The Unknown Kerouac

by Jack Kerouac

  “No that isn’t the way I want it.”

  “What you want is impossible.”

  “I don’t see why it should be . . .”

  Dennison said “Well of course he isn’t influenced by money at all, you’ve noticed that haven’t you?”

  “Well, he is, but he shouldn’t be . . . I don’t want to admit that he is.”

  Dennison said, “Facts, man, facts!” Now he took on a bourgeois père de famille tone and looked full at Allen, the black sheep son. “Why don’t you make something of yourself, something he’d be proud of and look up to. Look at you! You look like a bum!”

  Ramsay Allen had on an English tweed suit looking like it had been slept in for years, a cheap Sixth Avenue shirt and a frayed Sulka tie. That’s what he wore all the time, the only clothes he had . . . He looked like a bum.

  Dennison drove home his point, his plan. “Now I have it from reliable sources that there is at the present time a tremendous shortage of drugs in this country owing to the war. Marijuana is selling for fifty cents a stick whereas before the war it was ten cents a stick. Why don’t we cash in on this situation, get some seed, and start a marijuana farm? . . .”

  “Well,” said Allen, cocking his head to one side, “now, that sounds good to me . . .”

  “You can buy the seed in bird stores . . . We can sow it out in the country somewhere and come back in a couple of months and harvest our crop. Later on when we build up a bankroll, we can buy our own farm.” Dennison stood up to his full height and swelled out his chest. “Think of it, man, a field of marijuana as far as the eye can see. . . .”

  Ramsay Allen smiled.

  “You can’t get anywhere with Phillip or anything just sitting around,” Dennison continued. “Hop to it! Be aggressive. Why, some day you’ll have enough money to keep a whole harem of Phillips.”

  This annoyed Al. Dennison made him promise to go and buy some bird seed the first thing in the morning . . .

  That was settled. Now they were hungry. Al went on inquiring about the marijuana business . . . Now, there was an idea, perhaps . . . Then he wanted to know what did it mean when Phillip said this last night, and should he call him up tonight or just go down to the Village without calling, or was Phillip really in love with Praline LaJeune and if so should he do anything to break it up . . . They were sitting in Hamburger Mary’s eating dinner . . . Dennison ate his food and said yes, why not, no, go ahead, and stopped listening to him. He’d heard all this for years. The more this thing dragged on, the more Al seemed to obliterate his own character in an acid bath of anxiety.

  “Hop to it!” Dennison thought to himself. He could see Al, and himself, rushing around town, stimulated on cocaine, making money, cancelling appointments, telephoning long distance, pausing only to take Turkish baths and more cocaine, rushing out again, aggressive and magnificent, clad in Panama suits, wearing cameo rings perhaps, flying out to the marijuana farm in a cub plane and dropping empty whiskey bottles on the countryside below . . . That’s what he saw in his mind’s eye. Amusing thoughts! . . . What he liked best about it was the sight of feverish human activity. His mind expanded: poppy fields in Mexico! in Persia! He saw himself sitting in a compound with a Persian woman on his lap, a gun on his hip, natives to shoot at outside the window . . . That’s what he liked by God! Feverish and perpetual human activity, always one step ahead of death, unthinking and insane, while death made a detour and came around to pull you over to the curb at the other end of the night road . . . By God, give death a merry chase, that’s the ticket.

  After dinner Al went off . . . he didn’t know whether he’d visit Phillip or not. He bounded off in his long nervous stride, a lost sheep in the middle of a moiling herd of sheep he didn’t like. Dennison, for his part, had his work. He started off for the bar on 46th Street where he worked.

  There they all were, the monstrous drunken Americans, in the Continental Cafe, as it was called. The place was open all the way across the front in summer with doors that folded back. There were tables where you could sit and look at the sidewalk if you wanted to. There were several waitress-hostesses who would let you buy drinks for them, if you wanted to. Inside the bar was the usual chromium, red leather, and fluorescent lights. The regular sprinkle of soldiers and sailors, a couple of whores with two Broadway Sams, one fag . . . all standing at the bar. Three plain clothes detectives at the far end of the bar, drinking scotch. Dennison took off his coat and transferred everything to his pants pockets. He found an apron with a long string so he could loop it around and tie it in front. Then he stepped behind the bar and said hello to Jimmy, the other bartender, who was already there . . .

