by Jack Kerouac
Jack
P.S. Dear Evelyn,
I would have complied with your every wish immediately, in that letter of several months ago, if I’d had half a chance—between hospital, troubles, having to work and earn $ and everybody wants me to get drunk I had no idea how I’d ever get to Frisco or whether, in spite of Cody’s desperation with regard to his loneliness on the level you mentioned, it was possible, wise, healthy, etc. for me to try to go any old way; but now I’m going to try it, in fact I wish I’d tried it then. Now if Cody doesn’t tell me about his REAL troubles how can I know? Believe me, I suffer the same as Cody from not seeing him once in a while—and have to batter my head against the general emptiness when I want to explain something to somebody. So anyway Evelyn, I hope I’m still wanted; I’m Cody’s friend, not his devil. Ain’t you by the way about to run out of names for the kiddies? We never know where we’re going.
Love, Jack D.”
2
AROUND THE POOLHALLS OF DENVER during World War II a strange looking boy began to be noticeable to the characters who frequented the places afternoon and night and even to the casual visitors who dropped in for a game of snookers after supper when all the tables were busy in an atmosphere of smoke and great excitement and a continual parade passed in the alley from the backdoor of one poolroom on Glenarm Street to the backdoor of another—a boy called Cody Pomeray, the son of a Larimer Street wino. Where he came from nobody knew or at first cared. Older heroes of other generations had darkened the walls of the poolhalls long before Cody got there; memorable eccentrics, great poolsharks, even killers, jazz musicians, traveling salesmen, anonymous frozen bums who came in on winter nights to sit an hour by the heat never to be seen again, among whom (and not to be remembered by anyone because there was no one there to keep a love check on the majority of the boys as they swarmed among themselves year by year with only casual but sometimes haunted recognition of faces, unless strictly local characters from around the corner) was Cody Pomeray, Sr. who in his hobo life that was usually spent stumbling around other parts of town had somehow stumbled in here and sat in the same old bench which was later to be occupied by his son in desperate meditations on life.
Have you ever seen anyone like Cody Pomeray?—say on a street-corner on a winter night in Chicago, or better, Fargo, any mighty cold town, a young guy with a bony face that looks like it’s been pressed against iron bars to get that dogged rocky look of suffering, perseverance, finally when you look closest, happy prim self-belief, with Western sideburns and big blue flirtatious eyes of an old maid and fluttering lashes; the small and muscular kind of fellow wearing usually a leather jacket and if it’s a suit it’s with a vest so he can prop his thick busy thumbs in place and smile the smile of his grandfathers; who walks as fast as he can go on the balls of his feet, talking excitedly and gesticulating; poor pitiful kid actually just out of reform school with no money, no mother, and if you saw him dead on the sidewalk with a cop standing over him you’d walk on in a hurry, in silence. Oh life, who is that? There are some young men you look at who seem completely safe, maybe just because of a Scandinavian ski sweater, angelic, saved; on a Cody Pomeray it immediately becomes a dirty stolen sweater worn in wild sweats. Something about his tigerish out-jutted raw facebone could be given a woe-down melancholy if only he wore a drooping mustache (a famous bop drummer who looked just like Cody at this time wore such a mustache and probably for those reasons). It is a face that’s so suspicious, so energetically upward-looking like people in passport or police lineup photos, so rigidly itself, looking like it’s about to do anything unspeakably enthusiastic, in fact so much the opposite of the rosy Coke-drinking boy in the Scandinavian ski sweater ad, that in front of a brick wall where it says Post No Bills and it’s too dirty for a rosy boy ad you can imagine Cody standing there in the raw gray flesh manacled between sheriffs and Assistant D. A.’s and you wouldn’t have to ask yourself who is the culprit and who is the law. He looked like that, and God bless him he looked like that Hollywood stunt man who is fist-fighting in place of the hero and has such a remote, furious, anonymous viciousness (one of the loneliest things in the world to see and we’ve all seen it a thousand times in a thousand B-movies) that everybody begins to be suspicious because they know the hero wouldn’t act like that in real unreality. If you’ve been a boy and played on dumps you’ve seen Cody, all crazy, excited and full of glee-mad powers, giggling with the pimply girls in back of fenders and weeds till some vocational school swallows his ragged blisses and that strange American iron which later is used to mold the suffering man-face is now employed to straighten and quell the long wavering spermy disorderliness of the boy. Nevertheless the face of a great hero—a face to remind you that the infant springs from the great Assyrian bush of a man, not from an eye, an ear or a forehead—the face of a Simón Boívar, Robert E. Lee, young Whitman, young Melville, a statue in the park, rough and free.
