by Jack Kerouac
It was too completely mad for flabbergasted dumb old Tom Watson, one of the kindest fellows in the world, who in any case could never be expected to even have the energy to face a thousand miles of deliberately absurd travel in a clonking old heap, no, Watson’s first, real, and genuinely kind impulse was to quiet Cody down.
“My land,” he said to himself, “he’s practically crazy from being hungry I bet!”
He took him home that afternoon to his grandmother’s house. They had a big snack from the icebox, Cody drinking two and a half quarts of milk in fear that he’d never see that much for several more years, and making sure not to tear the bread when he folded it over the butter, clutching his chest, actually clutching his chest when he realized Watson’s grandmother was only standing over them to refill their glasses from a fresh bottle of milk, not pleased or displeased but just a nice old woman with a rosy moon face, glasses, white hair, wearing cotton stockings over her piano legs that supported her so firmly and unmovably in the halos of her bright linoleum and a housedress that in the course of tender chores around the house which was as comfortable as an old pillow, had taken on the kindly, almost dear shapelessness of her herself, the simplicity and sadness of her stolid motherlike repose at the poor hunchbacked boy’s side as he bent to his supper, her grandson whom she served and honored, enough to make Cody feel like crying for his own mother whom he was positive now would have been something like Watson’s grandmother, just as calm, plain, humble, like old women who run rickety grocery stores in dumpy backyard neighborhoods of trees and woodfences. In Watson’s bedroom upstairs the boys spent a quiet hour facing each other at a folding cardtable set near the window where the lace curtains puffed in with the breeze and played over the flowery wallpaper and knickknacks of windowshelf, the mere sight of this graceful drowsy phenomenon making Cody marvel and enjoy life (always high at fifteen) to be in a real home that had lace curtains and little feminine lonely frills in it to beat harsh nature, as Watson, not realizing that Cody was thinking these kinds of thoughts, proceeded in a thorough explanation of the various first steps in cheating at cards.
“First off you see Cody you mark ’em best with your thumbnail like this, usin your own code if you like, to designate face cards, acies and deucies.”
“Yes!” cried Cody. “Yes indeed!”
From a closet next to a dark wood dresser with carved iron grips that swung on little hinges in rich significant clicks, and next to the right front bedpost of Watson’s fourpost manorial boxspring bed in which Cody imagined Watson slept like the little boys in fleecy nightgowns in mattress advertisements of the Saturday Evening Post, which he realized now he was confusing with a rubber tire ad that shows a little boy wandering out of bed with a candle on New Year’s Eve but expresses the same tender comfort of angels and vision of American children (ah poor Cody who’d seen this vision in those soaked magazines that have been dried by the sun and stand on tattered edges among weeds and cundrums of backlots), from that closet that seemed too rich because it was next to these things and inside had the luxuriant darkness of suits all flashing dim from starry moth crystals (and their starry odor) and the faint gold of shoetrees, Watson pulled out a fairly good brown tweed suit and, with a slight bow like a Viennese nobleman, like the Bela Lugosi vampire Count bowing to the young hero at the door of the rainy castle, he presented it to Cody to keep, Cody in turn offering his toy accordion as collateral anyway, with a smile and still bowing Watson saying he’d keep it for him. It was Cody’s first suit: he bulged out of the new clean underwear; bulged out of the starched white shirt that was handed to him with a laundry cardboard brace in the collar that made him wonder if he had to fiddle with it like irascible millionaire husbands tugging before last minute mirrors in B-movies, he bulged out of the necktie that wound foursquare around the pillars of his neck, but out of the suit he exploded, the buttons were in danger of popping, the trouser creases were stretched flat out of sight on his thighs, the back seams of the coat showed connective spinal threads, the sleeves took the shape of his forearms that suddenly looked almost as big as Popeye’s.
“Damn! Do I look sharp?”
