by Jack Kerouac
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AND BETHESDA, AN EARLY NIGHT I SPENT thinking about my FATE, how it was impossible for me to die (with loss, that is) because of charts, had-to-do’s, SUPREME REALITY, and it was raining out; was that first, no second ward when allowed myself to think in fate terms, apparently because I was soon gettin out and back to merchant marine—aware of Maryland, the Maryland forest in the night, rain on Wilderness, went in bathroom to smoke and think just as recently at Kingsbridge I’d go shit and brood—So later I grew conscious of wrinkled cigarette packs and Arthur Godfrey on sunny porch (which was earlier nuttier pinetree hatch) like real hungup patient until guy said “Cock weather” to change my concepts—that Nashua or Kinston Main Street, America littleboys dig towns just as simple as that, Lowell has areas, New York boroughs.
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OH THAT CODY DREAM, last night he was all attentive as he never really or only rarely is—in a suit, suits always look new on him, with hair wild and bushy not because uncombable but had been ruffled in the coffee drinking, gabbling-at-bars excitement of the broad crazy dark and dusty New York night—Now we were on a sidewalk, like Paris sidewalk of Buferd-park-movie-house dream, saying goodbye to a segment or group and then heading out together to later, wilder parties—as I say, like Errol Flynn and Bruce Cabot but ever so much beater and stranger, really less simple and less inscrutable. How tragic the sidewalks were—along the order of Julien’s when he in a dream came back or was back from death in an apartment house with an elevator and his mother sweet, white-faced, was willing for once to talk to me, the tragedy then was in the very sidewalk out front. In fact Cody and I were in that general vicinity which is like Sheridan Square (FBI tea dream), perhaps the Deni Bleu one of that sun-slanting afternoon in Nick’s when he got back from Brazil in real life but really a new Sheridan Square I’ve been getting lately (where are these messages from?) which I think is connected with Danny Richman but positively connected (with sad Greek lunchcarts I dug 1939) with a girl—that pale sweet girl who lay like a great soft oyster (Bev Watson) on a couch after unspoken agreement she disrobe and give herself to my hand although by that time scene had shifted from Sheridan Square to a house in Maine or Lowell. Next Cody and I were in dark hallway of the sensualists; party was up; I arranged for girls; Cody, for first time, followed me and let me do things. In other dreams when I go San Francisco to see him, and we descend the mighty hills in a car, one time he fell out of the car in one of his attempts to show driving tricks, I closed my eyes exasperatedly to die but he miraculously jumped back into the car and righted it—in San Francisco I follow him, or alone go up long Babylonian stairs (ferry, too) like the stairs in D. W. Griffiths’ Feast of Belshazzar in Intolerance to find the girls over the ridge and down to the swimmingpool, the little sweet Italian group I never refound in m’ dreams but I think already met and lost recently in real life—There sat Cody and I—I was looking at tablecloth—thinking “I am tired, we do too much, I must run away from Cody to ever rest but now he’s following me I’ll never can do it.” We’re high on T and staring at wild designs of tablecloth which are also dear familiar lunchcart check designs under the ceiling fans of Oklahoma roadhouses as well as Mexico City tablecloth. Main thing, Cody had given up and was following not me, but anybody sweet and good and kind in the world, like he’d died and came over to see me before his departure, dammit, into eternity. This was a dream last night. And Cody let others do talking, for once was a smiling and bemused listener, like Irwin or everybody—He said something: “I’ll only be back for a short time but while I’m here you’ve got to take care of me, understand?