The Town and the City

by Jack Kerouac

  “Gentlemen,” he was crying out, “your arguments do not touch me in the least, as my kingdom is not of this world, not-of-this-world!”

  “What kind newspaper you got in your shoes?” cried a heckler.

  “I do not read the newspapers. I know nothing of this world. I am not of this world. It is not my kingdom!”

  “You can say that again!”

  And they yaahed him in the cold winds.

  “You there!” cried the saint, pointing at a youngster who carried books and listened in silence. “Pick up your pen, son, and write against the evil in this world. My little son and brother, if thou didst ever hold me in thine heart, absent thee from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, to tell my story!”

  The youngster smiled thinly—he knew where those words came from—but he was moved, he stood there gazing confusedly away, almost blushing.

  “And you, sir!” cried the saint, pointing straight at Martin, “pray for the deliverance of all our souls, in your heart of hearts, in the deep of your soul, pray! It is given you to pray in this world!”

  The old man walked away, peeved, but he never forgot this rueful oddity of a madman with his beard and his rags and his melancholy stoop, and the mournful triumph of his great cry, right there in the streets of men—“My kingdom is not of this world.”

  Martin was more alone at this time of his life than he had ever been. He began to have the reveries of an irreparably lonely man. All his life he had taken it for granted that he could walk down a street and say hello and a few words to somebody he knew. Now he could only stare curiously at strangers. He began remembering, in his reveries, a particular boyhood friend from the old days in Lacoshua. He had no idea what on earth had happened to this fellow since then, but the memory of this lost friend—Shorty Houde—haunted him incessantly now whenever he walked alone down Canal Street in the black pot of night. He remembered how it used to be with Shorty—in the early morning streets of Lacoshua, Shorty would amble over, not smiling, not sullen either, just gravely puffing on his pipe, fall in step, and address him every day, almost without deviation:

  “Where you headed for, Georgie me boy?”

  “Oh, just going to work as usual.”

  “Goin’ to earn your bed and vittles, hey, Georgie me boy?”

  “I sure am.”

  “Well—I guess I’ll join ye for a little perambulatin’ down the streets of dear old Lacoshua-town, seein’ as I’m headed for work myself.” Shorty worked in the same sawmill with Martin, on the same shift, but he never mentioned that. And they would go down the empty street together without another word.

  The memory of this strange, simple occurrence in his earlier life filled the old man now with a warm glow of recollection, and the thought that anybody would ever walk up to him in the gray sidewalks of New York or Brooklyn and say: “Where you headed for, Georgie me boy?” was utterly impossible, he thought of it with a grin, until the dark and serious sorrows of New York at night froze his heart and made it shrink miserably again. These were the dark last days of his life.

  Yet one morning—the Saturday before Christmas—he woke up feeling fine and vigorous and looked out the window at the bright sun and the blue winter’s sky and the snow. It was a splendid morning in Brooklyn. He got up and shaved, put on a clean white shirt and a new necktie, and went down to the corner store to buy a fresh cigar. And he suddenly realized that on every Saturday morning since his arrival a gray-haired old man took up his station in front of the bar and grille and began playing a cornet at ten o’clock sharp. Martin had never thought about it before, but now as the sun began to warm the streets, and people went to and fro shopping and hurrying off to the excitements of the big Brooklyn Saturday, the air rang with the sweet bugle-notes of some old song. The children flocked around the old musician and listened gravely as he blew just as gravely on the cornet, men came out of the bar and dropped dimes in his cup, and women paused with their groceries and listened with pleasure.

  Back in his chair by the front window and the radio, Martin sat down, lit a deep-smelling cigar, opened the fresh pages of the Daily Mirror, tuned the radio to a barbershop quartet and there he stayed, comfortable, occasionally looking up at the feet of people passing on the sunny sidewalk with a new sense of order and joy. Then, as his wife moved about the kitchen preparing his breakfast, he began to smell the bacon and eggs and coffee of morning, and he thought—“Well, by God, it isn’t so bad after all.” And he grew hungry.

