by Jack Kerouac
It was a Saturday night and if a train happened to crash by you would have to hold up everything you’re doing to freeze and wait. The two girls were not exactly the usual American girl team of the pretty one and the ugly old one because in this case the older one was extremely attractive herself only you had to look twice or be an expert to tell that if passionate fornication was what you wanted tonight, real gnashing passion in the black, this older one—who looked away resolutely from everybody as if she was a school teacher who had orders to do so but with exactly that kind of sternly imposed self-discipline that was so pathetic and so tight you knew it was bound to explode and when it did it would be good for a man to be there to catch the contents of the act—Now Cody although he was only fifteen at the time noticed this about her the first thing because it was his habit to make his judgments as immediately as possible so as not to waste preliminaries on ordinary hello how are you I’m Joe he’s Bill hee hee ignorance—the moment he stepped off the dark curb of the car, stood in the muddy yard (it had rained in that part of Wyoming) and saw the two girls standing in the face of the onslaught they knew would come from such a carload he made his decision—simply, who’s best. The younger girl called Marie was the epitome of the cute little sexy fleshpot of honey, gold and shiny hairs that you see in illustrations of Coca-Cola girls at fountains with equally pretty rosy boys and so much so, so startlingly what the guys wanted that immediately they were terrified to see it staring them in the face, the bird in the hand—with her pudgy arms that gave promise to the genuineness of two beautiful tits protruding from a deliciously soft cashmere sweater and her arched eyebrows and plump little foolish assy mouth. But I’ll start again.
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THEY GOT TO THE HOUSE where the girls were at nine o’clock sharp. It was located practically under a watertank of the U.P. railroad that passed right by and left that dark dirt which is like the concoction of an artist’s palette after a short rain, the black color artists use to depict night, gloom, maybe evil—and it had just rained when the boys pulled up and Cody cut off the motor in a kind of a driveway covered with this dark railroad snotground. A fitful moon was all that was left of that entire day’s wild light (poolhall chinks of light, miscarriage field purples and iron file skies) and now nobody could see anything except the shape of the house, a few brown lights in it, and the hanging pendant globe of a streetlamp not across the street but across a whole plaza of dirt which might have represented a crossroad, a soccer field, a square, because at the other end of it just barely seeable was an old wood church with vertical boards and gingerbread eaves, behind it even more vaguely in the lunar underground a crazy huge uplilting wheat silo painted wild aluminum and glowing like a June worm in the darkness of the plains that seemed to begin behind it but actually surrounded everything I’ve been talking about—house, clearing, watertank, tracks, lamp, and a few further indications of a townlet beyond the road’s lamp—in one hollow misty carrousel of wild black space horses so close to one another that the only time you could see between them was when a faroff light indicated it, a railroad switch light or a roadlamp or an airport tower in the other county or the topmost glimmer of an antenna in a Cheyenne or whatever radio station.
