The Town and the City

by Jack Kerouac

  And it was all the more amazing to see Patricia living with Liz, to see the two girls conducting their separate lives in perfect understanding—Patricia working as a typist downtown with the same patient, musing, brooding silence as she had done in Denver to be near Joe long ago, Liz carrying on with her own slapdash fantastic affairs which always precipitated great and weird confusion in the apartment. At two o’clock any morning, there might be a procession of jazz musicians wearing berets and sporting California scarfs and dark glasses, or dancers and showgirls and models, and all kinds of strange characters from somewhere, or teaheads (Clint, the marijuana man who trained his cockroaches, was numbered among this host). While all this went on, there was Patricia Franklin, minding her wistful little affairs in the privacy of her room.

  Joe knocked on Peter’s door late one night. When Peter went to the door, it was like sensing the entire purpose of life to see him—to see why Patricia had come to live with Liz, and why, someway, she had inscrutably left it up to him to bring Joe back to her. Peter realized this in one clear, ecstatic moment of unearthly joy, when he saw his big brother standing there all wild and gaunt and racked with loneliness.

  “Come on!” cried Joe. “Let’s go out and have a drink and chew the rag. What the hell have you been doing? Why haven’t you been home?”

  Paul Hathaway was lurking in the hallway. It was about midnight.

  “Did you see Pa?” demanded Peter with nervous curiosity.

  “Yes, I saw him and he’s got one foot in the grave, and you know it.”

  “Listen,” said Peter, “I’ve got something to show you, I’ve got somebody to show you, that is. But wait a minute first—you don’t have to get sore at me for not staying home. Do you think I love to watch the old man dribble away every day? I’d rather stay here alone, that’s all, I’d rather do that any day—”

  “Never mind what you like!” the older brother scowled darkly. “It’s what you’ve got to do in this world that counts.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  “You damn right I’m right.”

  The mood was ripe. Hathaway had a bottle and they all took a nip and started out into the warm October night to hit the bars. Suddenly, without warning, as they walked down a dark street, Joe took out a .32 automatic, looked around quickly, almost meekly, and pointed it into an ash barrel and shot. It made an astounding crashing noise in the murmuring stillness. Nothing happened, nobody was around. Peter was amazed, almost jubilant suddenly.

  “You better look out with that thing, the cops’ll get you on the Sullivan law—”

  “The hell with Sullivan,” muttered Joe darkly. “Sunday I just missed a sea-gull off a dock, you shoulda seen the look on a guy’s face who was walking by. Hyah! hyah! hyah! Here, have a shot!”

  He handed Peter the gun, not the bottle, but Peter waved it away with exasperation, though not without stifling a keen impulse to try it.

  “I heard you got in trouble with the cops,” said Joe. “You don’t want to let those punks push you around, you’re a merchant seaman, ain’t you? Stand up for your rights, man! Here, take a potshot at that light. Let’s see what kind of a shot you are!”

  “You’re crazy!” laughed Peter. “We’ll hit somebody. But listen, I want to ask you, have you heard from Patricia?” He looked slyly at Joe. “Do you have any idea where she is?”

  Joe twirled the gun on his finger, snapped it back and said nothing.

  “Where is she?” pressed Peter.

  “How the hell should I know? She’s in Maine, I guess, and I guess she’s all right in Maine.”

  “Everybody’s all right in Maine,” echoed Hathaway darkly.

  “See? Everything’s great in Maine,” said Joe, and he let go another blast into an ash barrel, this time nonchalantly shooting from the hip without looking. A tenement window opened above and someone stuck his head out with suspicious curiosity. A man coming up the street suddenly vanished. The street was deserted and strange; they hurried away talking in loud voices.

  Climbing the three flights of steps in the rickety Ninth Avenue rooming house where the girls lived, Joe wanted to know what it was all about. “What are you taking us here for, joker? What’s all the mystery?”

  But Peter was losing the sense of crafty joy he had felt at first in bringing Joe to Patricia. He suddenly felt dazed, and stopped in the middle of the stairs.