He looked alright but strange. So awed by these new clothes that he could hardly turn his head when Watson talked to him, but only nodded up and down, his long hair bushy and uncombable, his thoughts all pompous sweaty astonishment like the cartoon characters they draw with bewildered perspirations raining from their heads, just as ludicrous as that, and yet as that bright afternoon that had shed its radiance unasked for so long now showed itself to be turned into old red afternoon when they stepped forth from the house, and piteous remorse among men, birds, and trees that had transpired while they were dressing still haunted the air with that hung silence that makes people ask themselves sadly “Oh what happened to the afternoon?” and later when the general autumn dying quietly like a brave soldier overwhelms them, “Oh what happened to the year?”, Cody, very like an Episcopalian farmer boy going to church the Sunday morning before his wedding and with the same absent-minded ignorance of the wide surroundment brooding over him that characterizes all mortal persecuted breath beneath this hugeness, literally had to be led stupidly and stiffly down the street by Watson as they hurried back to the pool parlor to meet the entire gang. It was going to be a big night, suit and all. It didn’t take long for Cody to quicken his steps with Watson’s and soon they had pinpointed down-street and were swinging around the corner to a big trolley line thoroughfare, hurrying for the big-traffic, ever-more-exciting, all-of-it-pouring-into-town Saturday night, both of them with the same bright fresh gleam in their eyes that you see on the shiny fender of a new automobile when it turns in from the darkness and outskirts of town and immediately reflects Saturday night Main Street neons where before it just sat black in a dark garage or else in the driveway collecting dim dressing lights from the upstairs of the house, vanishing like a comedy team rightward in a vision of ankles twinkling in the dusk with regardant bending figures pointed downtown plunging through the same pocket of excitement which was not only their point of sober discussion but raised little fogs from their mouths as they yaketty-yakked along (with lone envy Cody used to watch other guys cutting along like this, sometimes from Mission reading-room windows on nights when it was so cold he thought he could read what the buddies said before their intense voluminous talking-fogs whipped back to dissolve in wintry eternity); Cody finally forgetting he was wearing a suit, forgetting the high entrapment of the collar and the woolly stifling around his armpits and the unfamiliar scuffling cuffs out of which he soon in fact resumed telling Watson further things and all things about himself, gesturing out of the shiny round starch his big grimy cracked hands that were not at all the hands of an absorbed banker in the street but more like a dirt farmer’s at a funeral and worse like horny toads in a basket of wash. “Now in Gaga’s barbershop in back and setting way up high behind the water heater I have a bag of clothes, harkening to clothes, but to go and pick it up involves terrible divisions with Gaga over money my old man owed him even though it’s just old pants and belts and polkadot shirts, but further I have an extry pair of fairly good work-shoes settin way up high so nobody can notice on top of a locker in the Y and my plan, actually and no lie, was getting down to Colorado Springs or Raton or some such to freeze m’fingers off in construction camps or whichever”—and so on as Watson assured him he had plenty of clothes for him and not to worry. Excitement of hurrying downtown on foot for the big night reached a supreme peak when suddenly as they rushed arm-in-arm and came to cross Broadway the light instantly changed for them and they didn’t have to wait but just hustled right straight on across the street for the poolhall, that light that wouldn’t allow lulls in the rhythm of their joy holding up whole avenues of traffic exactly for them to sweep along, profound, bowed, bumping heads together; Cody so singing in his soul now that he had to talk on several levels to express himself to Watson: “Even though as you say there’s just as much work around here and why even
go to Fort Collins where it’s so c-o-l-d (whee! zoom! look at that new Cadillac!) and I didn’t further finish about earlier speaking of Gaga and all the things I want you to know—”; his arm around Watson, tight armpits or no tight armpits, he the only one who’d ever put his arm around the hump of Watson’s sorrow; similarly in the moment, seeing, just as they reached the other curb, in the exciting shadows of a five-and-ten awning and to his deeper and simultaneously running amazement, a beautiful girl fixing on him from her casual one-leg-forward hand-on-hip position by the weighing machine waiting for the bus a cold arrogant look of sensuality done with misty eyes and something suggestive, impatient, almost too personal to understand, astonishing him in the realization that he was wearing a suit for the first time in his life and this was the first official sex-appeal look from a regular high-heeled downtown socialite honey (still finding room to yell “Watson watch that new Caddy beat the light now!)” and reflecting: “So this is what these damn dames and big guys been doing, giving each other turble personal glances of angry snaky love that I didn’t know about in my previous boy days beatin around the sidewalk with my eyes on the gutter looking for nickels and dimes wearin goldang cockin old pants. Damn! Lessgo!”
