by Jack Kerouac
Reaching into his pocket with that gesture, the topcoat flying behind him, see Cody hurrying into the heart of Denver with the same gleam in his eye you see on the fenders of shiny new automobiles just dusted out of that old house-light reflecting garage but now wink to the wild neon of Main Street; see him, sometimes in such a big hurry that it seemed the traffic light clicked green just for him and whichever buddy arm-in-arm with heads knocking in talk he sweeps along with, twinkling ‘round-corner in a vanish of heels, so they don’t have to stop at all but cut right along to the poolhall, levels of conversation to match the exciting joy, wham, bam, those voluminous talking-fogs whipping back like dialog balloons dissolving in wintry air, a sight (again) little Cody oft dug from that lonely Skylark winter window of his poor bumfather’s creaking in old chairs behind his watchpost dusty glass; maybe as he rushes a bus-waiting girl, (again), legs akimbo, watching him suddenly with that snaky sexy lovelike look and the kid’s saying to himself “So that’s what they been doin all this time the big guys and girls (damn, damn, look at that Cadillac beat the light!),” the girl standing under candy-striped late Saturday afternoon October five-and-ten awnings, with dark glasses, a regular highheel downtown Denver broad; see Cody Pomeray trying to hurry into the heart of the great Denver evening that to him will find its obvious focus in the pool-hall where sometimes the hour is so roaring that with the Tremont parlor backdoor open you can see a solid block of poolhall through the two joints like looking down an endless mirror all cuesticks, smoke, green; hustling to stab the heart of the night or be stabbed but always missing because it is not in the poolhall, or downtown further where the redbrick walls lead further, glowing from blackracked neons into unspeakable secret glittering centers where everything must be happening or at least give modified indication of where to go for it, show down what long dark lane and boulevard with its nameless forlorn corner (the Fox and Hunt Bar!) where a neon light hidden behind further buildings is sending an aura of invitation and calling men to come and make their mothlike approach (like the heroes of Dreiser whom he has hurtling like beetles against summer screendoors, against sad refinements and excitements in the huge dark of America, umalum, umalum), and instead the whole night and everything it’ll ever give anybody besides death and absolute loss is to be found twelve, thirteen feet above Cody’s head as he rushes all eyes into the poolhall, either with Watson the big Virgil of the Poolhall Night with whom he shares the same robe of refined dissipated excitement everyone else’s dumb about, the shark and his boy, the stars of loungey interviews at midnight, like Miles and Lee Konitz cutting into a bar together, or, say, Ike and Harry Truman, or me and my boy into the union hall three thousand miles from home, or alone hankering; twelve, thirteen feet up the redbrick wall and barely around the corner into the between-buildings alley, so tragic and hidden from the city, right there, the vision, what you get, what there is.
To emphasize that it’s Saturday night some people bring boxes of chocolate that they buy in poor beat drugstores that have bedpans and jockstraps in the window, thinking the ribbon, and the moonlit Indian maid with beads but this time (because dealing with ladies’ tastes and palates, not rough crotches of cops) no breast, makes it Saturday night truly; Saturday night, which makes it entirely different that, as you walk by a drugstore with nothing to do and maybe a glum lack of interest, you see an ad for chocolate candy in the window—those selfsame boxes that used to have even more ornate Indians on them and women with longer beads framed in silverer moonlight—even the names are Saturday night sad, “Page and Shaw,” “Schrafft,” etcetera and all this is as connected to the meaning of Saturday night as those old syphilis movies of the Twenties showing a couple all dolled in evening clothes rushing uptown in a mad glitter of lights to a party (where they get the clap or the syph and later, after Saturday night is over, they have a suicide pact in ordinary weeknight clothes—) (this was an actual pix I saw and it wasn’t a Thirties film because I saw it in the Thirties and even then, aged twelve, wondered about the oldness of the film). Candy in fancy boxes, chocolate, it’s the only thing a drugstore that sells nothing else to eat will sell, the serious drugstores without sodafountains sell chocolate candy; ice cream sodafountains, the fancy kinds that make their own ice cream and candy and have tile floor and jars of