—you’ve got to see I don’t get lonely, I don’t know anybody in that cafeteria of yours on Fourth Street and Bowery, I don’t ever go to those high balcony movies on V-Square, Brooklyn is too mad, the Els confuse me, the canals, the little white houses, the ships east or west and that pump at the foot of the hill where you peel potatoes I have nothing to do with it—I’m in your hands entirely as you were in Frisco when I jumped back in the car going fullspeed—I want to meet people and gurls—take me to the white one, the soft one you had on your couch there—Oh this is a cold dark town, man.” We talked and smoked with the sensualists. Once I had a dream that a party was going on in a bleak little house standing all by itself in a dump lot the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge, old eighteenth-century brick house with warehouse and gables, and inside an orgy was going on, there were Negro sailors, Irwin Garden, a girl on her knees and suddenly the Brooklyn Bridge was burning and these people didn’t care, only the wild bourgeois who ran across the Bridge risking their lives with dogs under their arms. This Cody didn’t understand; he understood only Frisco and those soaring wild white-house hills where my father once lived and rejected me, the time I said boo! in his cellar there at what I thought was a ghost and it was only Mr. and Mrs. Old and he was gambling with the fellers he used to know in the redbrick alley between B. F. Keith and Bridge Street Warehouse Lowell, Mass. So I not only took care of Cody’s understanding but protected him from horrors which he, unlike me, was not capable of absorbing. Yes he was strange, childlike, and as if, as I say, he had died or been otherwise crippled in S.F. and had come to see me prior to some sad journey from which he never was going to come back—so naturally I took advantage, went to pains to arrange the best party with the sensualists, it was a sort of dark ambiguous flop but Cody and I jumped and made it. This dream followed the one about Crawford Street in Lowell and the Kingsbridge Hospital, as if replacing it for special reasons when I decided to sleep some more. The next time I’ve a dream about Cody and they’re rare I will note it: but now just let the only other rememberable dream of Cody I have serve our growing purposes—this is going to be the complete Cody—
Inseparably entwined with Joe my boyhood chum, I had flash of that many-windowed wooden cell-house along Third Avenue and also in Joe’s barn and Julien’s jailship connecting with Cody—but this occurred when I wished to harken back to our discussion at the sensualists (I say sensualists because one of them was that unspeakably sensual fag from Glennon’s who talked with that young actor and me, part Rance the hipster, part more desperate than that, somehow a Cody hero)—when I said in effect to Cody “If you worry about my attitude or have in the past towards homosexuality don’t worry now, I have a new attitude” (a Ritz Yale Club party where I went with a kid in a leather jacket, I was wearing one too, and there were hundreds of kids in leather jackets instead of big tuxedo Clancy millionaires and I yelled over to a gang “Buddy Van Buder?” thinking it was Buddy Van Buder but they only smiled, cool, and everybody was smoking marijuana, wailing a new decade in one wild crowd) “—not only that party but other things that also make me sad though but I’m fundamentally opposed on principle and because I don’t like it—but think how strange and charming it is that I understand it now and in fact there was a blond amant at Josephine’s, man—” To get on with Denver: there was a cartoon moon shining over a boardfence, a wild drugstore ice cream crowd on the corner, somewhat Reservoir Hill-like, ricketiness, and then these tremendous brawling bars to which Cody and I repaired for gabbling talks—apparently in my early dreams of Cody it was bars not T-pads of sensualists I envisioned—as if Cody and I were construction workers not dissipates who dissipate so much it becomes a principle and finally a philosophy and finally a revelation—That Denver had elements of Big Slim Washington and New Orleans, had a strange New Haven empty lot with three-row house where I lived (near trolley line, near water, where innumerable small craft sit in dry canals and people celebrate along boardwalk which faces a dry sea with terrible raveled muds and spiders but in rain big tidal waves and storms and naval battles start offshore, flashing Pow! in the rainy sea)—and a New Orleans, née Florida, which also has MexCity in it and I was in Mexico City with Cody. I’ve dreamed of Dave Sherman on a gray student afternoon in Mexico City which was in fact half on the Columbia campus where I’d been flunking classes and goofing for years, cutting classes in science for El rides into unknown upper
New Yorks and failing to salute the flag in front of the library with other boys who ate regularly in the cellars that were vast like Lowell High School cellars. I know it isn’t true, but it seems to me Cody was stealing a suit during that happy afternoon in MexCity with Sherman. These are the pitiful few dreams of Cody I have—is that all?