  There they all were, gesticulating and shouting and drinking, with the soft August night coming on outside. Madmen! The music bleating in the juke box, playing the refrain of themselves to which they not even listened. Dennison had long ago decided not to bother with them.

  The three detectives said “Hello kid” when they saw Dennison. They had Jimmy waiting on them hand and foot asking for scotch and cigars and lemon peel in their drinks, and more soda and more ice. These three were always in the place sopping up free drinks because the boss thought they would help him out in case of trouble. No one could possibly cotton up to these three, least of all Jimmy, whose work was trebled. He was winking at Dennison. Then he brought the lemon peel to the three dicks. Now they were telling him a lot of horse shit about how he was a swell guy and so was the boss a swell guy and he ought to treat the boss right, Jimmy ought . . . They had that burly unconcern of the plain clothes man, always swaggering around noisily and scratching their crotches, or winking at each other in conspiratory stupidity. They all carried guns, which of course gave them the finishing touch. The sentimental fools were likely as not prepared to shoot anyone who annoyed them, or at best, arrest them if necessary.

  The juke box was playing a song called “You Always Hurt the One You Love.” It was a big hit that summer. People sat in bars all over America nodding sagely as they heard it: they knew! . . . from experience! . . . you always hurt the one you love. Three sailors at the other end of the bar, Dennison’s end, called out to him. “Hey Jack, how come that machine never plays what we want?”

  “I don’t know,” Dennison said. “People are always complaining about it.” One of the sailors asked him where all the women were in this town, and he said they were in Brooklyn, hundreds of them on every corner. He told them how to get there, but they couldn’t understand the directions . . . notwithstanding which fact they started out for Brooklyn anyway. Dennison took their glasses off the bar and sloshed them through dirty water and they were washed.

  He stood behind the bar watching, feeling like the only sane man in a nut house. It wasn’t so annoying as it was frightening, because there was no one to contact . . . not a soul in the place, in anyplace like this. He expected any moment would erupt with unspeakable brutalities . . .

  The fag was being obnoxious with two sailors. It might break out there, Dennison decided.

  There was a sudden commotion at the other end of the bar and all eyes turned there. A man about fifty years old dressed in slacks and a light gray coat and hat was having words with the three plain clothes dicks. He was saying, “You mind your own business.” He looked like a man of some intelligence and wealth; his eyes were bloodshot and he had been drinking quite a bit, but he had himself under good control. It seems that he had been kidding the waitress and the three detectives hadn’t cottoned up to that. He stood glaring at them. One of the dicks came up and said, “Get the hell out of this bar, you prick.”

  “Who are you?” the man wanted to know. “It’s none of your business, as I said before.”

  One of the dicks gave the man a shove and a second gave him another shove—just like a relay team—until they had him behind the phone booth. Then they pinned him against the wall and began slugging him methodically. From Dennison’s end of the bar you could hear the pounding against the phone booth, as on a muffled drum, as
the man’s head beat back from the punches . . . They hit him for quite a while, about thirty times or so, in a monotonous kind of ritual, and the man didn’t even raise his hands. His knees buckled after awhile, so they took him and threw him on a chair. After a few seconds, the man started to come to, and raised his hand like a man pushing covers off his face. At that one of the cops scented danger and hit him again, knocking him off the chair onto the floor . . .

  Then the other two helped him up and dusted off his clothes and found his hat. One of them said “Jesus, who hit you, Mac?”

  The man’s eyes were glazed . . . he looked like a case of light concussion. He stood around awhile and then focused his attention on one of the cops, the one who had helped him up. “Thank you,” he said. The cop said “Any time Mac.” The cop with the man’s hat put it on his head, and then grabbed him by the collar at the back and by the belt. He shoved him along to the front of the bar and gave him a push which sent him across the sidewalk into a parked car. He bounced off the car and looked around with that glazed expression, then staggered off in the direction of Sixth Avenue. People stared back at him and laughed.