The appearance of Cody Pomeray on the poolroom scene in Denver at a very early age was the lonely appearance of a boy on a stage which had been trampled smooth in a number of crowded decades, Curtis Street and also downtown; a scene that had been graced by the presence of champions, the Pensacola Kid, Willie Hoppe, Bat Masterson re-passirig through town when he was a referee, Babe Ruth bending to a sidepocket shot on an October night in 1927, Old Bull Balloon who always tore greens and paid up, great newspapermen traveling from New York to San Francisco, even Jelly Roll Morton was known to have played pool in the Denver parlors for a living; and Theodore Dreiser for all we know upending an elbow in the cigarsmoke, but whether it was restaurateur kings in private billiard rooms of clubs or roustabouts with brown arms just in from the fall Dakota harvest shooting rotation for a nickel in Little Pete’s, it was in any case the great serious American poolhall night and Cody arrived on the scene bearing his original and sepulchral mind with him to make the poolhall the headquarters of the vast excitement of the early Denver days of his life becoming after awhile, a permanent musing figure before the green velvet of table number one where the intricate and almost metaphysical click and play of billiard balls became the background for his thoughts; till later the sight of a beautifully reverse-Englished cueball leaping back in the air, after a cannonading shot at another ball belted straight in, bam, when it takes three soft bounces and settles back on the green, became more than just the background for daylong daydreams, plans and schemes but the unutterable realization of the great interior joyful knowledge of the world that he was beginning to discover in his soul. And at night, late, when poolhalls turn white and garish and eight tables are going fullblast with all the boys and businessmen milling with cues, Cody knew, he knew everything like mad, sitting as though he wasn’t noticing anything and not thinking anything on the hard onlooker’s bench and yet noticing the special excellence of any good shot within the aura of his eyeball and not only that, the peculiarities and pitiful typehood of every player whether some over-flamboyant kid with his eleventh or twelfth cigarette dangling from his mouth or some old potbellied rotation wizard who’s left his lonely wife in a varnished studio room above a Rooms sign in the dark of Pearl Street, he knew it all.
The first to notice him was Tom Watson. Tom was a hunchbacked poolshark with the great moon blue eyes of a saint, an extremely sad character, one of the smartest well-known shots of the younger generation in the locality. Cody couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old when he wandered in from the street. It was only that many years before, in 1927, that Cody was born, in Salt Lake City; at a time when for some Godforsaken reason, some forgotten, pitiably American, restless reason his father and mother were driving in a jalopy from Iowa to L.A. in search of something, maybe they figured to start an orange grove or find a rich uncle, Cody himself never found out, a reason long buried in the sad heap of the night, a reason that nevertheless in 1927 caused them to fix their eyes anxiously and with throat-choking hope over the sad swath of brokendown headlamps shining brown on the road…the road that sorrowed into th
e darkness and huge unbelievable American nightland like an arrow. Cody was born in a charity hospital. A few weeks later the jalopy clanked right on; so that now there were three pairs of eyes watching the unspeakable road roll in on Pa’s radiator cap as it steadfastly penetrated the night like the poor shield of themselves, the little Pomeray family, lost, the gaunt crazy father with the floppy slouched hat that made him look like a brokendown Okie Shadow, the dreaming mother in a cotton dress purchased on a happier afternoon in some excited Saturday five-and-ten, the frightened infant. Poor mother of Cody Pomeray, what were your thoughts in 1927? Somehow or other, they soon came back to Denver over the same raw road; somehow or other nothing worked out right the way they wanted; without a doubt they had a thousand unspecified troubles and knotted their fists in despair somewhere outside a house and under a tree where something went wrong, grievously and eternally wrong, enough to kill people; all the loneliness, remorse and chagrin in the world piled on their heads like indignities from heaven. Oh mother of Cody Pomeray, but was there secretly in you a lovely memory of a Sunday afternoon back home when you were famous and beloved among friends and family, and young?