by Jack Kerouac
Old Bull Balloon (speaking of loneliness and the diaphanous ghost of days) a singularly lonely man, and most ephemeral, along about one of these years went broke and became so poor that he went in on a ridiculous partnership with Pomeray. Old Bull Baloon who usually went around wearing a poker-wrinkled but respectable suit with a watch chain, straw hat, Racing Form, cigar and suppurated red nose (and of course the pint flask) and was now fallen so low, for you could never say that he could prosper while other men fell, that his usually suppositious half-clown appearance with the bulbous puff of beaten flesh for a face, and the twisted mouth, his utter lovelessness in the world alone among foolish people who didn’t see a soul in a man, hounded old reprobate clown and drunkard of eternity, was now deteriorated down to tragic realities and shabbiness in a bread line, all the rich history of his soul crunching underfoot among the forlorn pebbles. His and old Pomeray’s scheme was well nigh absurd; little Cody was taken along. They got together a handful of greasy quarters, bought wire, screen, cloth and sewing needles and made hundreds of flyswatters; then in Old Bull’s 1927 Graham-Paige they headed for Nebraska to sell door to door. Huge prairie clouds massed and marched above the indescribable anxiety of the earth’s surface where men lived as their car belittled itself in immensity, crawled eastward like a potato bug over roads that led to nothing. One bottle of whiskey, just one bottle of whiskey was all they needed; whereas little Cody who sat in the rattly back seat counting the lonely pole-by-pole throb of telegraph lines spanning sad America only wanted bread that you buy in a grocery store all fresh in a happy red wrapper that reminded him speechlessly of happy Saturday mornings with his mother long dead—bread like that and butter, that’s all. They sold their pathetic flyswatters at the backdoors of farms where farmers’ wives with lone Nebraska writ in the wrinkles around their dull bleak eyes accepted fate and paid a nickel. Out on the road outside Cheyenne Wells a great argument developed between Pomeray and Old Bull as to whether they were going to buy a little whiskey or a lot of wine, one being a wino, the other an alcoholic. Not having eaten for a long time, feverish, they leaped out of the car and started making brawling gestures at each other which were supposed to represent a fistfight between two men, so absurd that little Cody gaped and didn’t cry. And the next moment they were embracing each other, old Pomeray tearfully, Old Bull raising his eyes with lonely sarcasm at the huge and indefatigable heavens above Colorado with the remark “Yass, wrangling around on the bottom of the hole.” Because everybody was in a hole during the Depression, and felt it. They returned clonking up Larimer Street with about eighteen dollars which was promptly that night hurled downward flaming in the drain like the fallen angel—a vast drunk that lasted five days and was almost humorous as it described crazy circles around town from the car, which was parked on Larimer at 22nd, little Cody sleeping in it, to an old office over a garage in a leafy side street that Old Bull had once used as headquarters for a spot remover venture and where pinochle at a busted dusty rolltop desk consumed thirty-six hours of their fevered reprieve, to a farm outside town (now abandoned by some family and left to Old Bull) and where drinking was done in barns and ruined livingrooms or out in cold alfalfa rows, finally teetering back downtown, Pomeray migrating back to the railyards to collapse beneath Rex in a pool of urine beneath dripping ramps while Old Bull Balloon’s huge pukey tortured bulk was finally reposed on a plank in the county jail, strawhat over nose. So when little Cody woke up in the car on a cold clear October morning and didn’t know what to do, Gaga, the beggar without legs who clattered tragically on his rollerboard on Wazee Street, took him in, fed him, made him a bed on the floor like a bed of straw and spent the night thundering around in bulge-eyed sweat trying to catch him in a foul hairy embrace that would have succeeded if he’d had legs or Cody hadn’t lowered himself out the transom.
