by Jack Kerouac
“Best line in that,” Phillip told him, “is ‘Aye, men have died from terror of the mind!’ Here’s your Lucretius.” He had fished it out from a heap of books in a disorderly corner of the apartment. “The rest of that is just an extension of terror.”
“Well,” said Walter, “anyway, does anyone want a drink.” It developed he had a pint of apple brandy with him . . . Why he was drinking in the middle of the day nobody knew. It wasn’t really a vital point. Everybody tried some of the brandy, and the pint disappeared without Walter’s showing any sign of sadness.
So there they were, the seven of them, and the two animals, and all the cockroaches, having a great time in Apartment 32. It was always like that . . .
Eventually, Phillip put his foot down and demanded once and for all that someone help him move his stuff. Ryko went into his den, a little room at the other end of the place, to put on a shirt. Janie followed him in there.
“Mickey,” she said, “don’t go.”
Ryko said “Huh?”
The girl forced him to sit down in the easy chair—this was the chair he sat in to read, or to stare out the window at dirty rooftops—and dropped herself on his lap. She was now launched off on a campaign to dissuade him from going to sea. All so futile, of course, because Ryko had been thinking of going to sea for six months without any visible signs of movement . . . He sat in the chair now, looking out at the rooftops, burdened down with the weight of his woman. A depressing scene . . . There were heaps of dust in the corners of this little room, as though the room itself were rotting dreamily, like its inhabitant.
He said, “Oh take it easy, we’ll be back in a few months with loads of money.”
“Mickey don’t go.”
“Oh boloney.”
As he said that he realized what he had done . . . She had an opening now: she was going to cry. He took her hand and bit the knuckles gently. “When I get back we’ll go to Florida or someplace for the winter.”
“I don’t want you to leave me.”
“I’m not leaving you . . . I’m going on a trip to make some money.”
She sniffled. “You are leaving me.”
Ryko lapsed into a general silence of desperation. “Even Phillip doesn’t really want to go,” she went on insidiously. “He only wants to shake off that old queer bastard Allen . . . He doesn’t want to leave Praline.”
Ryko shrugged helplessly.
“He loves her,” she said, going through the tear drying motions with the back of her hand. “He loves her like you’ll never love me, because you’re so stupid and dumb . . . I wish you had as much sense as Phillip. He’s an Indian.”
This was one of Janie’s characteristic remarks. She would come out with something that was entirely meaningless to anyone but her . . . She was an extraordinarily natural girl, it was clear.
“Well,” said Ryko, stabbing in the dark, as it were, “if Phillip is your Indian why don’t you go and bother him.” This was of course another blunder . . . Now Janie had the final and glorious opening.
“Oh you’re so cute!” she cried, and kissed him. “My little Mickey is jealous . . .”
Here, he had to grin sheepishly. But finally—displaying what was for him a remarkable sense of assertion—he pulled himself together and said: “I have to go on this trip. Good Christ do you realize that I haven’t had a cent of my own for months? I can’t go on spending your money like this.”
“You can always get that little job back!” she snapped angrily.
Now everything was taking on the proportions of a real domestic squabble.
“Aah!” There was your Ryko for you: if he couldn’t think of anything else to say, he said “Aah!” in great disgust.
“Oh why don’t we ever get married!” Janie said.
Rather placidly, he replied, “Oh we will some day.”
“You bastard, you know you’ll never get around to it.”
“Hell! Who am I to marry? And who are you thinking you want to marry, Rockefeller?”
Janie had a trust fund in her name, providing her with some thirty odd dollars a week . . . On top of this, her father in Denver kept sending her money every time he wrote a letter. Her father was a happy old widower who liked to spend his weekends at ranch parties out there, and write and tell his daughter about it. His name was George Thomson and he could drink anybody in Colorado under the table.