Johnson who’d picked up one of the girls in Cheyenne a few weeks before and scored tried the storm door first while all the others stood around carrying the beers, the whiskey, the whatnot like altarbearers but with considerably more guilt and with a stirring in their gut that you feel in a whorehouse when you’re told to wait for the girl and suddenly you hear high-heel steps coming down the hall and envision the legs, the garters, the thighs, the panties, the breasts, the throat, the face, the hair of the woman coming—This was exactly the way they felt when Johnson unhooked the storm door with that delicacy of thumb and forefinger you need for such gadgets and as though he was unfastening a brassiere from the bulge-back of the house. Wild children opened the door; there was a lot of stumbling over things on the porch floor but Cody never dreamed that one of the crazy little giggling girls who had been sent by the gals to open up while they brush up the last wave was Joanna Dawson his future wife. In America it’s always two girls and one is always older and uglier than the other, except in this case it was more accurate to say that one was younger and prettier than the other because the older girl—Vivian, a sort of taut redhead with fairly short hair, in dungarees, the chaperone of the two and anybody looking at the younger girl could tell she needed one—Vivian was really pretty and to Cody who was only fifteen offered the most promise of passionate kicks as he came in and sized up everything in one second (back) “you had to look twice” or rather, here, again, he saw that she was supposed to watch out for everything and because of that and maybe had to that all her life was accustomed to acting stern like a teacher among irresponsible elements that element year by year now becoming life in general so that he instinctively realized she was a plum to pick before the Puritanism sank in for good and she became an old Lesbic maid. Besides the dungarees Vivian was wearing moccasins and a blue man’s workshirt washed and re-washed and now faded and made to look feminine only by the crucifix that dangled over a freckle in the little throat-hole at the base of her frightened neck: an outfit that showed she did a lot of chores around the house and yard all day and rode horseback somewhere but also on this night seemed to be a concession on her part to the wild necking party her younger cousin had arranged via Johnson. Marie, the younger, was a vivacious blond who habitually wore broad shiny leather belts, usually red, that emphasized the place where the finest part of her waist gave way to the swing of two white hips that must have looked like columns from there down to the toes if you could have looked under her skirt while the belt was on. Better than that, best of all, and for a reason that none of the guys knew or even tried to form in their minds, Marie wore glasses—dark rimmed glasses that gave her creamy white face and rosy natural lips with but just a tiny down of sideburn wisping down the cheekbone a price they could afford, without them she would have scared them off into the formal camps of complete ego-approach the kind American boys use for their Lana Turners in the rosy ballroom of the land, use for their idea of what it’s like to make Lana Turner and Ava Gardner and such. The same kind of approach they use on the boss when they go out to find their first whitecollar job. Marie was a wild little thing who read books and Dostoevsky and enough of D. H. Lawrence to make her ten times more aggressive than any shambling shy boy she could meet in this forlorn district of the world whether they came driving from Denver or lived a couple of telephone poles away. These two girls were cousins; Vivian was the daughter of the thin countrified woman in glasses whose picture was on top of the player piano; Marie was staying for the month, visiting from Killdeer, N. D. One of the three kids was also visiting—little Joanna, from Denver, whose father, a cop in Santa Fe, was waiting for her annual visit from the general matriarchal Colorado. Big Slim Buckle sat on the couch among the others, Watson on one side, Johnson on the other, with a great beautiful sincerity that made Marie change her interior plans for the night, because it had been the prettiness of Johnson that attracted her and decided her to arrange this party no matter what happened, a prettiness that Buckle had in greater and tenderer proportions—
These imaginings lead me backwards to my one and original poipose.
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DIRTY OLD VOYEURS. On Times Square all these dirty old men we all hate some of whom try to make boys as well as girls and are the ugliest old lechers, make you think of the Arabian proverb “A young woman flees an old man”—they wear hats, why all the time wear hats!—hang around subway entrances, little bookstores, library parks, chess arcades—prowl up and down—some so innocuous you don’t notice what they are till they stop in front of you (say as you lean against building) trying to look casual but somehow with their dirty old hardpants pointed straight at you like a hex, a hoodoo pointed at the man goin down Dauphine Street to die—Nevertheless Cody and I have the same soul and we know what they do, we st
ood with them at dirty-picture windows from coast to coast—So here goes, all this was just defensive preamble, and I will add (at least my own) food kicks: (anchovies with capers in olive oil is so rich it stuffs the throat, so salty it chokes you, so strong it seems to permeate and flavor the tin of the can itself until the tin tastes saltier than any salt, a metallic salt, the salt of Armageddon)—(this is a food example)—
