy yet gleeful headquarters of my soul. I went in the little tar alley and yelled up to George’s second story window “Georg eeeeee” and his mother came out to the porch and said (as on many other occasions) “Yorva not here.” She wore long black widow’s mourning weeds, she had been in mourning for 10 years now for her Greek husband who had had a long black handlebar mustache that was the only thing G.J. could remember about his father as long ago he’d leaned over the crib and looked at him, like that . . . Downstairs lived the Goslins, with little Goose Goslin the head boy of the children but a little too young and too small to play with me and my gang tho he was a happy little ballplayer and even now in late December emerged from the hall with a baseball hat and baseball glove and wanted to know if I wanted to play catch. “No Goose, it’s the basketball season.” How strange it was, too, that little Goose bore the name of one of the great ballplayers of all time . . . I ran down Phebe again, heard cries in the park, and there he was, G.J., involved in a hot game of basketball with Rondeau and Scotty and Salvey and the Houde brothers, using a practically air-empty sodden little ball to throw against a simple barrel hoop that had been nailed to the big tree-trunk. What furious, ferocious, insane games they played at that hoop and with that pathetic ball! The Houde brothers, Mike and Pete, never spoke to each other much but when they got into these games with the kids (they were both well along as teenagers) their language came out in furious sneaky hip-whacks they gave each other while dribbling around, and they always got on opposite teams so as to deliver these messages more and more. Rondeau was a mad hellnecked screaming kid we called Whattaguy because he was always boasting, I could hear him screaming above the rest as the game furyated now in a dusk gloom almost impossible to see what was going on. But you could tell the game would go on till well after dark. They didnt care. Meanwhile what massive clouds were gathering over the sandbank at the end of Phebe, what oranges of sudden low sun showing, what bloody sawdust in the air of heaven, what snows impending from the grim secret hills to the north. How exciting it was to be in a keen dusk, to hear the cries of my gang, to rush up and join the game, to plow and shuffle with the crazy kids in the dark. Typically, however, old G.J. was all tired out laid out panting in the grass saying “Phew, I’m through, I have a cold.” Poor G.J. always thought he was going to die from a cold. He was the favorite of the gang, the funny guy of the gang, whenever Mike or Pete Houde shot sensational baskets now he lay there grinning saying “Ah good old Joe Joe Dee Joe Joe sinks another one” . . . “the real high de jo jo speed not seen since the happy days of Old Kid Shine, how are you Memory Babe” he says to me as he sees me come to sit beside him to dig him and laugh with him. G.J. called me Memory Babe because I could remember things in our distant childly pasts everybody had forgotten, like sometimes I’d say “whatever happened to that kid Ernie Noval used to know walked with us to the Dracut field and used to have snot coming out his nose, Henri de Bourgerac,” “Henri de Bourgerac! O you Memory Babe you!” and he’d grab a fistful of my hair and drag me around to all the members of the gang “I want you to meet high speed jo de jo jo Memory Babe the only and only memory king of the world. No kidding Jackie, how did you ever remember that kid’s name, when you said that name just now my brain stuck out a mile to realize I had lost the name in bottoms of my closet but here is shining Memory Babe remembering all all all.” And he’d keep that fistful of hair and chuckle. G.J. had curly hair and a big nose and big yellow eyes and was tall and skinny and funny. He had completely mastered the gang simply by being funny. He couldnt fight, couldnt play, all he could do was talk but with his talk he had completely subdued, me, Salvey (a great athlete), Scotty (a great quiet athlete) and even Rondeau who screamed so much you’d have thought it was impossible to master h
im. Rondeau was insane: one afternoon we’d gone into his kitchen to have a bread and butter contest, I saw him eat about 16 slices of fresh bread with lots of butter and with this he rushed out eagering for a game of basketball. . . .