hard candy all spick and span and intricate like you might imagine old Vienna looked, they also sell boxed candy, have big displays of it, all brands and the boxes with their golden arrangement and ribbons and fancy lettering catch at my heart as I say with this unspeakable realization that it’s Saturday night—not only because the beau might tip his cap at the dismal door and present such a box, or because in a drugstore window otherwise made up of pans and rubber a lavender candy box sits humanly, sweetly, God-knows-whatly, dearly, dismally and the only person who’s aware of drugstores on Saturday night is necessarily alone and lonely, but because in the Saturday night darkness and glitter (the special kind that makes iron fire escapes of the sides of theaters particularly bleak) boxes of chocolate candy signify staying at home in spite of festivities everywhere so-called, signify the speechless yearning to reach a hand across the abyss and in gentle self indulgence like that of the opium man across town behind drawn shades plop rich chocolates one by one into the mouth, listening, I’d say, not to the Hit Parade but the Saturday night dance parade remote band-broadcasts most networks have (while the woman of the house is ironing the fresh fragrant wash), in your bathrobe and slippers, preferably Chinese style, with the funnies. But Saturday night is to be best found in the redbrick wall behind the neons, it’s now infinitely bleaker than ever, like the iron fire escapes at the blind wallsides of those great fat movie auditoriums that squat like frogs in businesslike real estate are so much bleaker on Saturday nights, they cast more hopeless shadows. Saturday night is when those things that haunt us beyond our speech and the formations of our thoughts suddenly wear a sad aspect that is crying to be seen and noticed all around and we can’t do anything about it and neither could Cody; and to this day he, older and after all this time, goes now haunted in the streets of Saturday night in the American city with his eyes torn out like Oedipus who sees all and sees nothing from the agony of having lived and lived and lived and still not knowing how to conjure from the pitiful world and the folks around some word of praise for something that makes him grateful and makes him cry but remains invisible, aloof, delinquent, complacent, not unkind but just dumb, the streets themselves, the things themselves of life and of American life, and the faces and hopes and attempts of the people themselves who with him in gnashing map of earth pronounce vowels and consonants around a nothing, they bite the air, there’s nothing to say because you can’t say what you know, it’s a void, a Demosthenes pebble would have to drop way long down to hit that kind of bottom. Sometimes way out of town, say miles out on East Colfax, Cody, waiting for a bus, or a ride, would see the distant rust glow of downtown neons and be so impatient to get there at once that with his chin lifted to his goal he would walk fast in such intense get-there preoccupation (in his topcoat pockets his fists pressed against his thighs for speed) he’d be like a man riding a wheel, a flat wood doll you hold in your hand and give the legs a blurry spin because miles from downtown was like the sudden tragedy I felt one Thanksgiving in Lowell when the family decided to go to the movies and though it was the biggest event that I could’ve wished for I said I’d stick to my regular Thursday night YMCA exercise gymn class and yet when I got to the Y steps, even before my father’s old Plymouth was vanishing in a wink of red light as exciting as the red neons up against the Kearney Square buildings and Chin Lee Restaurant five blocks down and around the corner of which wildly I knew the theater was glittering, I realized it was Thanksgiving and there was no gymn class (and so ran through shortcut railroad canal bridges among cardboard crates and mountains of millrags blue with dye, straight for the red walls of movie street as though, clutching my throat, only there I could ease the horror which had suddenly lifted me in the air in a dream
y realization that I was going to die), Cody feeling that way on lesser impulses most likely and maybe wasting his, dissipating his last dime on a wild promiscuous trolley ride that plummeted him in, and he ran to the poolhall, and nobody was there, it was closed for repairs or Thanksgiving, and always as he stood there on the sidewalk beneath the redbrick neon wall, thinking, unthinking, a cop cruiser came around the corner in a flash of evil two-toned black and white with shiny antenna and the growl of the radio and he turned away, he moved along, he had hurried for this and always for nothing more than this.