Janie, a slender blonde with a flamboyant almost masculine air about her, had deserted a rather insane life out in Colorado with her father—the steak fries, the drunken hunting trips, the wild automobile rides—for this decidedly more insane life in Manhattan . . . She had originally come east under the pretext of wanting to learn to paint. Her father believed in her implicitly, that is, he didn’t care what she did.
Janie had met Ryko in a bar. Bars are where Americans seem always to meet, especially if they’re New Yorkers . . . She had thought that this bony red-haired Finn was the most wonderful guy in the world. He was a writer, she told her friends, and he was a genius . . . Besides, she added, he was so cute. No one in the world had exactly that same shape of neck and back: you could recognize him immediately from a distance if you saw him with his back turned. They had begun by getting drunk in bars and rushing off to cheap hotels. Ryko could drink whiskey for breakfast . . . that was another recommendation.
Finally, after Janie had gotten herself an apartment—the ill-fated Apartment 32—Ryko had casually moved in. He was, technically speaking, a merchant seaman . . . After a few trips overseas he settled down in Apartment 32 to write. He was writing, they said, a huge prose poem called “The American Night.” This went on for quite some time . . . Ryko’s parents lived in Pennsylvania and every now and then, on the impulse of a pang of some kind, he hitch-hiked out there on nostalgic returns. A gloomy brooding drunken hoodlum . . .
Poor fellow! He was in the clutches of a woman far too shrewd for him, the dreaming Finn . . . Still, if it wasn’t a matter of being in someone’s clutches, he was otherwise lost. It was hard to say what Janie wanted of him. She supported him, she ministered to his every need . . . He never worked any more. He never even helped with the dishes . . . There was just enough of the dance-hall romeo in him to save his life, that’s it.
“I don’t want you to go to sea,” Janie now said firmly.
“I’m going.”
“Then you can go to hell.”
There was a lot of noise in the front room. Everybody was getting ready to go and move Phillip’s junk . . . Janie went into the bedroom to pout. There were all kinds of convenient rooms in the place for the kids to brood and pout in.
“Janie doesn’t want to come,” Ryko confessed guiltily.
“Come on Janie!” they yelled. There was no answer.
“There’ll be drinks in it,” Phillip said at the door of her bedroom. “Come on, we’ll have fun.”
Janie said nothing and hid her face in the pillows. Ryko went over to pacify her. He said a few words and got no reply either.
“Well let’s go,” he said, and everybody started out. “Sure you don’t want to come?” he threw back. There was no answer . . . The dog glared at him.
They went around the corner to Phillip’s place, Feinstein and Quincy disengaging themselves from the party because they had something else to do. It was arresting, in Phillip’s room, to see a picture of his father on the wall, with the penitentiary numbers underneath. Beside this display, there hung a masochist whip from a nail. Phillip tenderly laid away the poster of his father and the masochist whip in a box. He had reproductions of paintings, chiefly of the Impressionist and Paris school period; books, record albums, easels, an amazing assortment of medicine bottles, a saber of some sort, pornographic pictures, whole boxes of assorted junk he had picked up during his three years in America . . . It was all eventually carted down to the lobby of the family hotel. John Alexander, who loved to hail cabs, went out to hail one . . .
“Well,” said Mr. Gross the proprietor of Washington
Hall, “we hate to see you go, Mr. Tourian.” He was checking Phillip out in the guest book. “Allow me to wish you bon voyage.” Mr. Gross was a fatuous old man who smoked Egyptian cigarettes. “I must say we’ve never had quite so cooperative and charming a young guest.” He smiled as Phillip paid him the back rent. “And so now you’re going to sea,” he added, folding the money in his hands in a very courtly manner.
“Yes . . . you’ve heard the old saying haven’t you? The sea instead of the paint brush. Better I could not do.”
“Oh yes,” said Mr. Gross, “oh yes indeed.” He was going to say something else but the lobby phone rang. The taxicab had come, and Ryko and Alexander were hauling the boxes of junk into it.
“Mr. Tourian,” said Gross, “it’s for you. Take the call in the phone booth.”
Phillip dashed into the phone booth and called out, “Hello hello,” rather merrily.