—when maybe you saw your father standing among the men, laughing, and you crossed the celebrated human floor of the then-particular beloved stage to him. Was it from lack of life, lack of haunted pain and memories, lack of sons and trouble and humiliated rage that you died, or was it from excess of death? She died in Denver before Cody was old enough to talk to her. Cody grew up with a childhood vision of her standing in the strange antique light of 1929 (which is no different than the light of today or the light when Xerxes’ fleets confused the waves, or Agamemnon wailed) in some kind of livingroom with beads hanging from the door, apparently at a period in the life of old Pomeray when he was making good money at his barber trade and they had a good home. But after she died he became one of the most tottering bums of Larimer Street, making futile attempts to work and periodically leaving Cody with his wife’s people to go to Texas to escape the Colorado winters, beginning a lifetime swirl of hoboing into which little Cody himself was sucked later on, when at intervals, childlike, he preferred leaving the security of his Ma’s relatives which included sharing a bedroom with his stepbrother, going to school, and altar-boying at a local Catholic church, for going off to live with his father in flophouses. Nights long ago on the brawling sidewalks of Larimer Street when the Depression hobo was there by the thousands, sometimes in great sad lines black with soot in the rainy dark of Thirties newsreels, men with sober downturned mouths huddled in old coats waiting in line for misery, Cody used to stand in front of alleys begging for nickels while his father, red-eyed, in baggy pants, hid in the back with some old bum crony called Rex who was no king but just an American who had never outgrown the boyish desire to lie down on the sidewalk which he did the year round from coast to coast; the two of them hiding and sometimes having long excited conversations until the kid had enough nickels to make up a bottle of wine, when it was time to hit the liquor store and go down under ramps and railroad embankments and light a small fire with cardboard boxes and naily boards and sit on overturned buckets or oily old treestumps, the boy on the outer edges of the fire, the men in its momentous and legendary glow, and drink the wine. “Wheeoo! Hand me that damn bottle ‘fore I knock somebody’s head in!”
And this of course was just the chagrin of bums suddenly becoming wild joy, the switchover from all the poor lonely woe of the likes of Pomeray having to count pennies on streetcorners with the wind blowing his dirty hair over his snarling, puffy, disgruntled face, the revulsion of bums burping and scratching lonely crotches at flophouse sinks, their agony waking up on strange floors (if floors at all) with their mad minds reeling in a million disorderly images of damnation and strangulation in a world too unbearably disgusting to stand and yet so full of useless sweet and nameless moments that made them cry that they couldn’t say no to it completely without committing some terrified sin, attacked repeatedly by every kind of horrible joy making them twitch and marvel and gasp as before visions of heart-wrenching hell penetrating up through life from unnumberable hullabalooing voices screaming in insanity below, with piteous memories, the sweet and nameless ones, that reached back to fleecy cradle days to make them sob, finally bound to sink to the floor of brokendown pisshouses to wrap around the bowl and maybe die—this misery with a bottle of wine was twisted around like a nerve in old man Pomeray’s brain and the tremendous joy of the really powerful drunk filled the night with shouts and wild bulging power-mad eyes. On Larimer Street Cody’s father was known as The Barber, occasionally working near the Greeley Hotel in a really terrible barbershop that was notable for its great unswept floor of bums’ hair, and a shelf sagging under so many bottles of bay rum that you’d think the shop was on an oceangoing vessel and the boys had it stocked for a six months’ siege. In this drunken tonsorial pissery called a barbershop because hair was cut off your head from the top of the ears down old Pomeray, with the same tender befuddlement with which he sometimes lifted garbage barrels to city disposal trucks during blizzards or passed wrenches in the most tragic, becluttered, greasedark auto body shop west of the Mississippi (Arapahoe Garage by name where they even hired him), tiptoed around a barber chair with scissor and comb, razor and mug to make sure not to stumble, and cut the hairs off blacknecked hoboes who had such vast lugubrious personalities that they sometimes sat stiffly at attention for this big event for a whole hour. Cody, Sr. was a fine. gentleman.
“Well now say, Cody, how’ve been things in the hotel this summer; anybody I know kick the bucket or which, or seen Dan up at Chilean Jack’s?”
“Can’t talk right now Jim till I get the side of Bob’s head done—hold on just a second whilst I raise up that shade.”