Cody and I are continually interested in the pictures of women’s legs—little black and white books nudged among many in a Times Square or Curtis Street bookstore window draw us to see the thing in lurid white, somehow interests us more than color, in black and white the thigh is all the whiter, the background all the darker and evil—
Cody used to say “Have this picture, I’ve used it.” I have here a pix of Ruth Maytime (the famous Hollywood actress) and Ella Wynn and I love it—what tremendous lovely tits Ruth has, one shoulder strap of her suit is down, the other is flimsy, they reach very low because her breasts are low, heavy and way out thus stretching strap even further (ah me strap!)—her left breast occupies me for five nameless unconscious minutes on the sidewalk of Times Square and not her breast, just a pix of it, it is so vast, heavy, three-fifths concealed which is better than any other percentage, the nipple is in no danger of showing, what’s in danger is the point at which the soft yearning bulge might plop up, almost out—Ella’s is conventionally concealed, you can see the rich delicious soft living valley and then the bulge of the cloth following the holy contours we all know—but Ruth’s is as if Ella was a stripteaser who started the act and Ruth went next step—pulled cloth down but only one end so that instead of one-fourth upper left of a breast showing (with valley) now we see three-fifths full upper breast with valley expanding—Ah those gorgeous breasts—I stand here among the religious dirty old men of the world, chewing gum, like them, with a horrible beating heart—I can hardly think or control myself—I even know this is infinitely more delicious than touching Ruth’s breast itself (though I’d do anything for the chance)—But more, more about the breast itself—all my life I’ve dreamed on breasts (and of course thighs, but now we’re talking of breasts, hold your Venus, we’re talking about Mars, and your water, we’re talking about milk)—the dirty magazines of boyhood become the religious publications of manhood—to stop joking—one pull on that cloth and a great breast plops out, that’s the thing that is holding me here and all these lechers, some of them ninety, holding us captive and especially because we know it’ll never happen, it’s only a picture, but IF IT DID!—If so, a magnificent bouncing jelly-like white-as-snow warm strange Ruth-personal breast with a nameless but revealing nipple which would tell us everything we need to know (the exact nipple will tell us more than Ruth’s entire life story, “Around the beauty parlors of Brooklyn during World War II a strange energetic young lady began to be noticeable to the characters who frequented the places afternoon and night and even to the casual visitors…”—the first glimpse of it and we’ve finally seen her soul, its perfection and its imperfection, its confession, its secret girlish shame, which is best of all what we want) and everything we’ve all our lives wondered about Ruth speaking of Ruth as a woman who’s come across our attention only through her fame, pixes, husbands, and if she complains it’s her fault, I didn’t ask her to have three-fifths of her living breast that I want to nudge between my lips photographed, she offered it herself and I’m sure God will reward her for doing it—Ah that breast! it is such a casual breast, it just went swimming with her, her hair’s wet, she’s cutting a cake on Orrin Wynn’s yacht, Edgar Bones the idiot is husbanding cutely at her side—her mouth is done up into what is supposed to be a smile but is really a great bit of desire and shuddering sensual bitterness (she’s really cutting the cake) and her teeth are like my teeth when I bring a little kitty’s nose next to mine—This pix is black and white, this breast is gray—there is more reality in gray for me (and for Cody too) because I was brought up in the balconies of B-movie theaters. Ah the holy contours all we men know—Now, not to leave that, but let’s turn to knees. Ella’s knees are showing—Ruth’s are under a towel. Now all we lechers turn our vast, rumbling attentions in a body but with no military music and no salute and no flag except the Cross and Bones to the knees of Ella Wynn—they’re crossed, which would be unfortunate except by so being a little lovely dimple was formed on the back of the uppermost knee—I mean under the leg (sweet smooth underleg like the belly of a warmblooded fish but much better). This dimple, which is just a crease between some back knee flesh and the inner bottom thigh smoothness is especially notable because it emphasizes as nothing else could the main feature which is the lowermost knee, the knee that’s crossed on—the great thing about that knee is the glossiness, indicative of the texture of that gal’s flesh and of the further textures inward from the glossiness (my heart beats again!) to the thigh areas, deeper, more dazzling, dizzier, like climbing a mountain, till the gardens of her soul are within earshot and you are eligible to look for her face along and among the mountains to see what expression it wears alongside the long beautiful hair in a big ribbon—we lechers by now really raping the poor girl whereas tough Ruthy didn’t give us half that chance and subdued us and we jumped on her friend in cowardly revenge. We glance at Orrin Wynn as though we’d known him forever and recognize him with a smile, that is, recognize that his eye is on the sparrow, i.e., Ruth’s tit, not on Edgar as you might think if you don’t look close and Ella unsuspecting of this is smiling at the cake knife although that in itself is strange and perhaps infinitely more sadistic than Ruth and her gritting teeth—but Ella generally is a sweet little thing and although we’ve all just raped her, at least threatened to do so, we don’t want to harm her. We also wonder if there have been orgies and switchovers in this foursome and earnestly hope so as we might hope, as an example, for World Peace.