“Phil?”
“Oh. Yes.”
“You sound surly,” said Ramsay Allen. After a pause he said, “I didn’t come yesterday.” This was Al’s way of justifying the present call. He had spent all day Sunday holding himself back. “I’ll come down today.”
“No don’t.”
“No? I’ve got something to show you, Phil . . . it’s about Neoptolemus and Philoctetes, an essay by Edmund Wilson called ‘The Wound and the Bow.’ It’s amazing how it fits in . . . with us. Really! Philoctetes you see is exiled on an island because of a terrible sore but he has a magic bow that the Greeks want, so they send Neoptolemus to steal it from him and—”
“Yeah!”
“Well, I guess you don’t want to hear it over the phone. Now shall I come over?”
“No.”
The silence which followed at Al’s end of the wire bore an odd similarity to all the desperate talking he had done a moment before. It was a kind of baffled pain, with confusion in it where Al seemed not to want to be pained.
“God, Phil, what’s wrong?”
“I think it would be better if you stayed away.”
“Better for who, Phil?”
“Better for me.”
“But why? What’s wrong? Is it . . . is it on account of Saturday night?” Al said this with such a soft undertone of assurance that Phillip saw red.
He clenched his teeth and said, “That was my way of saying goodbye.”
“Goodbye?” bleated Al, out of his mind now. “Where are you going?”
“Nowhere. I just don’t want you down here any more, that’s all.”
Phillip slammed the receiver down on the hook and barged out of the phone booth. At the other end of the wire, which he had just shut off, a great new despair was begun . . . He could feel it all the way across the city.
The others were waiting in the cab.
Phillip jumped in and gave the driver his uncle’s address. “I hope the old bastard gives me enough money for us to get drunk on,” he said, putting his arm around Praline. That was the way he put it.
CHAPTER FIVE
YOU STAND UNDER A STREETLAMP in the night rain and mourn whatever in this rotting life on earth could have consumed you and made you hate death. Now, instead of that, it’s gone, whatever it is you might have fiercely loved during your torturous stay, it’s gone and you’ve nothing else really to bother your little head about . . . You retch at the thought of the absurdity and the insipid folly of yourself. Or if what you want is not altogether yet out of your grasp, you can nevertheless feel it slip away in the slow death rattle all around you. Again, you begin to envy death, an invalid beggar jealous of the healthy young factory worker, to put it one way. . . .
The rain falls on you and you don’t at all care. You also realize that you have never really cared. Whatever it is that you wanted in life, that alone has made you care . . . Yet you realize that you didn’t really care, for how explain how placidly you accepted that which you wanted, when you had it, before this night rain, this time marking the point at which your desire has become an impossibility. All authentic desire is unreasonable: it comes when the object of its yearning is out of reach. Before that, all desire is willy-nilly and a bit drunk and silly, unthinking and vain. Now that this particular night rain is falling your desire has come to birth. Whatever you wanted is slipping away, and with the consequent slipping-away comes the first authentic desire . . .
Ramsay Allen therefore became desperate. He was now armed with desire, with it as he had never known it . . . He was now consumed with failure—which seems to be the only thing that can eat one up into eternity.
He hurried back towards his room on 52nd Street. He was mad with a new bravado . . .
Unfortunately Dennison happened to be entering Mrs. Frascati’s rooming house just as he bounded up the steps.
“Well, Al, where have you been in this rain?”
Al couldn’t tell him that he had been wandering along the East River. He couldn’t tell him anything except the facts, which would lead to confusion. That’s the way it is: the quintessence of what you are is going to be misunderstood perpetually by well-meaning bores.
“Why, I was just over to Tom Sullivan’s . . .”
“What on earth for?”
“Oh just cadging a few drinks . . .”
They went down the dim hallway into Al’s room . . . Al picked up a slim volume and tucked it under his arm.
“I was just going down to the Village, Will. We can ride down together.”
“Well, let’s wait till some of the rain stops, shall we?”