Years of hopping around with his father like this and on freight trains all over the West and so many futilities everywhere that he’d never remember them all, and then Cody had a dream that changed his life entirely. It was in reform school, after the theft of his first car and when he hadn’t seen his Pa for a year. He dreamed he lived in an immense cosmic flophouse dormitory with the old man and Rex and other bums, but that it was somehow located in the Denver High School auditorium; that one night he was walking across the street in an exhilarated state, carrying a mattress under his arm; all up and down the street with its October night lights glittering clear swarmed the bums, with his father off somewhere doing something busy, excited, feverish. In the dream Cody was thirty years older; he wore a T-shirt in the brisk weather; his beer belly bulged slightly over the belt. His arms were the muscular arms of an ex-boxer growing flabbier. His hair was combed slick but it was thinning back from bony frowns and Mephistophelean hairlines. His face was his own but it was strangely puffed, beaten, the nose in fact was almost broken, a tooth was missing. When he coughed it sounded harsh and hoarse and maniacally excited like his father. He was going somewhere to sell the mattress for wine money: his exhilaration was due to the fact that he was going to succeed and get the money. And suddenly his father wearing his old black baseball hat came stumbling up the street with a convulsive erection in his baggy pants, howling hoarsely “Hey Cody, Cody, did you sell the mattress yet? Huh, Cody, did you sell the mattress yet?”—and ran clutching after him with imploration and fear, a dream that Cody woke from with a repugnance that only he could understand. It was dawn; he lay on the hard reformatory bed and decided to start reading books in the library so he would never be a bum, no matter what he worked at to make a living, which was the decision of a great idealist.
At fifteen this child had the regimen of his life worked out in a confused and still and all pathetically practical way. He rose at 7 A.M. from Old Bull Balloon’s rolltop desk (his current bed); if the office was filled with poker players he slept in the bathtub of the Greeley or other hotels. At 7:15 he rushed downtown, washed at barbershop sink, if it was not available he used the YMCA sink. Then he delivered his paper route. Around nine he went to the Smith residence, where he knew a near-idiot maid that he made love to on the cellar cot, after which she always fed him a big meal. If this friendship with idiot maid sometimes failed he ran to Big Cherry Lucy’s at the Texas Lunch (ever since thirteen Cody was able to handle any woman and in fact had pushed his drunken father off Cherry Lucy Halloween night 1939 and taken over so much that they fist fought like rivals and Cody ran away with the five dollar stake). At ten he rushed to the library for the grand opening, read Schopenhauer and magazines (sometimes when he wasn’t reading funnies as a child he’d get a real book off the old Greeley Hotel shelf and read down over the first words of every line Chinese style in childly thought, which is early philosophizing). At eleven o’clock he asked to wash cars and sometimes asked to park cars at the Rocky Mountain Garage (already he could drive better than any attendant in Denver and in fact had stolen several other cars to try his skill since his time in the “joint” and parked them back on the same block intact except for change of position), noon hour he used a paper route friend’s bike to ride five miles out to friends’ families for big meals, then helped with chores till two. Back to library for afternoon reading, history, encyclopedias and the bloody sad amazing Lives of the Saints, and making use of the library toilet; four o’clock rest and meditation and connections in poolhall till closing time unless semipro twilight ballgame or other spectacles of interest sprung around town; eleven o’clock he stole nickels off newsstands for a Bowery beefstew and found the place to sleep.
* * *
IT WAS A SATURDAY AFTERNOON in Denver, October, 1942, when Tom Watson first saw pure-souled Cody sitting on that bench with his lower lip jutted up habitually in unconscious power that Watson thought was a gesture of profile power, a pose for somebody, when actually Cody was only dreaming there; wearing Levi dungarees, old shoes without socks, a khaki Army shirt and a big black turtleneck sweater covered with car grease, and carrying a brand new toy accordion in a box
he had just found by the side of the road, perched among the usual great number of Saturday onlookers half of whom were waiting for tables and talking about everything that had happened during the week, the kind of things that made Cody feel like a sheepish fool with no news of his own and marveled to see them all curling their mouths in the derisive telling of interesting tales, even while Watson said to himself “Must be some young new punk.” Cody sat there, stunned with personal excitement as whole groups of them shouted across the smoke to other fellows in a tremendous general anticipation of the rapidly approaching almost unbearably important Saturday night in just a few hours, right after supper when there would be long preparations before the mirror and then a sharped-up city-wide invasion of bars (which already at this moment had begun to roar from old afternoon drinkers who’d swallowed their bar egos long