The Unknown Kerouac

by Jack Kerouac

  “Dis iss de most continental bar in de United States,” she would hiss to them confidentially. “You vill find nozzing like dis anywhere else.”

  Then she would serve them a horrible drink called the Beggar’s Sip which was a mixture of cognac and cold coffee.

  Phillip wandered around the place restlessly, going into the back room where were hung satirical paintings. The flickering light of the candles from the main room illuminated these decadent paintings gloomily.

  There was an Italian tenor who sang there. He sang “L’Amour Toujours L’Amour” looking directly at Phillip . . . A little while later, Al very affably got to know the tenor and cadged a few sticks of marijuana from him. In a moment, the three drugged maniacs were all over the bar talking with everyone . . . The talented and effeminate young men played for them on the piano. Someone sang a dirty song. A morphine addict came in and began to perform on the platform; he collapsed a while later.

  Phillip was insanely happy that they had found this place. “It’s for this kind of thing that I want to go to Paris,” he said, and saying that, he hurried off and began to talk with one of the performers, a tall sophisticated-looking German woman who sang naughty French songs, with her long legs crossed as she leaned against the piano. She was a very haughty woman. There were rumors that she was a Duchess, or some such nonsense. She screamed hysterically when the homosexual waiter walked across the floor while she was performing.

  The dishwasher was a Martinique Negro jungle dancer who dressed exactly like a Liverpool waterfront Negro and who had immensely long hands. It was his lot to wash dishes while inferior artists performed out front. He told this to Ryko, who was helping him with the dishes. “You must see my dance sometime,” he said, and without warning, he stuck out his incredible hands and began to dance a jungle dance in the filthy kitchen . . .

  Our three friends lolled in this place until closing time, until they were thrown out, exhausted and broke. At least six men were willing to put them up for the night, in deference for which they preferred to carry on in the Bowery . . .

  “We haven’t seen our women for ages!” suddenly complained Ryko. “Boy are we going to get hell!”

  “We’ll see them tomorrow,” Phillip said.

  “Oh boy is Janie going to be sore, and Praline too for that matter.”

  In the Bowery they met a drunken middle-aged poet who offered to buy them drinks. They got drunk again while the man recited sonnets he had written. Phillip was very much impressed by them, with the result that at dawn, in Central Park, Ramsay Allen himself composed a presentable sonnet.

  They lay on the grass, on newspapers. The skyline of Manhattan around the park was barely visible in the grayish gloom. Al leaned back against a tree and watched Phillip, who was sleeping. Pencil in hand, Al watched. Then he began to scribble on a piece of paper. Ryko, pretending to be asleep, was watching out of the corner of his eye . . . There was the whining grate of a trolley from Columbus Circle.

  Ryko presently said, “What are you writing, Al?”

  Al smiled and shook his head; he wouldn’t say. In the damp light that was growing, Ryko could see Al’s disheveled gray hair, his crumpled coat, the stringy once-expensive tie that hung from the dirty collar of his shirt. Beside him the brooding black-haired Phillip slept, curled up rather pathetically on a spread-out newspaper black with war headlines . . . And Al was composing a sonnet.

  Ryko turned over on his back and stared up at the gray impenetrable heavens. Again there was the screech and grate of trolley wheels from Columbus Circle.

  He looked again at Al. He seemed old now, face contorted in thought and pain and defeat . . . Somehow he looked like a respectable Virginia business man figuring out the fiscal budget, in an odd moment in the park, as it were. And he was composing a sonnet . . .

  A policeman sent them off packing at eleven o’clock and they went back to sleep in another part of the park. Now the city was full of noise and it was difficult to sleep . . . The hot sun flooded down upon them mercilessly. Again a policeman told them to move on. Merciful night was what they yearned for, these three.

  In the afternoon it was once more necessary to connive against an obdurate system. The union wouldn’t let Phillip and Ryko ship out because they hadn’t attended a union meeting the night before, of which they had been of course uninformed. True, they could get jobs at the “open job” window, as it was called, but here were to be had the residue of jobs left over by the members in good standing for the use of the reprehensible element. (Phillip and Ryko, reprehensible as they were, refused to be placed in that unfavorable position.)