In the poolhall the hour was roaring. It was so crowded that spectators were standing obscuring everything from the street and somebody had the backdoor open simultaneously with the alley door of the Welton Street parlor so that you could see a solid city block of poolhall from the north side of Glenarm to the south side of Welton interrupted only by a little tragic alley of shadows with a garbage can, like looking down a hall of mirrors over a sea of angrily personalized heads and islands of green velvet, all in smoke. To Cody it was a vision, the moment of his arrival that everybody was waiting for, yet even though he stood in the door at the side of great cool Tom Watson the Virgil of this big Inferno, wearing not only his clothes but the same gorgeously sophisticated robe of their afternoon’s adventure which was already undergoing a rich change to evening and the lazy explorations that were to come, a decadent refinement that all the dumb bastards in this dimness would have to struggle to understand to know anything hereafter even about pool, nobody made a move to notice or even gave much of a crap and Cody would have immediately felt drowned again except suddenly for the saving memory of a hunch he used to have in boyhood which was whenever he turned his back on the people who were involved with him and even others who happened to be standing nearby, perfect strangers sometimes, they immediately gathered with the speed of light at the nape of his neck to discuss him voicelessly, dancing, pointing, until, jerking his head around for a quick look or just slowly to check, it turned out they’d always twanged back in place with all-to-be-expected fiendish perfect hypocrisy and in exactly the same bland position as before. Remembering anyhow his father when in his cocky way of bums used to stagger happily into some place howling “Hallelujah I’m a bum, bum again” Cody as he came in, very carefully digging everything through shrewd half closed eyes so he could size up and savor the scene for everything it had, jazzing on the balls of his feet in that thing Americans do instead of pinching themselves, now repeated the song to himself, “Hallelujah I’m a bum, bum again,” in a secret, sly, interested whisper of his own he always used to refer back to sad factors of the past. While Watson was busy looking around, Cody directed his attention to a spot on the floor near table number one where, after he had got tired looking at people on those long watchful nights, he used to spend stranger further hours on the onlookers’ bench absentmindedly studying the reality and vying with the existence of cigarette butts and spit by estimating exactly how it got there on the floor, wondering why for instance a particular calm spit gleamed like it did even though it had been rejected like a person’s rejected and spat out exactly (by the clock) two and a half minutes earlier by a blue-jowled conductor who had to spit and wouldn’t have spat otherwise but came apparently to think of something completely different at the button wire counting the score and scratching his chin (all as voices of the fellows reverberated around the walls of the hall and moaned in his absent not-listening ear), so that as far as the spot of this conductor’s own spit was concerned it no longer existed for him, only for Cody; Cody then estimating exactly how he himself got there, not only the world but the bench, not only the bench but the part of the bench he filled out, not only that but how he got there to be aware of the saliva and the part of the bench his ass filled out, and soon in the way the mind has; at all of which now because it wasn’t his best idea of what to do in a poolhall, in Watson’s company he made his ceremonial sneer and official revenge, even in the roaring noise and even though among all these Saturday feet he couldn’t quite see the exact spot he had studied, though he knew there were new cigarette butts and spit on that spot now, like little brothers and sisters following in the stead of others long ago studied and swept away, in any case doing all this so that the first full-fledged moment of his poolhall charactership would not be spoiled in fevers and forgetful excitement like running up to people to talk, but instead he would take advantage of his big chance to keep his attention disciplined on his good luck, and so do so in the roots of previous well-considered sorrow of October in the Poolhall.