  After breakfast he wandered out of the house and strolled to downtown Brooklyn, and there, around Borough Hall, he saw other men like him walking along the streets smoking cigars. He smelled the high sharp air of the harbor, he saw the great clear sunlight of winter falling on the busy streets, and he was suddenly almost glad that he lived in Brooklyn.

  He strolled around, all the way to Williamsburg Bridge in the snowy streets, and found an elevated train that made the run to Manhattan.

  “I never took this train, I’ll try it,” he said to himself absorbedly, and got on, full of the tingling joy a man has when he’s off from work and just rambling around on a Saturday morning.

  He thought this train would go underground at the river, but suddenly as it swooped higher near the Williamsburg Bridge, he realized that it was going to go over and soar in the morning sun. And there before his eyes again were all the waters, rooftops, streets and girders of a Brooklyn mysteriously whitened by snow.

  He got off the train in Manhattan and walked around the slushy Delancey streets of winter, down mournful side-streets, over to East Broadway, down an Italianesque street, finally arriving at the broad cobblestoned way along the East River piers. And here the sudden loom of great ship’s hulls stood high as though docked at the very curbstones.

  He walked on, passing beneath the roaring high overpass of the Manhattan Bridge, he stared incredulously at the mountainous pylons that supported this bridge, that rose from dirty alleys as cathedrals rise from the earth, huge black stone supporting furious traffic above—and he saw the sun’s winter light stream down from above in great smoky stabs.

  He stood then on the corner of Charles Slip and Water Street as the sun finally disappeared behind clouds, and it began to snow again. He walked down a narrow street, filled with mute joy and sorrow because it was snowing, the air white with snow and dark with shapes and strangely silent. He came to an old building and stopped, and read the sign: “Haven Hotel, Established 1837.”

  He went in to an old taproom with a bare floor, spittoons, a potbelly stove burning wood, and a droning congregation of old-timers drinking beer at the bar. He ordered a beer. An old man with white hair was there singing a song, holding a beer in one hand, waving his other hand with a firm, grave, completely unselfconscious gesture of sincerity and pleased determination to sing. The others listened smiling. And Martin knew that some of these men had been drinking in this bar for almost half a century, he knew it for a certainty as he watched them. They lived somewhere in the shadow of the Bridges, they worked around here too, in old waterfront firms, and some of them had begun drinking in this bar in the 1890’s of New York when the beer wagons were drawn thundering over cobbles by massive horses. They had begun drinking here after their fathers, and their fathers had been drinking in this taproom in the 1840’s of New York when the waterfront streets were overspanned by jibbooms of ancient sailing ships. Martin was so certain of this.

  He took off his hat and listened to the old man’s song, and when it was over he bought the singer a beer and had it brought to him down the bar. They raised their glasses and drank to each other solemnly and respectfully across the room.

  [2]

  There are a lot of ways of traveling into New York, into the vital and dramatic heart of it—Manhattan—but only one way thoroughly reveals the magnitude, the beauty, and the wonder of the great city. This way is never taken by the spokesmen and representatives and leaders of the world, who come in airplanes and in trains. The be
st approach is by bus—the bus from Connecticut that comes down through the Bronx, along Grand Concourse, over to Eighth Avenue, and down Ninth Avenue to the Times Square carnival of light.

  Busses coming from New Jersey or down the Hudson River drives do not penetrate by degrees into the city’s heart, but suddenly emerge, either out of a tunnel or over a bridge, or out of forested parkways. But when the bus coming down from Connecticut begins to pass through places like Portchester and New Rochelle, the realization slowly occurs that these are not towns properly, but far-flung yet firmly connected doorsteps and suburbs of the great huge thing that is New York. And gradually these places are no longer vague towns, they are continuous and unending suburban sprawls. A tremendous feeling comes from this simple and terrifying fact: what vastness is this that feeds the heart in the throbbing center? How big can the city actually be? What in the world is it going to be like?