And a great huge clock tocked these dim old hours away as young Cody sat in the stove corner (in cold weather) reading the comic pages, not only reading but examining for hours the face and paunch of Major Hoople, his fez, the poor funny easy chairs in his house, the sad sickening faces of his hecklers who always seemed to have just finished eating at the table, the whole pitiful interesting world in back of it including maybe a faint cloud in the distance, or a bird dreamed in a single wavy line over the boardfence, and the eternal mystery of the dialog balloon taking up whole sections of the visible world for speech; that and Out Our Way, the ragdoll rueful cowboys and factory workers who always seemed to be chewing wads of lumpy food and wrapping themselves miserably around fenceposts beneath the great sorrowful burdens of a joke; yet most blazing of all the clouds, the clouds that in the cartoon sky had all the nostalgia of sweet and haunted distance that pictures give them and yet were the same lost clouds that always called Cody’s attention to his immortal destiny when suddenly seen from a window or through houses on a June afternoon, lamby clouds of babyhood and eternity, sometimes in back of tremendous redbrick smokestacks that were made to look like they were traveling and toppling on the first and last day of the world and its drowsy butterflies; making him think, “Poor world that has to have clouds for afternoons and the meadows I lost”; sometimes doing this or looking at the sad brown or green tint pictures of troubled lovers in sensual livingrooms of True Confessions magazine, his foretaste of days when he would grow up and spend useless hours looking at nudist magazines at the corner newsstand; sometimes, though, only fixing his eyes on the mosaic of the tiles on the barbershop floor where he’d long imagined each little square could be peeled back endlessly, tiny leaf by tiny leaf, revealing in little microcosmic encyclopedia the complete history of every person that ever lived as far back as the beginning, the whole thing a blinding sight when he raised his eyes from one tile and saw all the others like the dazzling crazy huge infinity of the world swimming. In warm weather he sat on the sidewalk on a box between the barbershop and a movie that was so completely beat that it could only be called a C- or a D-movie; the Capricio, with motes of dusty sunshine swimming down past the slats of the boxoffice in drowsical midafternoon, the lady
of the tickets dreaming with nothing to do as from the dank maw of the movie, cool, dark, perfumed with seats, where bums slept and Mexican children stared, there roared the gunshots and hoofbeats of the great myth of the American West represented by baggy-eyed riders who drank too much in Encienega Boulevard bars galloping in the moonlight photographed from the back of a truck in California dirt roads, with a pathetic human plot you sometimes think is worked in to make everybody overlook who the riders really are. What disappointment little Cody felt never having a dime, or eleven cents to see the show; not even a penny sometimes to spend all the time he wanted selecting a chocolate candy from a lovely becluttered counter in a poor dim candy store run by an old Syrian woman in a shawl where also there were celluloid toys gathering dust as those same immortal clouds passed over the street outside; the same disappointment he felt on those nights when he sat amidst the haha-ing harsh yellings of those bums under the bridge with the bottle, when he knew that the men who were rich tonight were his brothers but they were brothers who had forgotten him; when he knew that all the excited actions of life which included even the pitiful getting of the night’s wine by his father and Rex led to the grave, and when suddenly beyond the freightyards towards the mountain darkness inhabited by great stars, where nevertheless and amazingly in a last hung dusk a single flame of the sun now making long shadows in the Pacific lingered high on Berthoud’s mighty wall as the world turned silently, he could hear the Denver & Rio Grande locomotive double-chugging at the base of a raw mountain gap to begin the train order climb to the dews, jackpines, arid windy heights of the mountain night, pulling the sad brown boxcars of the world to distant junctions where lonely men in mackinaws waited, to new towns of smoke and lunchcarts, for all he knew as he sat there with his ragged sneakers stuck in the oily yard and among the sooty irons of his fate, to the glittering San Francisco fogs and ships. Oh little Cody Pomeray if there had been some way to send a cry to you even when you were too little to know what utterances and cries are for in this dark sad earth, with your terrors in a world so malign and inhospitable, and all the insults from heaven ramming down to crown your head with anger, pain, disgrace, worst of all the crapulous poverty in and out of every splintered door of days, if someone could have said to you then, and made you perceive, “Fear life but don’t die; you’re alone, everybody’s alone. Oh Cody Pomeray, you can’t win, you can’t lose, all is ephemeral, all is hurt.”