  The cop who had thrown the man out came back from the door laughing like a schoolboy and scratching his crotch. The other two cops were leaning against the end of the bar . . . one had a match in his mouth, and was shaking all over with laughter.

  “Let’s have another scotch Jimmy!” said the cop who had thrown the man out. Everybody in the bar was laughing. You expected the cops to turn around and offer a toast, they were beaming with such excitement, and before such an appreciative audience.

  Jimmy, for his part, took his time about getting the scotch. You could see by his face he felt more like serving them a Mickey.

  “I been around a lot,” Jimmy told Dennison out of the corner of his mouth . . . he had a way of speaking so that his lips didn’t move; still he left open a corner of his mouth to let the sound out. “I done a lot of things too, but I never got so callous I could stand around and enjoy seeing something like that. These morons in the bar laugh and think it’s funny until it happens to them. Now if it was my joint I’d tell those cops, now listen fellows you made a mistake. There’s plenty alleys around here, you don’t have to beat somebody up in the joint.” He rushed off to serve someone a beer; he came back and opened the hole in the corner of his mouth. “And then, on top of everything else, they’ll walk out of here and won’t even leave a dime on the bar. If they were any sort of characters at all, they’d say here Jimmy here’s a dollar for you . . .”

  Dennison nodded wearily. Jimmy went back to the end of the bar, in some sort of moral indignation . . . There he was, telling the waitress about it.

  The man in the gray suit came back with a uniformed cop. The three dicks were still there at the end of the bar but he couldn’t identify them; he just insisted to the cop that he had been beaten up in the bar. One of the plain clothes men gave the cop the high sign, and the cop turned to the man and said, “Well what do you want me to do about it, Mister? You say yourself the guy ain’t here. Are you sure you’ve got the right place?”

  “Yes I’m perfectly sure. And if you won’t do anything, I’ll find someone who will.” He was calm and dignified in spite of the beating he’d taken . . . he was smoking a cigarette and did not touch his swollen jaw and lips, nor call attention to his injuries.

  The cop said, “Well what do you want me to do? You’ve had too much to drink, Mister . . . why don’t you go home and forget about it?”

  The man turned around and walked out. Now the owner of the Continental Cafe had come down from his apartment upstairs and the cops were telling him what had happened. The owner listened to all this with a haggard and harried look. He was silent awhile, staring at the plain clothes men yet not seeing them, just worrying about everything in general that happened to him all the time. “You guys better not be here,” he finally said. “That prick looks like he will cause some trouble.”

  The three detectives looked at each other and put down their drinks. One of them finished his drink quickly and started out. They walked out together looking worried. The owner of the bar leaned on the counter and rubbed his scalp . . .

  In a few minutes the man in the gray suit was back with five plain clothes men from the nearby precinct station. They took the license number of the place, talked to the owner a while, and left.

  Dennison put both hands on the counter in front of him. The juke box was still playing “You Always Hurt the One you Love.” Dennison watched the owner go back upstairs to his apartment, shaking his head.

  There were no further disturbances that night . . . On the average there was one disturbance a night. After that, possibilities seemed to be exhausted . . .

  Later on, it is true, just about closing time, four sailors came by and said, “Let’s go in here and start a fight.”

  “No you don’t!” the owner cried. “We’re closing up,” and with that he closed the door in their faces. After that the owner went behind the bar and counted up the proceeds for the night while his bartenders got dressed and ready to go home . . . The chairs were upended all over the place, ready for the floorcleaner’s nightly labors. The floorcleaner was a little Negro with a big bottle of whiskey in his pants pocket.

  “I done laid down a hipe,” he kept moaning. “I done laid down a hipe.”

  Whatever it meant, it sounded awfully discouraging. Dennison went home. He read the News and Mirror on the subway downtown . . .