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A GREAT AMERICAN INTERSECTION like the ones I will now go find on the road to Cody with a White Tower on one corner, diner (new blue cute kind with woman proprietor-waitress says “Come on let’s go” to half-drunk eccentric) opposite, small beat white Mobilgas station another corner (topped by red neoned flying redhorse, becluttered, white curbs soiled, car for sale, sign says Complete wheel alignment service and Brakes relined, tires for sale, used, including one vast graypainted truck tire), outdoor vegetable and fruit stand on the other (ice cold watermelon, red like fire, we plug ‘em).
Traffic lights shuttle this wild restless travel, cars nudging around impatiently and even hitting dips near sewers to do so, panel trucks, taxis, big trucks all mixed with cars, a four-direction confusion and anger and also buses, tooting, wheeling, jumping by, sending up fumes, buses growling, squeeking to stop, massing, surging, occasional sad pedestrians completely lost—a more interesting intersection further? Mainly, though, this is, a sad white outside-of-town intersection openspaced, stuccoed like buildings on Arapahoe Street in Cody’s Denver, this is the openspace whiteness which is always situated exactly halfway between the country and downtown, so that when you come in to a new city you always have to cross snowy suburban intersections like this—I’ve seen a building, originally redbrick one-story warehouse, located exactly at this halfway spot between the highways of the land and the dense buildings downtown and it was painted white but had failed and the redbrick showed through—to make a startling sight in all the pure hot dog road-stand and motel whiteness and in fact the gravel is almost white in these nameless districts of U.S.A. Red traffic light gives it a sense of rain; the green gives it a sense of distance, snow, sand—
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I GOT EXCITED, I thought I’d go to the Coast without money anyway.
I wrote a letter to Cody:
“My trip to Frisco at last to stay with you and talk with you and really be with it 100% for any number of inexpressibly delicious weeks you wish; beyond that even, Josephine wants to come, she wants to hitch, adventures etc. of young girl digging the road, she comes back via Lushy-Mushky Bust Colo, for her Sis, of course Josephine wants to cuk 7 Fuck (what mistakes dear me cuk 7 Fuck would be SOME FUCK) and I was saying she wants to fuck and fuck (fuck and fuck I meant to write but didn’t capitalize the 7) she wanted to fuck and fuck or that is fuck and fuck and has or rather and has been doing so (all this in imitation of you, you fool) and or rather doing so, Oh for goodness sakes, here is the sentence, Josephine wants to fuck and fuck and has been doing so with Irwin and me regular as pie and spent 4 days with me giving skull and getting skull, Mac and girl and me and everything and everybody but kitchen sink, weekend climaxed by my bringing colored guitarist and pianist and colored gal and all three women took off tops while we blew two hours me on bop-chords piano, new Marty bop-tapdanced, guitar bongoed and Mac fucked J. on bed, then I switched to bongo and for one hour we really had a jungle (as you can imagine) feeling running around, and after all there I was with my brand new FINAL bongo or rather really conga beat and looked up from my work which was lifting the whole group (as if in prophecy of the fact that you and I could be great jazz musicians among jazz musicians) (they yelled GO) and what do I see but this tall brown gal with a long white gleaming pearl necklace hanging down between her black tits clear to her black bellybutton, walking into parlor on padding black feet, looking at me, etcetera. Cody you are, I believe, my last remaining complete great pal—I don’t think I’ll ever have another like you for I might retire in (like Swenson) so far, or go crazy or eccentric—of course somewhere along the line I’ll end up yakking with some wench in a black night, like Louis-Ferdinand Céline, like those lonely soldiers who come back from Germany with six-foot-ten-years-older-than-them Isolde warbrides and argue with them in bleak rooms over drugstores, in bars, on church steps in the middle of the night in winter if you see what I mean, I mean bleak, sad, really mated, hung, like Bull with June or a lushy Josephine doll of course but aside from all that, I can’t think of anybody and that includes Swenson with whom I talked last night and includes Irwin G. who, undoubtedly the greatest, just doesn’t give a shit (like Rappaport, also tremendous), and certainly