  It was Ryko’s day. He was inspired. Their shipping cards would be completely valid once more if only they could get them stamped by a union official. He put his marvellous plan into action.

  He and Phillip walked into an office in the back of the hall. The union official was talking over a phone, with his hat on the back of his head. Ryko leaned casually on the desk, waiting for the man’s attention. When he had that, he said, “My friend and I were not able to attend last night’s meeting because we were in Washington. We were just refused a couple of jobs because we hadn’t attended . . .”

  “What were you doing in Washington?”

  “Oh well, it was an idea we got last Sunday or thereabouts. As you know the Congressional debates down there are going on . . . about the Pillsbury post-war bill, you know?”

  “Of course.”

  “And we wanted to see it for ourselves. You know how it is, we had a little money, we got drunk and decided to go down there to listen to the reactionary poll-tax Southern Democrat bastards, who’re always griping whenever any legislation on the side of the common man is introduced . . .”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “As it developed, we didn’t get back to town till late last night, long after the meeting was over. I was wondering if you could fix our cards so we can get a ship today. We’ve no money left, you see.”

  “Let me see the cards.”

  The man took the cards and stamped them properly. Ryko and Phillip walked out righteously, like two brothers who have just been bailed out of jail by a union after a strike. They had identified themselves as liberals . . . for this, they could be excused for the sin of failing to attend the union meeting. The beggars!

  To add injury to insult, they went to the back of the union hall where a desk was covered with petitions to be signed. The petitions were all about the Pillsbury post-war bill, which had inadvertently just saved their necks. Over the desk was a sign reading, “C.I.O. Political Action Committee.”

  The two boys, who unfortunately professed no political affiliations, nevertheless signed the petitions gratefully. Phillip signed “Jean-Arthur Rimbaud” and Ryko signed “Paul Verlaine.” It was their contribution to the union’s drive for the common man.

  Al was now progressively growing more desperate as the boys’ success at the union hall, odd though it was, began to point to actually getting a job on a ship. He had devised a new plan of action: the more money he could get, the drunker they would be, the longer, then, it would take them to get their ship. So while they were busy that afternoon lying to union officials and signing false names on petitions, he had gone out and borrowed some more money. He came back at closing time and said blithely, “Well, I’ve got some more money here. No ship, boys?”

  “Tomorrow’s another day,” said Phillip sternly.

  And off they were again. They went and waited on Dennison’s doorstep until he came home. They all had dinner and then went to a party at a girl’s house.

  This girl was named Betty-Lou East. She lived in a cellar apartment not far from Dennison’s, a cozy little place with white-washed stone walls, plenty of books and records, furniture scattered tastefully about, and lamps here and there to light up the place. She greeted them effusively; she was very fond of Al, who was a fellow Virginian.

  Betty-Lou was a Southern girl and a Christian Scientist. She had very definite opinions ab
out Christian Science, and also about the future role of radio in education. She told them how, after the war, recorded university lectures on all subjects were to be played twenty-four hours a day on the radio.

  “That sounds Goddamned awful to me,” Dennison drawled.

  “Why Mr. Dennison, you are terrible cynical!”

  This girl wasn’t however bad looking, with that sullen slant-eyed look of the American Southern girl. Still you could tell that she would become a stodgy busybody of a matron in no time at all. She had a clumsy walk, which wasn’t a good sign, and a mind weighed down with new-fangled yet everlasting prurience. Right at this moment, she was as attractive and useful to men as she would ever be. After that there was no telling what manner of incredible enemy to men she might become.

  And she certainly wasn’t going to be of much use to women either.