  When he got to his room he assembled on top of the bureau a glass of water, an alcohol lamp, a table spoon, a bottle of rubbing alcohol and some absorbant cotton. He reached in the bureau drawer and took out a hypodermic needle and some morphine tablets in a vial labeled Benzedrine. He split one tablet in half with a knife blade, measured out water from the hypodermic into the spoon, and dropped one tablet and a half tablet into the water in the spoon. He held the spoon over the alcohol lamp until the tablets were completely dissolved. He let the solution cool. He dropped a pinch of absorbent cotton in the spoon and gently insinuated the tip of the hypodermic into the cotton: then he sucked up the fluid into the hypodermic, through the cotton, leaving the spoon as dry as a bone. He fitted on the needle and started looking around for a soft spot on his arm. He wasn’t at the intravenous stage yet. After awhile he slid the needle into his arm and slowly pushed the plunger down to the base of the needle. Almost immediately, complete relaxation spread over him.

  He sighed happily and went to bed, putting out the light. He saw first an Oriental palace with dancing girls dressed in all manner of fabulous costumes, and heard the tinkle of their anklets. This absorbed his attention for awhile. It was an amazing setting, worthy of a Hollywood production. The longer he looked at it the more incredible it grew.

  CHAPTER THREE

  LIFE IS THE MOST MONSTROUS thing possible. The natural condition of the universe is darkness and no-life . . . It is space dotted with things to which life is some sort of unheard of perversion. The moon is sane, not mad. It is the earth that is mad. What happened on the earth that it should have grown life? Against the tremendous odds of natural conditions, life pops up eagerly, foolishly. The head of a foetus, a human foetus, is bright crimson with bizarre networks of blue blood vessels and veins . . . ready to explode from the very force of its own hot stupid blood. You could squash such a thing with a sledge hammer and there’s your pulp of red and blue nonsense.

  The point is, however, that there is no why. It just happened. Not even an accident, with that touch of destiny that accidents do have . . . just a happenstance. What a word! . . . happenstance! There it stands.

  One of the only things you can be sure of, if you are yourself life, and particularly a human being, is jealousy of death. While this is going on, there’s pain at every breath you draw, the knowledge of end in the charming offing, idiocy all around, and self-made brutality and distances . . .

  Still there are people who sit around and think about all this, whilst
there are others rushing around five or six thousand miles away, eighteen or nineteen years ago, introducing themselves as Persian princes to American women. That’s how Phillip Tourian’s father approached Phillip’s mother-to-be, in Istanbul in 1926 . . .

  In the same way that life just came along, like a mushroom or a cancer, and spread all over the face of the earth, for no reason at all, some time ago—in this same way, did Phillip Tourian come along. He shortly became a foetus. Grotesquely, like all the others. He never knew why, did Phillip: that’s the reason he spent all his energies running around from bar to bar talking to people: searching outside himself he wanted to know what little plan went into his making. There was none, of course. No plan in anything. You walked down to the end of the street, past that last streetlamp there, and disappeared in the dark. You were always passing, never stopping . . . If you tried to stop, someone was behind you pushing you, some little eager foetus interested in the brightness of the last streetlamp.

  It seems that the only thing life has to its credit is that it never learns. That’s the great cry of the Socialists: “The masses never learn, no one ever learns!” Of course not . . . there’s nothing to learn. They cry: “Why? Why?” And there’s no why. Just jealousy of death . . . or perhaps that’s simplifying matters.

  Phillip’s father was named Abul Tourian Esses Sampatacus Jahan, and there was a Mohammed somewhere in it. Of uncertain parentage, he was. There he moiled, in the swarm of the Near East, starting off as a gamin, growing up without question, selling rugs for awhile, looking around and deciding to overlook whatever long dark corridor of mystery stretched away from his wiry existence. What did it matter to Tourian? . . . Just once, he had given the matter some thought, in a moment of awe and puzzlement, and then—full of exploding red blood and surging blue veins—he had dashed after the first woman that passed and had never since troubled himself with what was obviously of no point . . . No one in the Near East, or anywhere for that matter, ever really looks at the stars. At one time down there, Babylonian priests had looked at the stars. But they were dead now. Who cares about all that anyway? . . . or all this? There seems to be just about as much sense in living as there is in dying.