not Hayes, Bull etc., anybody who knows the sum and substance of what I know and feel and cry about in my secret self all the time when I don’t feel strong, the sorrows of time and personality, and can therefore on all levels make it all the way with me—who knows and loves even jazz as I do, and digs it as I do, who’s been AROUND and then some. I’m completely your friend, your “lover,” he who loves you and digs your greatness completely—haunted in the mind by you (think what that means, try to reverse, say, supposing you referred all your sensations to somebody and wondered what they thought about it) (that settles it: this letter includes a dream I had of you two, three nights ago), supposing each time you heard a delightfully original idea or were given such an image that makes the mind sing you immediately slapped it over like one of those new office roller files to check with the CODY THING, that is, the Cody constellation, and then on another level checked it emotionally like to measure its amounts of awe that you would bring to it. Last night Swenson spoke at such great length on Genêt that I suddenly realized (had innocently queried: “And Genêt? have considered Genêt?”) he not only of course had considered Genêt, every work published to date and incidentally reports brought to him personally by people who know him, reports about some recent new shift in Genêt’s general feeling or attack (and the reason I have no details is because I wasn’t listening, I was only dreaming over the significance that overlayed or overlay the context because it really to me was its rainbow) he even knew in detail the characters of the books, the names of the great mythological French queers of the underworld Paris, Froufrou, Mimi, Ange Divine and the lot, every nuance, like we know Buckle or Huck, knew them intimately, had savored them at his longest and most hungup leisure on nameless afternoons in that house which he now occupies alone ’cause his aunt died (and think!: he misses her! “I’ve grieved just the proper amount on the surface of it but it’s rather—rather, you know—after, one DOES realize, I just did wish I’d been nicer to her, that’s all, really”) (finally, after a whole minute of his eyes struggling from their demure downward cast to turn over to me, his face suffusing with a sudden blush that seems to advertise his glances, writhing with his body one way while his gorgeous enormous eyelids unfurled the other way, in my direction, to reveal eyeballs in the act of rolling with indescribably veiled languor, mixed with shy shames and raptures of all kinds, as if from premeditated evil depths, from long private preparations no man could ever dream was possible to the mind, mincing deliciously all over like this big lovely child that reads the Apocalypse, wrapping himself around doors, melting, like Bloom, most like Leopold Bloom in a Dream, with his huge expressive and excessive nose which is the indicator of all his directions and etcetera the fingers.) I dig Swenson, I dig like you did, I dig jazz, a 1000 things in America, even the rubbish in the weeds of an empty lot, I make notes about it, I know the secrets; I dig Joyce and Proust above Melville and Cêline, like you; and I dig you as we together dig the lostness and the fact that of course nothing’s ever to be gained but death; I only wanted to tell you how great I think you are (after all). So hear my plea—write—let me know if that attic’s still open, for the three, four weeks I be there; hip me to anything you can think of. Don’t give me up, I’m lost—especially since her, I almost had no life in me this summer, it’s comeback (I think) and right now, on no more than a hangover from last night (Josephine made a turkey, Irwin and I invited Swenson, Danny Richman, Nardine, Peaches Martin (!)—who’s back playing guitar an
d singing folk songs in Village and separated from Hayes who has “black orchid” Indian girl in MexCity and fears she’ll find an “amant more blond” while he pleads with medics for operations, 40 others, Julien Love and his fiancée and he immediately began breaking Josephine’s expensive glasses with tosses over his shoulder and she doing tit for tat and even more pretended casual but with her own destruction not his so later I tackled Julien maybe because of this but he had something like a fit, a rigid trembling popeyed fit and had to be led out of pad, Irwin wagging his finger at me, “Julien is weak, leave him alone” as if saying he was sick little boy, not tackle him, and so on, and don’t continue because you dig Julien anyhow, in fact surmise if you will that on way out he knocked over big hall table lamp and landlord