Now the corner light, sending its yellow halo down on the dirt of Phebe and Sarah, was on and the game had a little light to send it on but the Houde brothers suddenly quit and decided to go home, still not speaking to each other but headed for the same supper table. Only Pete spoke once in a while and he was a funny one too, he said “Alright ye lads, go on with the game, old Pitou Houde is now going home to eat his beans and hamburg and will rejoin you shortly in the outcome of the season.” “Say Pete where’s Rubber Hoyle tonight?” “Rubber Hoyle is in his cellar turning baseball bats over his lathe and plotting next spring’s sneaky sacrifices and double steals and writing out his list of hitters.” “Where’s Zagg?” “Zagg is sopping up the brew in ye old club and is about to come staggering down Gershom Avenue piffed to the gills singing to the ladies in the windows and does he care?” “Where’s Mike going?” “Mike is going to his house to eat hamburgs and beans, as I am, only he eats more bread than I do and after that he will drag his weary bones down to the club which is operated by Ti Jean’s father the estimated Leo A. Kerouac and there he will bend to his pool with that famous break that sometimes sends billiard balls flying as far as Lawrence Massachusetts.” “Where will you be tonight Pete?” “Tonight if all goes well Old Peetoo Houde is going to be suqriting in the weeds with a local lass whose name shall remain unknown.” He was really a kind of a strange little bowlegged French Canadian W. C. Fields and we always followed him half a block to ask him such questions altho he never paused but walking right on home, Mike silent and scowling at his side, and our final question had to be yelled half a block “Where’s the moon man tonight Pete?” “The moon man,” he said, turning the corner and disappearing up Gershom, “is having secret conclaves with the great shadow inside the tomb of Dracula whose bats are about to be let loose from the belfry of Ste Jean dark church so that all you little piffles will have to close yr windows for seventeen summers to come because once they get in your hair you cant get em loose unless you call on old Petto Houde who knows all the secrets of happiness. . . .” And still making these strange speeches probably, disappearing, and Mike not even listening. We went back to our game but all sat down sweating in the December evening grass for just a second and sighed and Salvey said “I think I’ll make elastics tonight.” “Elastics, what are you talking about.” “I think I’ll put elastics in my ice cream tonight.” G.J. grabbed a fistful of Salvey’s hair and stared at him with loving amazement. “What else Salvas old boy?” Salvas was a slight, pale, nervous, funny little kid with big ears who was really my best friend in Pawtucketville but such an insane explosive type you never knew what he’d do next and it was his typical routine to come on with strange meaningless statements like this that always amazed George. Rondeau, a dark, wiry, proud-of-his-common-sense Canuck, “Ah pay no attention to Salvey, he’s nuts.” Scotty always sat, dark, paying little attention, always counting his advantages and if he’d had barrels of money in the cellar he’d been down there during the game re-counting and checking it with red ink. That was why we called him Scotty. His advantages he pondered were not always concerning pennies but, as now, saying suddenly in the midst of hilarity “Tonight I’ll spot about ten strings at the club and that will leave me approximately 40 minutes time to go down and see my cousin Joel and see if he can lend me his ice skates for vacation and if he doesnt lend me them ice skates I’m going to crush his head with a baseball bat.” “Why dont you ask him to bring Sir Walter Raleigh” asked Salvey, and again G.J. grabbed a fistful of Salvey’s hair and stared into his eyes with loving amazement. “Repeat that will you please, sir, will you please repeat that sir de jo jo.” “Why doesnt he ask Sir Walter Raleigh to go screw his sister?” “O you rat! O did you hear what Salvey said. O that slave Salvey I’m going to tie him in chains and break his arm in my hall! O that strange terrible Salvey.” “O that immemorial Salvey” I said. “That’s it that’s it . . . did you hear it men? IMMEMORIAM! the great Zagg has spoken: Immemoriam, a word I can never remember. When I grow up to be sixty nine years old and have 48 million dollars I’m going to tie Zagg in chains, me and Billy Chandler planned it, and every day we’ll come to him and hold a beautiful cup of cocoa, a girl, hot milk, cold milk, peanut butter, Bostons, Bolsters, Clarks, Old Nicks, Baby Ruths and a thousand immemoriam antiquities and we’re going to say right Zagg, say it, say that WORD. And Zagg will have to say IMMEMORIAM or he starves to death or we whip im to death using the long whip of the Zorro.” “It’s not immemoriam, it’s immemorial?” “Zagg where did you FIND that word?” “In the dictionary.” “Dont lie to me, I know you made up that word so that you could fool the city fathers and make your way across that river . . . Jesus it’s cold, I’m dying of the cold, boys I’m going home.” “What you got for supper tonight G.J.?” “Same as usual, porkchops and bread.” “Well,” says Rondeau, “I think I’ll sashay home myself and pile into them good old beans and hamburg and bread and butter and then see what I can do tonight with a little game of pool at the club.” “Me,” says Scotty, “I’m going to spot ten strings which will give me approximately 40 minutes to go see my cousin Joel and see if I can borrow his ice skates for vacation.” “And me,” says Salvey, “I’m going home and see if Joe Joe De Joe Joe got into Sir Walter Raleigh’s ice cream can.” And thus they all wandered off into the evening, it was getting cold, they all huddled in their jackets, I could see them parting at the corner with casual handwaves, great blear trees of December bent over their heads, shook over their heads, they all went off to home and supper lights and I went home myself laughing and thinking and came to my house and slid around the pole twice and there was my father’s Plymouth parked in front of the house so he was home so I went into the bright warmth of the kitchen to see what was going on but not without one final parting look at the huge silver clouds could be seen massing in the evening darkness over my apple trees and suddenly one snowflake fell and swept across my nose. This is a nice kind of thing to close the kitchen door on, when you’re 13, and when you have a father to pay the heat bills and supper bills . . . and especially when your father weighs 230 pounds and looks like he’ll never die.