  Peter Martin was traveling on this bus one rainy night in the spring of 1944, coming back from a nostalgic and sad visit to Galloway. Nothing had happened there. He had expected something intensely meaningful, dark, immense, and wonderful. Out of the sadness of his heart, he began to imagine that he had never been to New York and that he was coming into it for the first time in his life. He even selected an old woman who looked like a farmer’s wife, who was riding in the same seat with him with a grin of awe and delight, as proof human and simple that coming into New York for the first time in one’s life was an event of the most wonderful importance. He watched her greedily.

  They came down through Mamaroneck and all the bright places, and in the soft rainy darknesses of April, they began to see apartment houses, huge ones, window-glowing in the night all around. Sometimes they saw these apartment houses where there was no town to connect them to anything. They just simply appeared, fifteen stories high with a thousand shining windows, innumerable cars parked in front, and dentists’ offices and doctors’ offices busy with lights. The bus would roll on and pass occasional dark parks, sometimes a field, sometimes even a farmhouse, and suddenly a roadside inn with pink neon, white gravel and parked cars, and then again the huge glowing apartment houses bulking up in the night, some of them built like forts on cliffs of rock.

  Though there were more and more of these apartment houses and the distant spread of incomprehensible lights in the night rain—still they were “not anywhere near New York,” according to the bus-riders who knew, they were “only in Larchmont” or “only in New Rochelle,” and so on. Instead of the dazzling view of Manhattan towers in the night, there were just these same innumerable huge apartment houses standing high in the darkness with their thousands of windows, their thousands of parked cars, their unending drab shrubbery-vases in gravel courtyards.

  Then bridges … incomprehensible bridges glistening in the rain, underpasses and overpasses, ups and downs along the crowded road, and still no dazzling Manhattan towers. Still the apartment houses—the Broadmoor, and the Cliffview, and the River Towers—but not the slightest sign of the tremendous Metropolis. The traveler in the bus grew more and more awed at the thought of the sheer numbers of people living in all the apartment houses that stretched back for miles, the uncountable nation of families that dwelled here “nowhere near New York,” yet indisputably denizens and partisans of the huge unknown thing called New York.

  Finally the apartment houses became so numerous and so vastly spread out in all directions that it became evident that something was coming up at last. What was this? “This is the Bronx.” Peter watched greedily the grin of fascination on the old lady’s face beside him. What was she thinking? Of the fabulous young Jew, Bronx-brooding and Bronx-fierce, who had written the play with that springtime yet Bronx-slain title, Awake and Sing!? Was she thinking about that? Why the grin of fascination and delight on her face? With her parcel of wrapped newspapers that passed for a traveling bag, with her big piano legs and her comfortable fat way of sitting back deep in the seat and possessing it whole, and her smile of delight because this was the Bronx and she was going through the Bronx at last. What was she seeing with her eyes and with her soul?

  Now the bus crossed more bridges and suddenly the apartment houses loomed everywhere immediately above, and the streets were suddenly zooming by in explosions of light and traffic and thronging crowds. “We have just passed a shopping center.” Some of the streets were darker than others, they merely glistened forlornly in the misty rain, cars were parked densely on each curb in the canyons between the apartment houses, a few people moved along the sidewalks, but the lights were not dazzling and many.

  Then suddenly, between the apartment houses, strange tenements began to appear, darker, red-bricked, with lights in the windows that were somehow brown and dull instead of glittering bright. Then, in a flash, a great broad street exploded into view strung incredibly for a mile with lights and cars and trolleys and people, and this too disappeared, but only for a moment, as another thronging blazing street zoomed into view and passed flashing. “This is New York! O this is New York!” they thought gleefully, and Peter’s old woman leaned back comfortably and began to grin a little more complacently, knowingly, with a shrewd old pleasure and joy.

  But nothing changed: the tenements and the blazing crowded streets continued on and on, and this was certainly not New York. “We’re still in the Bronx.” So, all right, it was still the Bronx. The travelers leaned forward once more, the old lady leaned forward with a frown of perplexity, and they all searched outside through the beady panes for their New York that was not there. “Say, where the hell is it?” thought the old lady in secret.

