The Unknown Kerouac

by Jack Kerouac

  Off they rushed, these kids, to see Tchelitchev’s Cache-Cache at the Museum of Modern Art, to see themselves . . . They talked about it endlessly over their Pernod. None of them had looked at that painting long enough to learn not to talk about it.

  Phillip was still trying to find out what plan was in his making. He wondered if he shouldn’t become an artist, another Rimbaud. This became the big issue. Art! All over the Village the ghosts of 1912 lay sleeping on dusty bookshelves . . . and these little pip-squeaks were going to decide about art. And they did, by God.

  Meanwhile Ramsay Allen employed all the artistry in his power and made great contributions to everything. It was, as the French say, très formidable! We had, at least,—(this is essential)—a little collective womb of our own . . . in which to play hide and seek, cache-cache.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ALL THE LIVING DETAILS that go into the making of a climax are perhaps absurd, for maybe it is the people alone who matter—what they look like, what they wear, what they say, how they act—and not what they do. Fixed shadows, they may be, surrounded by a swirl of details, details like making phone calls and appointments, eating and sleeping, smoking and drinking and talking, standing, walking, or running, or sitting down, and rushing around in a perpetual human activity that is so mortal that no memory of it exists the next day.

  For when we remember people there is only one picture . . . we see them as in a mental portrait, alone, doing nothing but sitting for the portrait. We see their faces and the clothes they wear, we see their eyes and the way they comb their hair, and they just sit there staring at us out of the frame of the mental portrait, alone and quite noble!

  Perhaps absurd! . . . the fevered activity of their doings!

  And yet again, maybe it is the goings-on of people that attest to their true personalities. Without that which they are doing, they may only be shadows without meaning, and one surrenders himself to a serious error believing that the inert remembered portrait is enough.

  Personality and action! There is a way of reconciling these two, by seeing that the sum total of both produce eventually the portraiture that a person will bequeath to the minds of the earth. The portrait becomes a picture now . . . there is the person himself, and then there is a background, his background, cluttered with the ruins of his life’s action . . . Pillars of ruined purpose scattered over a moor, as in a surrealist painting, and the face of the remembered person staring out over the wreckage of his activity.

  At any rate, there was much activity, a mad flurry of it, springing from the events on the roof of Dennison’s apartment house. These activities began on Sunday . . . they tumbled over one another and began definitely to point towards a climax, as the saying goes. Then and there, in the hot August dawn, on a rooftop, Phillip and Al were swept up in their destinies like wraiths in the updraft of sighing life . . . It was Phillip’s moment of frozen realization. It was Al’s moment of consummation and premonition.

  Phillip decided that he would go away. And the moment he had decided that, it was made suddenly clear to him that he had wanted to go away for a long time.

  He had seaman’s papers. He was going to ship out with his new friend Ryko.

  “Right away! And Al mustn’t know a thing about it!”

  “Why?” demanded the naive Ryko.

  “Oh Christ you don’t know him like I do. If he ever finds out he’ll do something . . . I don’t know what.”

  Ryko showed the palms of his hands and quietly said, “Why all the fuss?”

  “The whole point of shipping out is to get away from Al. Don’t you see?”

  “Yes but you sound afraid of him.”

  Here Phillip looked askance at his new friend. “I have the gravest fear of Al. I have a feeling . . . that even if we sailed to a foreign land without his knowing about it, he’d be there sitting on the beach when we got there, smiling and waving at us, with five or six little Arab boys at his feet. Wearing a beret and cracking clam shells.”

  Ryko slapped his knee in appreciative amazement.

  “There’s something bizarre about Al’s power.” Phillip closed his eyes and shook his head. “Honestly there is.”

  Ramsay Allen, for his part, had like a child spent all day and night Sunday brooding ecstatically and turning over in his mind the marvellous events of the roof. Trembling from a most acutely sweet yet ineffable pain, he had nursed the aching and delicate events of a Saturday night, spending a whole Sunday at it . . . The most religious moments of American life are undergone on Saturday nights. Al had sat in his dark room smoking cigarette after cigarette, while the curtains spread and puffed in, bringing in faint rumors of 52nd Street, the jazz music and street traffic . . . He had sat like that interminably, full of soft and fearful joy. He hadn’t dared go out and find Phillip. There was something he wanted to preserve, some perfection he wanted to absorb before jumping back into the continuity of living.