got on Josephine, you dig Julien anyhow and I think he’s “had it,” I guess—) from this night, when also I got hi on Mexshit with Danny Richman to Julien to Rappaport to girls in general to etcetera (and all the time conscious of this awful Newyorkitis, this incessant drinking and talking always in a musty pad not even cool but drunk, like when you were there last trying to make a W. C. Fields show) (incidentally I’ve since dug Harry Levinski and he told me stories about Huck in 1933, isn’t that real choice?), drunk and most of all all exhibitional like a bunch of goddamn fools who can’t grow up and dig anything but themselves, that includes me, I need the fresh winds of California, I start right after New Year’s—but from this night, and its hangover, to return, I am conscious of my own personal tragedy, my sleep, that is my room itself is haunted by it at night when I sleep or wake from a series of restless desperate images, catching myself in the act of shuffling the file cards of the memory or the mind under the deck, aware also of the tragedy, the loneliness of my mother. I have the persistent feeling that I’m gonna die soon, only the feeling, no real I think wish or “premonition,” I feel like I’ve done wrong, to myself the most wrong, I’m throwing away something that I can’t even find in the incredible clutter of my being but it’s going out with the refuse en masse, buried in the middle of it, every now and then I get a glimpse. I get so sick thinking of the years I wasted, especially 1949 after we returned from Frisco all that Watsonia and Boisvert and hangup—yes, now I know how to understand life, I learned the hard way, etc., after 14 years trying—but why did I waste 1949 with false understanding and bum kicks like the flatteries of J. Clancy etc., why did I waste my beautiful MexCity on paranoias, I could (like today) have gone out dressed the way I like, casual, cool, no big author or even big American or tourist or whatever, just go and mix with the cats and get to know people, the really interesting ones, like say the circles revolving around that mudhut coffee-nutmeg-rum bar we had to jump over an open sewer, an open gash of the lost corrupted lake of the Aztecs to get to—Instead—Oh shit! never again Cody! I really know now, you’ll see, of course everything is fine because I’ve won (you see I almost lost this summer, if I had gone to Mexico with Julien instead of re-remembering my soul in the hospital (Oh what things I have, or could tell you about the hospital! what literatures out of just that one month (remember the wheelchair letter?) for my big personal knowledge Odyssey structure (this is apart from objective fragments of my life to examine)—with Julien, Mexico, drunk, June dying, I might have gone under, that is, seriously, in the habit of dying and started doing it and maybe even in the powerful gut feeling I had (and still do, never had before, it makes me lush) maybe even a habit itself, junk, from sheer need to turn over before I kick the dog. But now I’m a big seacaptain again, lookout—that is, faroff eyes in the gray morning, and I think of Frisco, I think of the evening I’m going to arrive, shh, I creep up the street taking in not only every aspect possible all the sensations round me but referring them to earlier personal tiptoeings around my beloved and spectral and soon to be holy Frisco—the neons, the mad neons, the soft, soft nights, secret chop sueys in the air and I know a bar on Embarcadero where Oakland Mex Hipsters drink and blast with 50¢ whores, it’s near markets, I never told you, but tiptoeing to your house, digging the street, digging available indications of what’s going on in your house from a block away (actually understanding in myriad rapid thought everything I sense as it stands in front of me and activates all around, in portable breast shirtpocket notebooks slapping), advancing little by little to the point of knocking on the door which will be exactly like those hot summer afternoons when I used to pretend that I was dying of thirst in the desert but an Arab chieftain found me and took me to the hospitality of his tent, and laid a glass of ice water in front of me, but said “You can only have it if you surrender your fort and your men, and do it on your knees abjectly” and I agree, bowing my head in tremendous heroic agony but seeing the glass, the dews of the foggy rim, the ice clinking, and plunging for it, raising it slowly to my lips, the forbidden drink, that moment of actually taking the first sip and appreciating water itself playinly, whee, wow, you know what I mean, that’s how I’m gonna knock on your door which ain’t any door.