Al sat down on the couch desperately. Dennison made himself comfortable in the long easy chair. He said, “This morning I got a letter from a detective agency to report to work. I applied for this job about a month ago and had almost forgotten about it. Evidently they haven’t checked on the fingerprints . . . and the fake references I gave them. I went down and accepted the job, Al. They handed me a batch of summonses to get rid of . . .”
“Swell, Will.”
“I spent all day running around town to serve a summons on someone named Leo Levy, who is, I must say, a very elusive Jew. Give a New York Jew a few partners and he’ll get himself so incorporated you’ll always end up serving papers on the wrong party.”
“Yes, I suppose that’s the way they are . . .”
Dennison was pleased with his new job. It goes without saying that he was all through with the Continental Cafe. “Do you know,” he said, “that bartending can be the worst kind of work . . . I remember one time in Newark, I had a cold and felt lousy, and one of the regular customers said what’s the matter Will, you’re so quiet tonight . . . Americans always think there’s something wrong if you’re not continually blowing off your mouth. I went on that way all night saying nothing . . . Finally this regular customer began to take it as a personal affront and got very sour about it . . . Americans instinctively mistrust silent people, you know, as though they were spies or F.B.I. men or worse. . . .”
“Especially in bars,” put in Al wearily. “Say, I think it’s stopped raining now. Let’s go, shall we?”
Someone was knocking on the door. “Who’s there?” cried Al, jumping up. The door opened and Agnes O’Rourke stuck her head in . . .
“Hullo there.” She came in and sat down on the couch next to Al. “I think Hugh is being held by the F.B.I. . . .”
Dennison sat up. “Yeah? He told me Sunday they were looking for him. He planned to go down there this morning and see them . . .”
“Well he did, and he hasn’t been back. I called there . . . it’s the House of Detention . . . I called there this afternoon and they wouldn’t admit that they were holding him. I’m sure he must be there because we had arranged for him to contact me if he could.”
“Did you ask if they were holding a Hugh Maddox?” Dennison asked.
“They wouldn’t admit that they were holding anybody by that name.”
“Come to think of it,” Dennison mused, “I never did know whether his name was Madix, Maddocks, Madox, or Maddox, or how many d’s
are in it . . .”
“Well,” said Agnes, getting up, “I’m going to look into this tomorrow the first thing. I’m not going to work.”
“Well then, good luck Agnes. Let me know how things turn out.”
Agnes swaggered to the door and stopped there to turn her head. She always held her head a little to the side, in a kind of virile defiance and challenge . . . “I’ll find out all right. So long now.”
When she had left, Al went to the window and stuck his nose against the pane. “It’s stopped raining, Will, let’s go . . .”
“If you like.”
It was around midnight. The subways were crowded with people reading the Daily News and Mirror . . . Dennison asked Al what was wrong. They were leaning against the subway door staring dejectedly at each other.
“I called up Phillip today and he told me he thought it would be better if I stayed away from there. I asked him what he meant, and he said ‘better for me’ and hung up . . .”
“Did he seem serious about it?”
“Yes . . . it was all said in a very sulky tone.”
Dennison leaned over and said, “Well let it ride for awhile, why don’t you.”
Al compressed his lips together. “I’m going down there now,” he said after awhile. “I’m going to climb into his room . . .”
Dennison squinted at him. “Well, that’s taking the bull by the horns.”
“No, you don’t understand. . . . I’m just going into his room while he’s asleep and watch him for awhile. After that, I’ll leave. . . . I’m bringing along this Edmund Wilson essay to leave on his bed.”
“And suppose he should wake up? He’ll think it’s some vampire hovering over him . . .”
“Oh no,” Al said in resigned dejection, “he’ll just tell me to get out. This has happened before . . .”
“What? . . . What do you do, just stand there?”
“Yes. I just get as close to him as I can without waking him up and stand there till dawn.”
“You’ll probably be arrested for attempted burglary, or shot, more likely.”