  The bus rolled on and finally began crossing great dark networks of bridges. They could see abutments and steel girders, black limbs of bridges swooping in the night, in the rain, backgrounded by a thousand scattered nonunderstandable lights, just so many swooping scaffolds and pinpoints of light everywhere. Where? What?

  Then they were off the bridges and on solid ground again, and rolling fast. More dark tenements, a crowded blazing carnival scene at each corner, cars and trolleys and movie marquees, more and more of them except—well, by God—look! a million Negroes in the streets, all the Negroes in the world—fabulous and fantastic and thronging in the lights!—and what lights now! what lights! Every corner a blaze of lights and a blur of voices and klaxons and screeching trolley wheels. And one more thing!—now all the corners were absolutely square, the streets zoomed by in regular measured beats, everything was constructed in perfect squares, and such teeming tenemented carnival squares each one! It was Harlem, that’s what it was! “Say—this is Harlem!” The old lady, no longer placid and grinning, leaned forward in her seat staring slack-jawed at everything that passed and blurred swiftly by her window. She even looked away for a moment to wipe her glasses, to stare appealingly at Peter, and then hunched her great bulk forward to feast her eyes on the dense blazing scenes that grew and grew in size as they plunged on.

  But where were the shining towers of Manhattan?

  The passengers waited as the bus lurched around a corner at a park, on a broad square lurid with marquee lights, and went roaring along the trees and by tenements on the other side. What was this? One could sense it for sure, something tremendous was coming up!

  And in one brief fleeting blink of the eye, as the bus roared through the green light at 110th Street, they saw the magnificent space of Central Park West stretching almost three miles down to the glittering towers of Columbus Circle. In one instant they had seen it all! They had seen not only the tremendous “penthouses” of New York ranged along a great park boulevard, but they had seen the careful straight-distanced magnificence of Central Park and its stone walls and broad promenading pavement, they had seen a vision of one thousand yellow taxicabs speeding in the deep canyon-side by glittering penthouse fronts. This was it!

  They had seen only the smoothness and swankness. Now they were going to see the unbelievable hugeness. For, as they sped down Ninth Avenue by store fronts and fruit markets and crowde
d tenements, as they saw the hordes of people moving about in the lights, they realized somehow that this street, as many others in New York, was as straight as an arrow, and broad and long enough to lose itself in vistas even on a clear day, and just as crowded as this on every inch of its miles.

  And then they saw the cross-streets flashing by. When they saw how these streets, which numbered in the two hundreds, crossed seemingly endless avenues and were losing themselves over the curve of the island’s rock to the east, they had a vision of hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million streetcorners in all of New York, perfectly square and measured, and each one, as well as the intervening space between corners, thronged and trafficked and peopled and furious. How could it be?

  But the appalling hugeness had not revealed itself entirely. As they sped downtown past 59th Street, they began to see people in multitudes, they began to see a sea of heads weaving underneath lights unlike the lights they had already seen. These lights were a blazing daytime in themselves, a magical universe of lights sparkling and throbbing with the intensity of a flash explosion. They were white like the hard white light of a blowtorch, they were the Great White Way itself. And all the cross-streets were now canyons, each exploded high in the night with white light, and below were the multitudes of New York, the sea of heads, the whirlpools of traffic, the vast straggles and confusions and uproar, again and again at each block.

  Was this the end of New York?

  “Oh, no, this is Times Square, where we get off. But there’s downtown, oh, about six miles more downtown, down to Wall Street and the financial district and the waterfront and the bridges—and then Brooklyn, you see.”

  And where were the sparkling towers of Manhattan now? How could they be seen when one was buried in them, how could one have possibly missed them from afar?

  So Peter was back in New York that night, and it struck him with singular wondrous knowledge that this was one of the strangest and saddest moments of his life. The sight of New York now, the way it had unfolded itself in a horror of endless streets and uncomprehendable sprawl and distance, was as full of dark mystery and ghostly sorrow as the world itself—the world as it had become to him since the beginning of the war, or since some unnoticed time when he had begun to look around and say to himself: “It is not known, it is not known!”