His father had never done anything but stare dumbly in alleys beneath windows of hotels that had red neons, in fact with that same grave careful floppyhat adventurous sorrow beneath the redbrick glow wall looking straight ahead with his eyes moist in the moon, but Cody was ambitious to conquer the world of men that existed up there in the shadows behind the swarming gloom in back of the neons that spread like brickdust softly exploding red and then dark again…and somewhere on the main drag a man hurrying across the street to serious business. When on rainy nights Cody happened to have fifteen cents for a bowl of noodle soup with rye bread and one pat of butter in some diner downtown, and sat there by the window with a stolen newspaper, and saw, through mediums and worlds of dark steel, concrete, and wetsplashed tar, through populations of parked cars beaded silver in the light from the diner and passing buses and Railway Express trucks and iron fences, through arches of nameless overpasses that for all he knew through the diner’s silver reflecting window were the overpasses of darkness and the night itself, when through all this, as in a dream suddenly fished from loving infancy, he saw, barely saw, two blocks away, the deep bloodred neons of some bar and restaurant winking against the distant brown-brick of its building with subsidiary blue moons of neons that said Sea food, Steaks, Chops, saw the thing agitating in otherwise gloomy city darkness more like the darkness he knew in the backass bridges and meatpacking porches of Wazee and the railroad tracks and agitating with a comfortable little message of joy to anybody who had the money or knew the people there to come on in and enjoy the shelter, the sea food, music, the waitresses, the hot hissing radiators, he wanted to go and be with it and go gabbling among humanities and not just meander in a blind chagrin like his Pa. It was like he wanted to penetrate and know the poolhall. Leaning his head on his hand at two o’clock of Monday morning in that diner and staring that neon, he thought, “And now, unlike Satnite when I came here with sixty-eight cents and had the wheatcake with sausages at thirty-five, and the fried onions with order at five, then the cream cheese sandwich at fifteen, and that gal with the marcelled hair in the green coat was making googoo eyes at me and I thought by gawrsh it was going to be one big dinger of a night and so and so but now, now, now, now and time has flown and rolled ah me and this pair of rubbers developed a hole sinst, now it’s Sunday night or should I say Monday morning (yawn) and now for me to cut over there and eat the blue chops only the ops of which I can see in blue thar with the gaspump hiding the ch and my rubbers leaking I go over that pattering shiny rain that ain’t interessed in my mother or me and never has to do with anything but where it falls and maybe I slide in oilslick and go off that high curb, jump over the puddle as only I can, on tiptoe, zoom across the middle island, zoom to the dry sidewalk along the gray wall with the bulbs and down through that part that I can’t see to that bar that starts town with a bloody light separatin this edge from general restaurants and bars of Denver as I go along, but here really if I’m going to die why do I get to feel so good and how come I feel so good so often anyhow, I don’t even figure with any exactness what my next shoes will be bought out of, it’s all fine and good to sit in a diner and enjoy soup and papers and looking out the window but son of a bitch goddamn if that coat hadn’t been given me I’d be freezin this winter and where the hell have they put my father with all their lousy systems of lopping and laying away people, I’ve got a long long ways to go before I get to that hard bed in Johnson’s buddy’s attic, and a climb to boot, and in the rain, and my eyes are hot, and I ain’t got a belt, and finished my soup and would like to eat sea food, steaks and shops of chops right now. What is all that brownness of light in the railroad station damn damn damn. There’s Denver, I always told Pa I wanted—he didn’t believe me when we had that friend with the printing shop and let us sleep on the cots and I seen those beautiful views of the city with lights shining full of movies and plays and lobsters flown in from New York, and pretty women with silk stockings tied by garters to their cunt hooks where I gotta go with my hand tomorrow night, he didn’t believe me when I predicted I’d be a big dispatching agent someday with a wife waiting for me where they have lit-up foyers and potted palm trees by the desk and upstairs you look out the window and there she is, the red light that says RESTAURANT, and the brick wall in back of it, and in blue SEAFOOD, STEAKS, CHOPS, and it’s raining and I got a wife and car and Watson is with me in a tuxedo because he just won the World’s title at billiards beating Willy Hoppe and we’re gonna go push that car and make tire tracks in the rain to the middle of town and eat all we want, talking to the Mayor in the lobby, passing by the boxoffice with a pass, sitting in the box of the theater the three of us like in Vienna, us leaning forward and her hanging back with a wrap and everything dark and great and after the curtain goes down they yell ‘Author! Author!’ I guess I’m the author, did that whole thing while selling in Chicago, I bow then I go out for a smoke on the iron balcony overlooking Denver and I see the whole town and all the red lights blue lights below me and I even see that place where me and Pa slept on the cots and I teold him I sure did tyell him but all he thyought about was other things.”