The lurid big pictures of immense-thighed burlesk gals on corner newsstands make us hold up sidewalk traffic day and night. My next stop must be France (postcards on the boulevard?)—but further and later.
* * *
SO IT WAS AS THOUGH CODY POMERAY’S early life was haunted by the sooty girders and worn old black planks of railroad bridges behind warehouses, by cinder yards where great concentrations of cardboard crates that were a nuisance to foremen of factories became the sly opportunity of bums—the backplaces of what we call downtown, the nameless tunnels, alleys, sidings, platforms, ramps, ash heaps, miniature dumps, unofficial parking lots fit for murders, the filthy covered-with-rags plazas that you see at the foot of great redbrick chimneys—the same chimney that had bemused Cody on many a dreaming afternoon when he looked at it toppling forward as clouds upswept the air in readiness for the big disaster—it was as though these things had been the—(and of course many more, why list any further, and besides we shall come back on other levels and more exhaustively)—these things had been the necessary parts of his first universe, its furniture, just as the little rich boy in a blue playsuit in some swank suburb outside St. Louis stands, in November, beneath the bleak black branches, staring at a universe which is necessarily and unalterably furnished with things like half-timbered English style housefronts, circular wooded drives for avenue blocks, forests of birch, the wire fencing in back of Tudor garages, boxer dogs, bicycles, sleek autos reposant at dusk before the warm lights that shine behind the drapes of a Spanish style house worth twenty-eight thousand dollars bought by an insurance broker who cuts along the narrow redbrick downtown streets of St. Louis near the markets by day, where you can see the river between box factories, earning his living among the trappings of the poor and of bums of all kinds but is incapable of stretching his home bones anywhere twenty miles away, inland from the river and the unclean city in private parks, quiet neighborhoods—Cody’s life, with the coming of the suit and consequently the beginning of some kind of different adult existence that for instance reached its own maturity when he also acquired a winter topcoat from Watson or one of the others in the gang a
nd that nameless gesture that men have, became his, when they reach for something in their pants pockets and flapshroud the coat away, elbows bent, head to one side, like a theater manager coming out at midnight in a hurry checking to see if the keys are all there. With the coming of the suit and this adult gesture, Cody’s life in Denver entered a second phase and this one had for its background, its prime focal goal, the place to which he was forever rushing, the place his father had only known as a bum in meek stumbling uplooking approach or had more vigorously known in his youth but that was Des Moines and long ago, nothing less and nothing more than the redbrick wall behind the red neons: it was everywhere in Denver where he went and everywhere in America all his life where he was. It was in the secret dusty place around the corner of the frontwall of the poolhall, up near the second-story beauty parlor windows there, actually in the alley or area between buildings no more than a foot wide or floored by anything but the most darkened debris of the city but it was illuminated by a nearby red neon and some from the poolhall below, it showed every furrow of the brick, it clicked sadly on and off with the lights—in the beauty parlor itself you could see the interior with its fathead shapes haunted by red and empty now, see through it in through the around-the-corner window that, like the wall, hid, as so many things in America on Main Streets and now even on bleak suburban streets that have chiropodists’ and lawyers’ offices near rectories and old houses with hooks over a defunct second-story door without stairs which is the old hayloft door and maybe a man in a roundpeak nineteenth-century hat was hanged from that hook, these things also hid behind the red neons of our frontward noticeable desperately advertised life. The new loneliness that came to Cody with