  There were a lot of dull people there, some Russian friends of hers who came to the party with a lot of rum. Everybody was supposed to sit around breathlessly while she played Josh White recordings . . . they were so full of social significance. Ryko was ingratiating himself with Betty-Lou; he had taken a liking to her bosom, evidently. He looked more like a hooligan than ever before, that night, as he hadn’t shaved since the dissipation began some days ago, but Betty-Lou seemed to accept him as he was. Ryko put his arm around her and listened amazedly to her favorite records, listened, as it were, religiously. Meanwhile, Dennison was bored. To avoid conversation with the people of the party, he repeatedly took himself off to the bathroom, where he enjoyed a regal solitude.

  Phillip and Al were in Betty-Lou’s kitchen helping themselves to slices of cold roast beef and greeting her guests in an offhand way. Finally, in a supreme fit of impatience, they left the party in search for new guests, and returned fifteen minutes later with two French sailors.

  Things became very confusing when the French sailors arrived. Phillip and Al had managed to create the misconception in their minds that they were being invited to join in at a whore house party. The Frenchmen just couldn’t begin to understand that Americans were in the habit of rushing around bars picking up people to join them in a drink and a lot of talk, in private homes, on a respectable plane. Still, one of the French sailors proved to be obtuse enough not to believe that such goings-on actually did exist in America. He began obstinately to woo Betty-Lou. He was going to make himself believe that she was for sale, parbleu!, like she should be.

  At one point in the party a large brown rat ran out of the kitchen into the middle of the room. He stood there indecisively for a moment, crouching and confused, then emitted a squeak and ran into the bathroom. Betty-Lou cried “Land sakes! There’s that old rat again!” She hurried into the kitchen and buttered a Graham cracker with phosphorus paste. She broke the cracker up into small pieces and Ryko helped her scatter them around the kitchen and in the bathroom. Dennison was standing around, skeptical.

  “That won’t do any good,” he said. He had once been an exterminator in Chicago. “Rats get wise to phosphorus paste,” he said.

  “Well Mr. Dennison, what else can I do?”

  “And besides there’re so many holes in your apartment that all the rats in New York can come in.” He wandered back to the party, satisfied with his thesis.

  The party became wilder. Ryko maneuvered himself on the couch with Betty-Lou and put his arm around her . . . they were promptly steeped in an earnest conversation.

  “I don’t like, I never liked that Phillip,” she said in a low voice.

  “I don’t either.”

  “There’s something about him, you know, that I can’t, can’t stand.”

  “What is it?” inquired Ryko eagerly.

  “Oh I don’t know.” She sighed. Just for the space of a moment she had leaned her head on his arm. “I’ll tell you what it is . . . there’s the smell of death about Phillip. That’s the only way I can put it.”

  “How interesting!”

  Not long after Betty-Lou had said that, Phillip Tourian surreptitiously looked through her handbag in the kitchen and found himself a dollar bill. There were so many holes in her apartment, indeed.

  The party finally broke up amid crumblings of self-respect. There were effusive drunken farewells. Everybody straggled off towards his own hole, like the rat after he’d got the squeak out of his system. The phantom was laying out the phosphorus paste at the proper places, for the propitious moments. The Russians went one way, the French sailors another, our friends still another . . .

  Dennison went to bed again and the three drunkards carried on. It was almost as though these three were loath ever to part . . . Or as if they were sentenced to die, and were trying to crowd as much life as possible into their last days. They barged into Village bars and began conversations with all kinds of people. People bought them drinks . . .

  In the morning, while Phillip and Ryko slept on his floor, Al went out and washed windows. He came back laden with money. He got them drunk again, so that they were too late at the union hall to get a ship. He got them so drunk they didn’t care whether or not they did get a ship, at least, this was so with Ryko. Ryko was lured from all sides by any manifestation of life . . . Still, Phillip was charged with that kind of purpose that showed in his walk, in his actions, in his speech. He had become so tense and impatient it bordered on hysteria.

  He kept knotting his fist and saying “Eee!”

  “What’s the matter Phil?” Ryko would ask drunkenly.

  “Goddamnit this isn’t getting us to sea, all this drinking and running around. Do you by any chance remember that we were supposed to get a ship?”

  “Sure . . . we’ll get one tomorrow, don’t worry.”

  “Tomorrow! Tomorrow!”