  “Listen, Joe, this is where Liz … lives.”

  “Lizzy?” cried Joe gleefully.

  “Yeah, Lizzy. And there’s someone else here too. I may as well tell you, Pat’s here too.”

  “Pat who?”

  “Pat Franklin, for krissakes.”

  Joe gazed at him dumbly.

  “So if you want to come up, come on—if not, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “What do you mean, Pat Franklin!” Joe almost yelled, flushing angrily. “What are you talking about! What would she be doing here!”

  “Go knock on that door and see for yourself.”

  They stood in the middle of the stairs in confused indecision, until finally Hathaway, who had not said a word for fifteen minutes suddenly pushed past them. He began pounding on the door with his fist, though softly. He looked back at them with a really sweet and radiant smile.

  “I don’t know about you guys, but if Pat’s in here I’d like to see her myself.”

  Almost instantly the door opened and there stood Patricia Franklin.

  For the next fifteen minutes Joe sat in a dark corner of the room with his elbows on his knees, just staring at the floor in complete perplexity, while Paul and Patricia and Peter carried on a meaningless nervous conversation about anything that came into their heads. Nobody knew what to do, or say—least of all Joe in his dark corner, and Patricia. The moment she must have been awaiting for so long had suddenly arrived, almost madly, and now all her thoughts of Joe were obscured pathetically in this one single tattered moment nameless with impurities. She and Joe went to extremes not to notice each other. Paul and Peter just bobbed around as though trying to conceal the lovers from each other. It was utterly insane, and suddenly, during a moment of silent perturbation all around, Joe got up and went out without a word.

  “Where’s Liz, by the way?” demanded Peter eagerly just as the door closed. “I thought for sure she’d be around.”

  “Oh,” said Patricia, staring at Peter with burning eyes, “she’s downstairs in that bar, that Kelly’s place.…”

  “I wonder where Joe went?” said Paul. He jumped up nervously, saying he was going downstairs to buy a pack of cigarettes, and left.

  “I’m going down to see Liz,” said Patricia firmly, and without even putting on lipstick or taking a coat, she opened the door, looked at Peter absentmindedly, and left. Peter, alone in the room, opened the window and looked out at the dark back-alley; sat smoking on the windowsill awhile. It was all over, his father was dying, it was dark and dirty outside, it was huge, walled-in, the great incomprehensible alley’s end of the night. He hurried out and went downstairs in a swirl of meditations.

  Joe was shuffling around the block with his hands in his pockets, painfully trying to recollect something, when Paul Hathaway caught up with him.

  “Boy! I’ve never seen such a bunch of crazy goddam clowns!” snarled the oldtimer with infinite loathing. “What’s the matter with you? There’s nothing wrong with that girl, she’s the finest girl I ever saw, I told you so a thousand times, I told you so years ago!”

  Joe looked at him wearily. He was just simply weary—weary because it was all so mixed up and torn and at the same time because it was so unbearable and excruciating to a fierce new sense of pride that had just risen in him. He suddenly realized that he never wanted to do what he was expected to do. It made no sense at all. He could not even remember why he had stopped writing to Patricia—he had just stopped, that was all. A feeling of terror crept over him. He stared at Hathaway earnestly, fixedly.

  “Honest to God, Paul, I don’t know wha
t’s the matter with me tonight. I think I been drinking too much, don’t you think? I feel sappy, I can’t think.”

  “Do you or don’t you like that girl, that’s what I’d like to know,” muttered Paul, lowering his surly face nervously.

  “That’s a fine question! It’s like asking me … Ah!”

  “It’s like asking you what?”

  “I don’t know what! I just don’t know nothing any more. I don’t feel good, Paul, I feel sick, crazy, sick—everything. I tell you I don’t know where I’m at no more. I’m not the same guy any more. Let’s go back, I want to look at her, see what she looks like. I can’t remember what she looks like!” he cried.