the coming of a suit and a topcoat was the difference between sitting on an upturned bucket in the smoky exciting dumps of Saturday morning on Sante Fe Drive, near the unbelievably exciting crossing of the D. & R.G. railroad tracks that nudged a long smooth corridor through the lean and ricket of dumpbacks, junkpiles and hangbrowed fences for a solid mile, a place at least of wild playful promise where all you had to do was wear overalls (like the can jungle place My Man Godfrey wanted to go back to after he got his fill of Park Avenue in a tremendously Hollywoodian naïve Depression movie that was nevertheless naïvely true, the unspeakable visions of the individual), the railroad track that swooped from the smear of dumpsmokes in the blue morning air cleanly and swiftly to the mountains of the mist, the green banks of another El Dorado, another Colorado, which was a loneliness that could be diverted by the actions of one hundred interesting grimy junkmen laboring with tragic heavy importance among the skewered wrecks and rustpiles—the difference between this and standing in the middle of the winter night on a sidewalk that is not your home beneath cold red neons glowing as softly as if it was still summer but now on a redbrick wall which eschews a humid and perforated iciness of its own, corrupted, dank with winter, not the place to lean a lonely back and in spite of all this grimness inherent in it suggesting more than it ever could suggest in the summer and with infinite greater adult excitement than the dump a joy, but a joy so much stronger than the joy of the dump that it was like the man’s need for whiskey supplanting the boy thirst for orange soda and took as much trouble and years to develop, the joy of the downtown city night. Great sign posters set on top of low graveled roofs of bowling alleys and shining fiercely against the bare bald backs of windowless warehouses, or maybe filling the windowed eyes of a hotel with their sheens, the glitter and yet the hidden beyondish gloom of this drove Cody in his secretest mind as it has myself and most others to further penetrations into the interior streets, the canyons, the ways, so much like the direction music takes in the mind or even the undiscoverable flow of dream images that make dreaming a tragic mystery; and so seeking rushing all dreams into the heart of it, always the redbrick wall behind red neons, waiting. Something was there that Cody and I saw together in an alley in Chicago years later, when we parked a Cadillac limousine in an unobtrusive black corner, pointed it to the street; that Cody saw a thousand times in the walls of towns of Iowa, Virginia, or the San Joaquin Valley; something, too, that was namelessly related in his poor tortured consciousness to the part of the redbrick wall he had always seen from the smooth old waitingroom bench of the County Jail when his father had been arrested for drunkenness on Larimer Street probably with five or six others taken en masse from a warehouse ramp, waiting for his appearance before the judge to appeal to the court for some mete of mercy for his father, swearing he hadn’t drunk for a month before and soon making great childly speeches that sometimes astonished people and later was brought to the attention of juvenile authorities who come looking to aid Cody like the Beast to aid the Beauty: the brickwall, always dully glowing from dark red to gray bleak red as a neon somewhere flashed, seen through a little barred window on the inside wall and where calendars depicting Indian maids in the moonlight with beads and exposed breasts drove Cody to wonder about the world that spoke of beautiful piney islands and Indian love calls and Jeannette MacDonald yet had nothing to show for it but jailhouses, arrested fathers, distant moanings, clocks tocking, and the one spike-driven sorrow of that red wall besmirched with lights that were intended for the streets for official passersby, but hid something behind for some sad and dishonest reason faintly related to what his father sometimes complained about; and yet had the ability like any old brickwall of a factory if you put a white unloading light on it instead of red of shining as forlorn as brown snow.