  It was the most innocent day of his life.

  On Sunday afternoon, Phillip began to pack his things in Washington Hall for transfer to his uncle’s apartment on Central Park South. He threw clothing and books into an old suitcase while Ryko sprawled on the bed watching.

  For money, Phillip had to go to dinner at his uncle’s Long Island house in Queens. Ryko was persuaded to spruce up a bit, and the two of them went off to Long Island, into the wilds of the Bourgeois cottage.

  Uncle Pete’s mistress sat at the head of the table, gorgeous and formidable in the candle light.

  “Uncle Pete,” said Phillip after everyone had had dessert, “you’ll have to give me some money to get things I need . . .”

  “Sure, sure, kiddy.” Uncle Pete flashed a broad Greek smile with a lot of gold teeth. “Now you’re going to be a war hero, a merchant marine, I shouldn’t finance a war hero? I’m patriotic yet.” He handed his nephew a crisp twenty dollar bill, avoiding the look he was getting from the tall dark woman at the head of the table. “For my brother’s boy I do anything.” He turned around and flashed the gold teeth at his mistress. “The Tourians they got hearts of gold, and guts yet . . .”

  Uncle Pete had a bullet proof car in the garage, and spent a lot of time watering the lawn and yelling hello at the neighbors, dressed exactly like them, in shirtsleeves with dangling suspenders. It wasn’t that he was trying his best to be respectable . . . he was only making the best of a good thing. The neighbors liked him, but they grumbled when swarthy men drove up to Uncle Pete’s in black Cadillacs and spilled out silently, like so many footpads. The neighbors said, “I don’t know about that Pete Rogers!”

  After dinner, Phillip and Ryko wandered around the neighborhood, giving it the once over. They had been living in Manhattan for so long that now they were bemused by all this suburban shrubbery and lawn, with soft lights falling out of windows. The quiet streets were dark. The stars were near and dazzling, practically touching the slanted rooftops of the half-timbered English style houses. A million treeleaves rustled a vast soughing orchestration . . .

  “It gives you a tremendous feeling of isolation,” said Phillip.

  There were some small boys yelling and running around in the dark. They’d be calling each other from all kinds of dark places, and calling back . . . They flitted under streetlamps and disappeared again. They were playing some sort of game in which the darkness figured as their wild and joyous partner.

  Meanwhile, the Bourgeois sat in their well lighted homes, not deigning to notice the darkness.

  On Monday morning Phillip was up early to finish his packing, and after that went uptown and bought himself a membership book in the National Maritime Union. He cleaned up odds and ends, of which there were many with regard to shipping out in wartime . . . Then he came hurrying back to Apartment 32, to his friends, to Praline LaJeune, and was full of wild jubilance.

  Apartment 32 was on the third floor of a rather shabby apartment house just off Washington Square. You went up to the door and pushed in: it was never locked.

  Pr
aline was sitting on the couch with her legs curled up underneath her, having a cup of coffee with Janie Thomson. Ryko was still in bed, having his customary morning coffee and cigarette, daily served up to him by his woman . . . He yelled “Well?”

  “All set.”

  “Oh Phillip are you really serious about all this?!” This was Praline singing out. Out of a vague negative silence, she would sometimes cry out like that in a quavering sing-song voice that sounded like a denial of everything. She had long black hair, an exquisitely pale complexion—like Phillip’s—and a habit of reacting perpetually, as though she couldn’t assimilate a blessed thing that was ever said or happened.

  “Poor petite,” snickered Phillip dropping down on the couch beside her, “who’s going to drink Pernod with her after I’m gone? . . .”

  They started to neck. Ryko was mumbling out the details of their program for getting a job on a ship, from the bedroom, and a moment later he emerged in his shorts, with a cup of coffee in his hand. “Flaming youth,” he said, and sat down in the easy chair.

  “You guys think we’re going to wait for you to come back?” demanded Janie, curling up her lip at Ryko. “We can get other men better than you.”

  “Oh well you’ve got to be faithful to us boys out there, you know.”

  Janie said “Humph!” with astounding significance.

  Ryko grabbed Janie and pulled her into the chair, saying, “We can be flaming youth too.”

  Janie slugged Ryko over the head with a copy of Rimbaud’s Season in Hell, and at that point the door in the hallway blew open and in sailed Erwin Feinstein, all eager and beaming.

  “Well if it isn’t the parasite,” Janie greeted. “Have some coffee.”

  “Thank you,” beamed Feinstein, “I will. How are you Praline? How are you Phillip? How are you Mike? And how are you Janie? How are all the little oases in the wasteland this dreary morning? . . .”

  That was Feinstein all over . . . a ridiculous little monkey at the time, about sixteen years old, one with big ears, a huge vocabulary, and no brains at all. He dropped his seven books on the floor and flopped on the couch amid the human wreckage . . .

  “What’s this I hear,” Feinstein now said, “about you deciding to go to sea?”

  Phillip groaned. “Eee,” he said, “no! How did you find out?”

  “From Alexander.”

  “It’s all over the damned N.Y.U. campus,” Ryko said. “Now if Al doesn’t find out about it, it’ll be a miracle . . .”

  Feinstein jiggled his knee up and down from sheer excitement and said, “Why all the secrecy?” He looked around at everybody, playing the wide-eyed little boy.

  Phillip told him.

  “But why do you want to sneak out on Al?” cried Feinstein. “He’s so convenient!”

  “He’s getting inconvenient,” Phillip replied swiftly.

  And in reply to this, the little monkey said, leering at Phillip and grinning from ear to ear, “But how can Faust escape his Mephistopheles?”

  That’s the way things were in Apartment 32 . . . To add to the confusion there was a dog and a cat in the place. The little black cat, full of feline hell, prowled among the wreckage and disorder like a panther in a jungle of scattered books, bottles, pillows and what-not. The dog went on occasional tantrums, overturning tea tables and chairs, as though some of the silliness had gotten into her too. Phillip was her lover; he stimulated her constantly. You only had to yell “Phillip!” and the dog would take a fit and race around barking.

  The place was always a shambles. Janie could not keep up with it . . . You couldn’t keep a place clean that had become the clubroom of a dozen or so twentieth-century young intellectuals, so called. Either people came there with a half dozen books or they came with a bottle. And they all smoked, which added to the confusion. At any hour of the day, you could find kids in that place, in the daytime sitting around bawling in loud voices about Nietzsche and Rouault and T. S. Eliot and drinking coffee; or in the night time, scattered around sleeping in chairs and on couches.

  No one in the place—that is, Janie and Ryko, who lived there; and Phillip, who practically and unofficially lived there—made any claims to being Bohemian. Bohemianism was a lost word. But no place in Manhattan could boast a purer Bohemianism . . . It stirred like something alive, this apartment. Cockroaches raced around in delirious freedom . . . The dog and cat were always one step ahead of the mistress . . . a situation which in turn later introduced a little colony of maggots. No one acutely minded. The Board of Health has a hell of a time keeping track of all the real hygienic menaces in town . . . like the law, whose long arm can’t always reach everybody, into all the obscure little doorways where lurk the Danny Bormans.

  Besides, the whole point was that no one could ever be lonesome in this open house asylum . . . People were always pushing in the door and and shouting cheery “Hellos.” Young people don’t have as yet that stodgy pride, that sour fussiness which created the “God Bless Our Home” placard that hangs in millions of American homes. Whoever conceived that monstrous slogan must surely have wasted away a few months later in his cozy nook; and it is certain that he was no young man.

  Considering, though . . . there were some really comfortable easy chairs in Apartment 32 but they had rents in them, with the melancholy cotton bulging out. The walls were hung with bright watercolor paintings, about ten of them . . . They had been done by some unknown southerner: splashed with sunlight and green trees, they were. When the sun shone the apartment rippled like the inside of an aquarium from the moted reflection of these bright things.