  They hurried back to the rooming house. Paul put his hand on Joe’s shoulder and began talking more earnestly and seriously than he had ever done, as though the deranged events of the evening had bitten into him deeply. “Do you know what it is, Joe? It’s the feeling that everything is upside-down and turned inside-out and every which way and so to hell with it all, see? You want to be left out from everything on purpose! So you can go off and feel sorry for yourself and get royal drunk all the time!”

  “Why should you care?” demanded Joe almost insolently, but with a hurt and subdued look at him.

  “I’m just warning you, that’s all, wise guy!” yelled Paul contemptuously. “Go ahead and do what you like, I don’t care. Look, I’m going in this bar and you can find me here if you want.” It was Kelly’s bar. Standing in the entrance, like some disconsolate panhandler, was Peter, gazing at them gloomily.

  “Do you guys want to know something?” he said, solemnly gesturing. “This is the end—all this.” He solemnly pointed around the street and into the bar. “You see your sister and your girl in there? You don’t see your sister, do you? That’s because you don’t recognize her. You never saw her the way she looks now.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Joe went to the window of the bar and looked in curiously. “Is that Liz sitting there with Pat? That crummy-looking blonde, Liz?” He stood there with a kind of dejected fascination. “The crazy little fool, I always knew she was going to be a nut from the start.” And he kept staring at her unbelievingly, reluctantly, curiously.

  “Let’s go in and have a drink!” cried Paul emphatically.

  They piled into the bar which was crowded at that hour with soldiers, sailors, regular neighborhood drinkers, and bevies of girls that seemed mysteriously to have come out of nowhere. Joe and the two others realized who and what all these girls were—girls just like Liz and Patricia for the most part, girls from other towns who had come to New York for one reason or another, part of a whole nomadic womanhood that had developed during the war. Because they knew Liz and Patricia so well and had seen them from all sides, human, sisterly, child-like, womanly, it was as though they knew all the girls in the place for what they lone-somely were, their real excruciating selves hidden beneath the lipstick, the hairdos, the studied poses. They saw all these girls as they truly were. They saw them with their hair in pins, ironing for mother in the kitchen; they saw them on the porch on warm nights gossiping eagerly with their girl friends; they saw them up in the attic furiously cleaning out the rubbish; they saw them streaking across the yard in dungarees to get to the swing before anyone else; they saw them hoisting great burdens down the cellar with wisps of hair over their brows and their tongues curled over their lips in ravenous exertion; they saw them sitting before the mirrors for hours with towels and cosmetics and lotions all about; and finally they saw them going down the soft dusty road at summernight hand in hand with the boy next door in the universe all blurred and transcendental with milky stars.

  Finally a kind of merchant marine officer who was talking to Patricia—she pretended not to notice Joe—put his arm around her and began whispering in her ear amorously.

  “See that, Joe?” grinned Peter. “I guess she’s trying to show you a thing or two.”

  “Let her! And look at that silly Liz guzzling the booze like a Bowery hobo. Hey, I got an idea! Why don’t we shoot up the joint, huh?”

  Within the space of minutes, a great brawl developed. It started when Peter went over to talk to the girls and deliberately ignored the officer, who wanted to know who he thought he was, whereupon Peter told him and asked what he proposed to do about it, and the officer invited him outside. They marched out single file with pounding hearts—the hum of activity died down in the bar—and outside, on the sidewalk, the officer absurdly struck up a John L. Sullivan pose with his fists. Peter, a little surprised by this unexpected twist, nevertheless started up a furious windmill of roundhouse punches that flattened the officer on his back from sheer numbers. But he bounced right up again. In another moment the officer’s crony sailed into Peter with something that resembled a flying tackle at his neck but got the point of Peter’s elbow flush in the face, and went sideswiping and sprawling on the sidewalk. But Peter’s jig was up as they stalked him against the door, bloody-faced and snarling. For some reason or other Peter began to snicker.

  “What!” he cried. “Two against one? What’s the matter with you guys? Hey!” he cried with a crazy sheepish grin, but they pinned him against the wall without a word and hauled him down to the sidewalk as he twisted and spun in their grip. One officer, who had hold of Peter’s hair, was trying to bat his head against the sidewalk. Peter, laughing foolishly, held his neck rigid and went right on chatting forlornly with them. Something grim, sad, and ugly had come into the fight now.