ago), thousands of young men of Denver hurrying from their homes with arrogant clack and tie-adjustments towards the brilliant center in an invasion haunted by sorrow because no guy whether he was a big drinker, big fighter or big cocks man could ever find the center of Saturday night in America, though the undone collar and the dumb stance on empty streetcorners on Sunday dawn was easy to find and in fact fifteen-year-old Cody could have best told them about it; the premonition of this oncoming night together with the dense excitement of everything around the tables in the shadowy hall nevertheless failing to hide certain hints of heartbreaking loss that filtered in with chinks of daylight from the street (October in the poolhall) and penetrated all their souls with the stricken memory not only of wild wind blowing coalsmoke and leaves across town, and football games somewhere, but of their wives and women right now, with feminine purposes, with that ravenous womany glee trotting around town buying boxes of soap, Jell-o, floor-wax, Dutch Cleanser and all that kind and placing these on the bottom of their wagons, then working up to apples at the fruitstand, containers of milk, toilet paper, half crushable items like that, finally chops, steak, bacon pyramiding to eggs, cigarettes, the grocery slip all mixed up with new toys, new socks and housedresses and lightbulbs, eagering after every future need while their men-louts slammed around with balls and racks and sticks in the dimness of their own vice. And there in the middle of it stood melancholy Tom Watson, the habitue, the one always ready to take anybody on for a game, hunchbacked, meek, dreaming at his upright cue-stick as naturally as the sentry with his spear or the hull-bump of a destroyer that you see on the horizon with its spindly ghost of a foremast, a figure so familiar in the brownness of the room that after awhile you didn’t see him any more like certain drinkers disappear the moment they put their foot on the brass rail (Old Bull Balloon, Julien Love, others), just for the most part standing there chalking his cue in the gesture of poolhall nonchalance he and all the others always used for quick look-sees, reassured. When he saw Cody he raised his eyebrow-he was interested in this wild-looking kid, but like an old woman rocking on a porch noting storm clouds before supper, placidly, dumbly surprised. Tom Watson on this lonely earth was a crippled boy who lived in unostentatious pain with his grandmother in a two-story house under great sidestreet trees, sat on the screened porch with her till poolhall time, which was usually midafternoon; en route made the rounds of downtown streets, mild, sincere, dropping a word in the shoeshine parlor, another into the chili joint where his boys worked, then a moment on the sidewalk with that watchful, spitting, proprietary air of all young men of American daytime sidewalks (there’s more doubt of it at night); and then into the poolroom like a man going to work, where you could best judge his soul, as Cody did, seeing him standing stooped at his cue-stick with that unfathomable patience of an old janitor awaiting a thousand more nights of the debris of rotation, snookers and pinochle in the same brown meeting hall, his huge round eyes once they were fixed on you persisting like a baby’s who’s terrorstricken by life watching a stranger go by his part of the sidewalk. Then again you saw that he prowled like a fox in his atmospheres, a weirdy, a secret wise man, making his living at pool; if you looked closer you saw that he never missed a difficult shot once he finally got down to it; that when he did go down and propped his thin artistic hand with forefingertip and thumb joined in a lean, architectural rest for cue’s smooth passage, unfolding his sculptured fingers below for ornament and balance on the green, a gesture so sophisticated in America that boys see it in their dreams as soon as they’ve seen it once, at these times he was even less noticeable at work than when standing loafing in bunchy balled-up gloom at the rickety pylon of his cue-pole. Raggedy Cody sitting there watching this Tom Watson was the enactment of the drama of an American boy for the first time perceiving the existence of an American poet, this Tom Watson so tragically interesting, so diseased and beautiful, potent because he could beat anybody yet be so obscurely defeated as he slouched down in the press of the crowd, sometimes flashing a languid sad smile in answer to the shouts of dishwashers and dry clean pressers but usually just enduring eternity on the spot he occupied, his Pepsi-Cola unattended on the ballrack, his eyes dreaming upon sorrows that must have been as deep as an Assyrian King’s and notwithstanding that when Cody grew up learned they were nothing but the pure dumb trances of a sweet crippled poolshark. At the moment when this strange love for Tom Watson and the great American Image of beautiful sadness which he represented was leaping in Cody’s imagination, and Watson himself understood from the corner of his eye that this boy wasn’t only interested in learning pool from him but everything he knew and would use it for purposes of his own which were so much vaster than anything Watson had ever dreamed that he would have to plead for Cody’s guidance in the end, Cody immediately jumped up, ran over and made the first great conman proposition of his life. It had to be a fantastic proposition; the moment Watson looked amazed and