  At the moment, now, a new arrival was barging in. It was John Alexander, swishing in from outside, full of news about what had happened on the Fifth Avenue bus. “A woman!” he bellowed. “I can’t say exactly what she was, Russian or something . . . God! She had a fur piece, mind you in the dead of summer, and a terrible black hat that hung over her ears . . . and a huge necklace and bracelets and four—four rings on each hand . . . eight altogether!” Alexander heaved a large happy sigh. He was a big aristocratic looking adolescent hulk . . . In the winter he always wore a white scarf, and gloves, and attended ballets and the theater with rich old ladies who had taken a liking to him. “And the lipstick! And rouge all over her face practically down to the chin, and flaming red fingernails, and this immense purse with sequins and enormous initials embroidered on it! Oh God!” he roared. Whereupon he rolled on for some time with his story. These were the things he was interested in . . . Old dowagers gleamed in his eye. If they sat behind drawn blinds in old brownstone East Side houses, in those grotesque black velvet dresses they all seem to take to, weighed down with jewelry and gloom and spite, John Alexander would like to sit with them, would like to be charming and while away the hours . . . Anything they needed, he would get it for them: he had the perfect chairside manner.

  He himself came from a wealthy tribe of New York insurance brokers. He was at N.Y.U., however, only to learn the business side of things. A few previous years at Yale had tuned him to the right pitch. Now he haunted fashionable shops on Fifth Avenue, and the better cocktail lounges. This had proved to be fortuitous: one old dowager had picked him up . . . She wasn’t heavy enough with ice to suit Alexander, but he did deign to escort her to the opera, and to private recitals here and there.

  His interest in Apartment 32 was purely academic . . . he had had Ryko do several term papers for him. His interest was getting less and less academic, however, since he had subsequently taken a liking for both Janie and Praline . . . Praline, from force of reacting, was always bounding up against someone or other, ricocheting, as it were . . . and it was plain to John that she would ricochet against him some time.

  “Everybody’s got to help me move my stuff!” Phillip announced. “There’s drinks in it, my uncle’s going to give me some more money.”

  “I still don’t believe that you’ll actually get a ship.” Praline announced this, blushing and looking at Phillip, in a kind of underemp
hasized complaint against the world.

  “Your ego’ll be severely jolted!” he warned jokingly.

  She uttered a piercing “Oh!” and punched him in the arm, blushingly . . . Her nerves were all shot from reacting in all directions from everything. She lived, indeed, in the smack middle of a bloody self-made war . . . She wanted Phillip, anyone could see that, but she hated what she wanted because she wasn’t sure she wanted anything. He was a great positive force upsetting her negative security . . . So that, refusing to admit to her life that she wanted Phillip, since that would be treason, she nevertheless being a very versatile creature, found some way by God to just as well deny her denial of Phillip.

  And now evidently he was going to be forcibly denied her altogether.

  They started to wrestle . . . They knocked over the portable radio which had been playing Brahms. The dog nervously joined the fray. Feinstein jumped up so he wouldn’t get kicked on the shins by the flying feet . . .

  “Oh God!” groaned John Alexander, who disapproved of spectacles such as these. He removed himself to the other room in a kind of a huff. “Really Janie,” he whispered savagely to her, “how can you bear those two when they start wrestling . . .”

  “For krissakes!” yelled Janie at the combatants. “You’re so silly!”

  There was a flash of Praline’s thighs, and a lot of silly giggling and shrieking on her part. She answered Janie, in the midst of her exertions, as follows: “Oh nuts! I always wrestle with my brother!”

  Praline lived in Manhasset with her mother and brother, and attended the New School of Social Research in Greenwich Village. She spent more time wrestling and necking with Phillip Tourian in Apartment 32 than she did in school. Which was just as well.

  “Come on Phil,” Ryko was saying, “get a headlock on her.”

  “Oh yeah!” yelled Praline. She proceeded to tumble Phillip flat on his back. A very athletic girl.

  It became very festive when Walter Quincy . . . he had come in search of a certain book . . . arrived a little drunk. He was looking for Lucretius; he had to study for an examination.