  Al hovered nearby, leering from perverse success.

  Off they went again, to scatter themselves all over the city. In a bar on the Brooklyn waterfront they sat around discussing James Joyce, Philoctetes and Neoptolemus, the portrait of Jean Cocteau in the Museum of Modern Art, Rimbaud and Dostoevsky. And jazz . . . the new jazz, on which Ryko was an authority, the drunken hoodlum. They had gotten to Brooklyn on the subway somehow, perhaps by mistake. On the way Phillip had leaned against the subway door watching the small lights flash by in the tunnel darkness, with Al standing over him anxiously, like a poor worried mother, and Ryko sprawled on a seat dozing.

  They found slatternly Spanish and Mexican neighborhoods full of muttering and moaning in the hot night, and small restaurants and bars . . . From the bay came the deep-voiced call of the big ships. In the bars the juke boxes were loud, and swarthy men milled at the counters drinking beer and straight whiskey. Some of them were tattooed like savages and spoke of Peleliu and Guantánamo Bay and Oran in harsh casual voices . . .

  Every time Phillip heard the moan of a ship from outside, he winced.

  “At sea,” he rushed to say, “I want to re-examine myself completely. Goddamnit I want to find out if art is more important than life, or if it is at least life . . .”

  “You’re perhaps too young for art,” Al said, cocking his head. “It’s only when you’re discouraged with life as is that art becomes appealing. Don’t you think so, Mike?”

  Ryko was in a fit of ecstasy over a jazz record being played. He shook his head from side to side, he made faces and gritted his teeth, and didn’t hear anything else.

  Phillip said, “I want to find the new vision. There’s something new in the air and I’ve got to find out what it is . . . We can’t go on this way.”

  “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” cried Ryko, coming out of his reverie.

  “It’s allright with you, you’re an aesthete . . . the aesthetic of things as they are satisfy you because you’re a pure poet.”

  “Isn’t the artist amoral?” yelled Ryko. He slopped down the rest of his straight whiskey. Anything he had said that night was meaningless; he had been drunk for days, and he couldn’t exactly take it that much.

  “The artist I’m afraid is at base moral indeed
. . .”

  This is the way they had been talking for quite some time. They were like wandering ghosts in a city predominately busy with the realities, so-called, of daily living—and what they had to talk about was very thin indeed in inverse proportion to its enormous volume.

  “Rimbaud’s prose is what I’d like to achieve . . .”

  “Thomas Mann or Goethe or somebody said art was suffering seeking form, and there’s your Dostoevsky in a nutshell . . .”

  “How about another drink boys?”

  “You’ll find the face of the sea shaggy and familiar, as though you’d known it all along . . . You’ll be bored.”

  “I want solitude, solitude, when the minutes don’t go ping-ping-ping.”

  “What Joyce did was dig down deep in himself and venerate that sufficiently to transform it into art. We’re too irreligious . . . we don’t venerate any more. Christ, what’s left to venerate!”

  “Drink up, boys . . .”

  They ate Mexican food in a blueish little restaurant full of flies.

  Then they returned to Manhattan like lost souls, going straight to the Village bars, to where middle-aged pompous intellectuals bought drinks for Phillip and said, “You speak of James Joyce but I doubt if you know anything about him.” Establishing themselves thereby in a position of dominance, they were qualified to buy him and his two friends drinks.

  Ryko wandered around insinuating himself drunkenly into conversations while Al stood behind Phillip and his patron and grinned. There was something desperate and foolish coming into Al’s smile . . . it had begun to lose its old affable quality, and to take on more of the idiotic. Sometimes, when Phillip snapped at him, Al’s crazy smile broke out meaninglessly. He looked then like a village idiot, say, who is being burned at the stake by a sadistic assemblage, and who grins and says “Wow! This sure hurts!” as the flames lick up to consume him.

  And then they were on the streets again, as by arrangement with a crazy fate. Once a small boy, about twelve years old, with black hair tumbling over his brow, came by, and Al greeted him, “Hiya Harry.”