dropped his superior pose out of sheer perplexity, in fact embarrassed pain because what was he expected to do with a kid rushing up to him and saying “Do you want to learn philosophy from me?” with a wag of the finger, sly eyes, neck popping with muscles like a jack in the box straining at the void of the world for the first time with a vigorous evil spring, Cody, his position established, leaped in. “Now further than that yet, and of course omitting to discuss the fact because already almost understood, i.e., you teach me how to beat pool” (pointing at himself) “and I teach you” (socking Watson in the chest with his forefinger and really hurting him) “I teach you further into psychology and metaphysics” (Cody mispronounced it “metafsicks” only because at this time he just hadn’t carefully looked at it yet and when he did several weeks later it caused him tremendous private grief to remember this) “and further beyond all that and in order to cement our relationship and in fact—of course if you agree, and only if you agree, as I do—in fact to establish a blood brother loyalty of our souls, if you wish to use clitchay expressions at this time or any other, and again just as you agree, always as you agree” (jabbing the iron finger again but this time careful not to touch, just holding it quivering powerfully within the tiniest fraction of an inch from Watson’s chest) “I propose now and without any further shillyshallying, though” (rubbing his hands busily, rocking back and forth with one foot in front of the other, his head down but watching Watson with an undertook that was very arrogant, cocky, suddenly sarcastically suggestive, the rocking deliberate not only like a boxer getting ready arranging his skip rope or a pitcher on the mound rubbing up the ball with a half-sarcastic expression on the catcher’s preliminary sign but almost hypnotic in the way it attracted Watson who watched entranced and just barely seemed to be wonderingly rocking with him)—“though I can whip a car into a going condition even if it’s awful old tin and I know buddies for free greasejobs plus where to steal cans of oil and even one tankful during the ballroom dance at eleven tonight on Broadway when I go around the cars parked in my boy’s lot with my siphon and mouth-suck up into cans on the average a half a gallon gas per car which is unnoticeable but awful hard work, etcetera on, I still have to find the car, you see, huge troubles natcherly as I consider ene
rgy and every and all contingency but listen carefully to me (and I will, no fear, to compensate, find, or steal a car, any time you agree, or say, whatever) if you want to go to the Notre Dame game this Saturday in South Bend, Indiana and REALLY want to see it and not just loafing the idea—stop a moment to understand!” he commanded Watson who’d started to speak. “All week I heard you and all the other fellows bettin, saying ‘Well now I sure would like to see that thar Notre Dame game by gawd’ and talking like people often do whose wish-plans never crystallize see because of lazy blocks that multiply on the back road of old delays yet I’m offering a real ji-nu-ine chance and I repeat if you really want to see it I’ll go get my Uncle Bull’s old Graham-Paige (!!!) if necessary” (this was such a tremendous concession Cody showed a stagger) “see? Which he won’t miss not only because it doesn’t run hor hor, but right now he’s freezing his assets in Montany ha ha ha hee hee hee” (staggering back with a high silly-gigling laugh for what he thought in those days was a tremendous joke and in fact bumping against others, one of them a gloomy C.B.&Q. brakeman who was just then bending down for an easy straight shot and missed completely on account of Cody in his foolish kid stupid excitement to be noticed, a sentiment that the brakeman, chewing his gum as fast as he could go while aiming now expressed by not removing his cue from where it finger-rested but just turning to look at Cody with his jaws chewing slowly) “and positively I can take you to the game and back in record time through chill winters and U. S. mails and all things and really blow the road wide open so long as you provide your ticket of course, after all, whoo!” (wiping himself in a parody of adroitness with a dirty handkerchief) “see? Whereas you watch the game but I’ll wait outside either in the car or in a diner listening on the radio or better try to see panoramic touchdowns from a roof or tree, or even better I’ll hustle around town while you’re enjoying and see if I can find some girls for us, money we can borrow with the promise we’re cousins say from Oopla, Indiana next door and come in every Saturday to attend the fair you see and tell them we usually have a lot of money but not this time on account Pa’s hard time with the hayin this fall and the pumpkins didn’t sell etcetera and then we come back possible the girls coming with us far as Nebraska or someplace where maybe they get money from their aunt or cousins, anybody. See? All that and most of it simple except as I say omigosh a ticket, a ticket to the Notre Dame football game one thousand miles away, six million feet deep with telephones and luminaries I can’t begin to even imagine, pity poor me and the big tickets to world stadiums, so I leave it to you…you…and also type of car, also anybody you want to bring. I be your chauffeur, you teach me pool, snookers, anything else comes in your mind, be my big brother, I be your helper. So it be! So it be! What say?”