  At that moment Joe came out of the bar and planted a kick on one of the officers with his G.I. boot and sent him sprawling. Paul, with an unexpected show of wild jubilance, took one great flying leap in the air and landed upon everybody, including Peter whose head was flattened in the act.

  Sailors rushed out of the bar, and soldiers, and merchant seamen. By some invisible movement the Army lined up against the Navy, and the merchant seamen milled around. Peter joined the Army—and everybody stood around talking affably as the police cruiser came around the corner menacingly.

  In the confusion Joe had herded Patricia and Liz both into a booth and was talking to them almost heatedly, while Paul and Peter stood at the bar loading up on shots of whiskey with great tact and sadness.

  “I’ll bet you loved that fight, both of you! That’s the kind of thing you like, isn’t it?” He was yelling at them above the hubbub and music, leaning madly across the table as he talked, while the two girls sat back watching him with amusement. “Get guys to fighting over you, that’s the ticket, hey?”

  “Will you listen to him?” scoffed Liz, laughing. “Big soldier comes back from the wars, tells his womenfolk what to do. Who do you think you are, hotshot? You may recall that neither Pat or myself started that fight. It was Pistol Pete over there in his eagerness to show what a—”

  And Joe had suddenly gripped Patricia by the arms and turned her around to confront him. He was looking at her with his grave troubled eyes and she, taken aback by this strange beautiful circumstance, could do nothing but look back at him. Hathaway and Peter stood at the bar drinking silently.

  Liz, alone momentarily, sat watching her brother out of the corner of her eye. She remembered now all the things that had happened long ago when Joe was her image of the fierce untamable youth who would be her husband forever. She remembered dark things, dark joys, and gorgeous hopes from the bottom of a girl’s heart. She remembered the day Joe had appeared in a rickety old car to help her and Charley when they were struggling on the cold wintry plains of the city dump for reasons she could hardly remember now, but could never forget either. All the time her life must have been imbedded in something dark, something joyful and secret, something that her big brother was like, and something that young Buddy was like, something undiscoverably beautiful and now gone. Why had she run away from home to go to cities, honkytonks, and claptrap? When that dark secret gladness brooded back there in Galloway, and waited for her, and mourned like the wind at night in October, and so
mething knocked against the house making summons and grieving, she was not there. A little girl in dungarees, she had lost her doll, climbed a tree in search of it, and seen, instead, great beacons turning and flashing on the night’s horizon. Knowledge and awareness told Liz that sorrow was the fool’s gold of the world, and she smiled, a smile that was her determined new key to things and understanding. But it was a poor key that did not fit, in any lock in the world, anywhere, ever.

  She got up and took her things and walked to the end of the bar, touched Peter on the arm, said, “Good night, Pistol Pete,” and went out alone.

  Joe, sensing how many things he had to say to Patricia as he gazed at her, sensing the whole exfoliation of love and truth returning, held Patricia by the hand.

  [2]

  For Francis, New York meant Greenwich Village freedom to live with a woman in a small apartment, to roam the little bookshops around Washington Square on misty nights, to haunt the bars where almost everybody had something to say about art, to attend parties where fantastic-looking people tossed off psycho-dynamic analysis, Jean-Paul Sartre, Orgone Theory, Jean Genet, and all the latest word in the easiest manner known to man, to writhe, finally, in the melodrama of “modern frustrative horror” in a chi-chi setting. It was the freedom to roam around deep in responsible thought from one foreign movie to another, from one art museum to another, from lectures at the Modern School of Cultural Research to the ballet, to the New Theater, to concerts, to political rallies, to performances by female impersonators, to poetry readings where some uncouth young poet yelled “Merde!” at everything submitted, to relief benefits, to demonstrations at cute little handicraft shops like the Taos (home of Kit Carson) Shoppe.

  Francis had reached the point where people meant little more to him than single sentences: