by Jack Kerouac
* * *
THEN ON THOSE MAD MYSTERIOUS gray afternoons when all of a sudden it was as though the Atlantic Ocean had swept its clouds over town and they had been further torn and tattered on the mountains and were swooping in a raw chill universe from all directions, screeching birds diving to see, occasional splutters of soft rain blowing upon the faces of people who stood at bus stops hugging their coats and packages to their bellies and not seeing their reflections in ruffled puddles at the curb—that kind of day, that’ll only know a rosy cloud at sundown when the sun will find its tortured way through masses and battles of fevered darkening matter—raw, dank, the wind going like a gong through your coat and also through your body—the wild woolly clouds hurrying no faster in the heavens above than the steam from the rail-yards hurrying over the fence and up the street and into town—fantastic, noisy, the kind of insanely excited day when suddenly at 2 P.M. you notice some places (say, nothing more than Haggerty’s washing machine distributor) have turned on their neons in the gray dark and men in topcoats and hats go rushing towards the redbrick walls and the Rathskellers of late dark-days, on those days Cody too was rushing, looking around to see where to rush, everything was hankering, pointing, leaping, arrowing towards some place in the mute gray mist of the wild city where, though the premature red neons of the afternoon were already turned on by busy absorbed office girls—Haggerty was standing there in his store with one hand holding the front of his coat down, the other reaching around and inside shroud of coat to pockets and down deep there, for money or keys, saying to them “Say wait, Sue—did I leave that box of samples in the Club McCoy last night or in the back of the car?”—outside his windows, which are gleaming red in the mad Denver afternoon, young assistants of state senators and pretty mink secretaries of 17th Street are rushing by and suddenly one pitiful raw ranch hand, to some nameless point that all the whole city twenty square miles of it squeezes and contracts in one speechless huge star-shaped bat-ribbed air nerve to locate and centralize—there, and there alone, we’ll find our chops and smoky talk of the most important dinnertime in Denver—but not only the most important, the one most reminding of the joy of the crib, the answer to all the countrified American crying in the wilds. “Yes, yes, oh yes indeed, yes siree, yes, yes.” Maybe poor Cody, collar up, feet a little damp because of the hole in his rubbers at the toe-end, would be walking along a block-long wire fence of a factory, the traffic bowling in the street all in the same direction, and ahead in the flying mist through steams and soots he saw the huge wonderful neon of a major hotel rising—this for the son of a man who’d been born in a little impoverished junction town in Missouri represented the thrilling unspeakable answer to all the wants of life, no more the log fence in the gray fog and the mountain of used cars—and he would think “Oh damn how delightful it’ll all be in a minute as soon as—say wait—” and he too reaching in that pocket—So now, a minute before gray becoming dusk, Cody stands in the doorway of the poolhall waiting for Watson, Buckle, Johnson, Evans, Jackoff, anything to come and unfold themselves, and he does not know, does not know, cannot know, even I don’t really know, and that thing twelve, thirteen feet over his head, that spot haunted red wall, what it is that makes the approaching night so exciting, so shivering, so all-fired what-where, so deep. It was years later before he found the answer in the little nameless second when, after meeting Joanna in a sodafountain and taking her to the Ouray Hotel, Tremont corner fifth floor room, and turning from his pants on the chair to go on with what he was saying to her his future wife as she spread her thighs experimentally on the faded pink bedcover, a beauteous creature of the first order with long ringlets and curls and only incidentally fifteen at this time he saw in the act of swinging his eyes from chair to bed a nameless red tint fading and flashing on the redbrick wall just outside the window, saw this in a fraction through the little dirty thin muslin curtain that billowed in the drafts of steam from the silver radiator which was also slightly roseate from the neon, the dirty sooty sill also almost rusty lit from the glow, a scrap of paper one hundred feet off the snowy ground suddenly swirling past in the January nightwind, the whole big flat window rattling, the neon coming and going on the brick, the poor hidden brick of America, the actual place that you must go if you must bang your head to bang it at all, the center of the grief and what Cody now saw and realized from all that time the center of the ecstasy.
* * *
SLIM BUCKLE WAS A GREAT BIG figure going down those Denver alleys between the rickety backs of houses that were completely suburban and respectable out front with lawns and sprinklers because the heat of the plains sun turns the grass brown, striding with bowed head in some kind of tremendous concentration of his own among the smoking incinerators, the brick ovens of Denver backyards that once you’ve seen them you wonder why they didn’t have them in your neighborhood they’re so exactly like home, they remind you of Saturday mornings when you were six and knew the day was young and blue just by looking over the fence through pale smokes of whoever it is is always burning something on Saturday morning (and hammering on nails in the afternoon). In fact Buckle went through these alleys (en route to the poolhall) with his hands in his pockets like Sad Sack but whistling like Genêt’s Alberto at his gayest, a way of walking and whistling when he was a little kid and scrabbled after others in a calm universe of his own that he carried around to wherever they wanted to go, spitting silently through his teeth and probably like Lousy over the waving grasses of afternoon in some occasion when the gang had fainted under a tree and was too lazy to play jackknife or call others over beyond the fence. Trotting along like this, calm, lovely, bemused, he approached the grownup gang as though he wasn’t six-foot-four at all.
* * *
FRISCO DREAMS, the most huge beautiful hill in the world with a broad Main Street with trolleys and activity on both sidewalks, a mighty swoop—as though Frisco was suddenly as big as New York, as though it had hills like Amsterdam from 125th to 140th but steeper and so white—
It had elements of a strange Chicago I’ve known, God knows pour-quoi Chicago, mais now to facts—Pop lived on that greatest white hill—at top it overlooks sea and even junction of Alameda and Frisco road near the sea to which one arrives after the rollies of Iowa and world-views of Colorado—
A lot of Fillmore in that big hill—Like heaven going up the thing on foot—the Chicagoan thing is the ferry to Oakland—Though I never took it and no ferries in Chi, it is the water—The new, latest Frisco hill was more downtown (that’s great joy of bighill, out, like N’s Robinson Street, in the white jewelry sunshiney part of town) new part had more bigcity gray and redbrick in it, there was an enormous dormitory-mine with a gymn on main level, like Orson Welles hall of mirrors in Frisco Park (Lady From Shanghai) and I walked, there was something over my head, balloon or pigeon, a vastened downtown Frisco and the one I in real life dug back of Embarcadero, old western warehouse firms—Why doth the Lord make me wonder in those places?—
A woman in a beat car on that gray hill—an infant—cobbles—it’s other side of town than Cody’s and my Pop’s white hill—unjoyous—connected with those salt mines—as though it was her, the baby, and jail for me—but much more than that because to the side were some of those doorstoops of Montreal and Brooklyn and some of my old relatives, Aunt Marie, Lynn, potted plants and everything’s waiting for me to understand it.
* * *
L’S BAR—I WAS OF COURSE so stoned I thought I was in Mexico in all those marvelous marijuana hallucinated nights when I didn’t even know where I was without some tremendous effort and sometimes actually didn’t as in case of Battleground movie house to which we arrived in a trance from a taxi wherein apparently some interest had absorbed us a million miles from either Mexico City or the movie—and incidentally activity that directly contributes to my Mexico City dreams, there were imageries, exactly in that neighborhood, a side street running parallel to Juarez but to the south and to the side, a place I walked in a dream but n
ever really walked except nearby (or that is symbolically nearby) with Ike and Dave the night of the weed adventure—I believe an image which later became the bulwark of one of them of my dreams of MexCity was actually formed while riding, high, to Battleground in that taxi—
All this whole consciousness of cities as bigger versions of Lowell kicks as my father must have experienced them in his own raggly day began with Mexico—and it was because it so wondrously reminded me (in its simplicity, straightness) of Lowell (and French-Canadians). At Danny’s I got hi true, but just so as to say “Time hasn’t moved though of course I know it has”—and actually it was ten o’clock before I knew it. Walking forth from D’s the real high began—now let’s talk about high till daylight—after all, I’d not smoked for so long, or got hi, I was pure and not a dissipate—The highness first manifested itself in an exaggerated sense of the importance (mind you not the significance) of what I recounted—utter contempt for ordinary connectives, so that Danny wanted to have explanations to be conversive—I plunged into the bottom of my subject which was the origin of young guys who drink in Bowery at twenty and lose teeth but not muscles at twenty-five—origin was Lowell dump, where in North Carolina tea-dreams I also saw Cody and tried to write a “story” about it—and as I told everything swam in front of me, all the Centralville Lakeview dreams of the dump and along the dump and the brown nights and my father ignoring me again as I now ignore my own boy—and have to, as he had to—but when I was alone I met that man in hall with garbage, rode in dumb silence after “Gettin cold out!” but everything seemed self explanatory when he didn’t get off in lobby but continued to basement and I said “Oh, you’re going to the basement” and in that high “cheapness” I’ve noticed assuming that his silence had only been a menial form of humbling himself as though he was the janitor, not on speaking terms with guests where at first I’d dug him as snooty citizen. Assured by the basement I went out into cold night and cut (deep in thought of something till I crossed Seventh Avenue) then, as usual, turned to look at Danny’s window and imagined everybody in apartment which is so eternal, we’ve all seen it so many million times in death, everybody watching me, curling their lips “There he goes now, I’ve seen that one before, he always leaves drunk and stupid.” Up Greenwich Avenue I then go to meet Irwin and Josephine at San Remo’s, digging people in streets, stores, women’s jail, the coolness of the world in general as though it wasn’t l’Enfer at all, losing stretches of this in myself, popping back at Sixth Avenue to decide a glance at Waldorf then up Eighth Street and for this circling far to the right of my course and because of that and that only running smack into Irwin and Jo who didn’t seemed pleased and nobody’s pleased with me any more, I’m going to Hongkong, fuck ’em all.
In fact I felt the utter horror of having to be with them in my high, because they are evil, both of ’em.
We somehow got to L’s bar and I didn’t know where it was—I asked twice, they said Thompson Street, it meant nothing to me except with tremendous effort trying to recall Josh Hay (who’d lived on Thompson) in another city a million miles away just as the “me” that slept behind the outdoor ad sign in Asbury Park in 1943 and many others before and after have no relation to the “me” of now; so L’s bar was located in heaven, or anyway in the world and madly—on a blue street in fact, powerfully reminiscent of the location of Las Brujas nightclub in MexCity on its sidestreet off Letran and with the same Eternity. This location is like seeing, for the first time, a great and beautiful inevitable face, a face that couldn’t have failed to exist. It was a Les bar and not only that the coolest and best in New York—Irwin said “They’re all kind in here, it’s not a wild dike fight hole”—and it was so, quiet, cocktailish, the jukebox blowing the finest softest tenderest records (Frank Sinatra’s “April in Paris,” Tony Bennett’s “Blue Velvet”) for these little gals some of them gorgeous had refined taste and because women love love, women who love with women if only for a fling are the most (though this still depends on spirituality) loving and understanding of love and hungup on love in all creation—bah.
* * *
IN PUEBLO, COLORADO in the middle of the winter Cody sat in a lunch-cart at three o’clock in the morning in the middle of the poor unhappy thing it is to be wanted by the police in America or at least in the night (slapping dime down on counter like killing a fly with hand)—America, the word, the sound is the sound of my unhappiness, the pronunciation of my beat and stupid grief—my happiness has no such name as America, it has a more personal smaller more tittering secret name—America is being wanted by the police, pursued across Kentucky and Ohio, sleeping with the stockyard rats and howling tin shingles of gloomy hideaway silos, is the picture of an axe in True Detective Magazine, is the impersonal nighttime at crossings and junctions where everybody looks both ways, four ways, nobody cares—America is where you’re not even allowed to cry for yourself—It’s where Greeks try hard to be accepted and sometimes they’re Maltese or from Cyprus—America is what laid on Cody Pomeray’s soul the onus and the stigma—that in the form of a big plainclothes man beat the shit out of him in a backroom till he talked about something which isn’t even important any more—America (TEENAGE DOPE SEX CAR RING!!) is also the red neon and the thighs in the cheap motel—It’s where at night the staggering drunks began to appear like cockroaches when the bars close—It is where people, people, people are weeping and chewing their lips in bars as well as lone beds and masturbating in a million ways in every hiding hole you can find in the dark—It has evil roads behind gas tanks where murderous dogs snarl from behind wire fences and cruisers suddenly leap out like getaway cars but from a crime more secret, more baneful than words can tell—It is where Cody Pomeray learned that people aren’t good, they want to be bad—where he learned they want to cringe and beat, and snarl is the name of their lovemaking—America made bones of a young boy’s face and took dark paints and made hollows around his eyes, and made his cheeks sink in pallid paste and grew furrows on a marble front and transformed the eager wishfulness into the thicklipped silent wisdom of saying nothing, not even to yourself in the middle of the goddamn night—the click of coffee saucers in the poor poor night—Someone’s gurgling work at a lunchcart dishpan (in bleakhowl Colorado voids for nothing)—Ah and nobody cares but the heart in the middle of US that will reappear when the salesmen all die. America’s a lonely crockashit.
It’s where the miserable fat corner newsstand midget sleeps in the lunchcart with a face that looks as if it had been repeatedly beaten on the sidewalk whereon he works—Where ferret-faced hipsters who may be part-time ushers are also lushworkers and half queer and hang around undetermined—Where people wait, wait, poor married couples sleep on each other’s shoulders on worn brown benches while the nameless blowers and air conditioners and motors of America rumble in the dead night—Where Negroes, so drunk, so raw, so tired, lean black cheeks on the hard arms of benches and sleep with pendant brown hands and pouting lips the same as they were in some moonlit Alabama shack when they were little like Pic or some Jamaica, New York nigger cottage with pickaninny ricket fence and sheepdogs and Satnite busy-cars street of lights and around-the-corner glitter and suggestion of good times in tall well-dressed black men walking gravely thither—Where the young worker in brown corduroys, old Army shoes, gas station cap and two-toned “gang” jacket of a decade ago now the faded brown of a nightshift worker dozes head down at the trolley stop with his right hand palm-up as if to receive from the night—the other hand hanging, strong, firm, like Mike, pathetic, made tragic by unavoidable circumstance—the hand like a beggar’s upheld, with the fingers forming a suggestion of what he deserves and desires to receive, shaping the alms, thumb almost touching fingertips, as though on the tip of the tongue he’s about to say in sleep and with that gesture what he couldn’t say awake “Why have you taken this away from me, that I can’t draw my breath in the peace and sweetness of my own bed but here in these dull and nameless rags on this humbling shelf I have to sit
waiting for the wheels to roll” and further—“I don’t want to show my hand but in sleep I’m helpless to straighten it up, yet take this opportunity to see my plea, I’m alone, I’m sick, I’m dying” (a groan from another sleeper and one that has so little to do with a waiting room, rather with a dying room, sickroom, operating room, battlefield, doom’s gate)—“see my hand uptipped, learn the secret of my heart, give me the thing, give me your hand, take me to the safe place, be kind, be nice, smile; I’m too tired now of everything else, I’ve had enough, I give up, I quit, I want to go home, take me home O brother in the night, take me home, lock me in safe—take me to where there is no home, all is peace and amity, to the place that never should have been or known about, to the family of life—My mother, my father, my sister, my wife and you my brother and you my friend—take me to the family which is not—but no hope, no hope, no hope, I wake up and I’d give a million dollars to be in my bed, O Lord save me.” There’s nothing in this speculation and delirious sleep—I hear the click of a newcomer’s heels, the litany of voices, the doors squeeking—
* * *
NOW THAT IT’S ACTUALLY TIME to leave home and go to the last coast—across the mist and cold—I’m packing—it’s only at this very moment as I sit to mourn this terrible night in my life whether I’m Duluoz or whoever I am that I realize why Cody didn’t write in answer to that foolish letter, it was because I mentioned Josephine for his couch on the same page that I scribbled a letter to his wife, why last summer he’d worked out an elaborate code for talking about Josephine, it was at the head of the letter Dear Cody (she was coming) or just Cody (she wasn’t). But do they suppose that I’m evil or mean to do harm? I’ve finally become so distracted that it’s going to be only with the greatest struggle that I’ll be able to find out who I am in the coming months in the hell and gone of the world at the risk of losing my mind forever. Who would ever have thought that Duluoz, poor Duluoz who was after all just a nineteen-year-old kid with a sense of exile when most other guys are simply brooding in early bars, that Duluoz would come to lose his mind. No, I’ve got to live—and Metkovich today said his father was joyful at seventy-five and his own father had lived to one-o-nine, 109, because of an earthy Yugoslavian will to live and if, he said, we didn’t hustle to understand what that meant we were liable to die—of emotional congestion, poor American folly, fear and self-horror. Many many times tonight I cry in my wandering soul “Oh why didn’t my father live?” I look at the galleys of H from the C I threw away in the poor football pennant basket my mother bought me for the gay October afternoons of 1950 upstairs (don’t you realize what upstairs means, I’m exiled and she’s exiled to this horrible downstairs because of my own stupidity that the ghost of my father never warned or curbed, we have half the room we used to have, same rent, more problems, have to listen to the sounds of the new tenants upstairs as if in hell listening to the upper sounds of heaven, they are a middleaged particularly materialistic complaining New York couple, one time the lady had me help park her car when she got stuck on the big tree out front that figures in the drama of my stupidity because it was my lovely summertree of 1950 T-reveries which led to fear, to her, to not refusing to move from upstairs with her leaving my mother alone and subsequently weeping to move to South, to Nin’s, O when will the troubles of this cursed family end, why were we all made to totter in the dark like slaves while other lesser families shit in the light and moon over their own dumb asshole ignorant emptiness, why were the wild dark Duluozes cursed and especially the ones like Emil and Michel?—that tree—that couple upstairs—and having finally reconciled myself to downstairs after the horrors and pains of late September after her first insult, working and earning a few bucks and getting a bed into this room and oiling my machine and yet suddenly inexplicably getting drunk too often and abandoning Rachel and Janie Thaw for that bully Josephine, it all began October 25 which was also the great moment of discovering my soul, yet reconciled to downstairs as a cute cozy place only now to find myself hounded to the end and have to pack and leave and head for the hell and gone even from the desk I only finished repairing three days ago and which was going to be the scene of studies and the whole vast ordered universe of my life which I loved, I have to, go, like a fugitive, staggering again in the dark just like that dream of me and Pa and Ma, never Nin, staggering with few belongings on a dark road from New Haven back to home and our cats following us about to be run over by cars with their blinding headlights coming at us on the highway, I have to pack, clear completely so as to comply with evil hidden wishes of this world, have nowhere to go except the water, the terrible terrible dark sea water, leaving behind the fields of life and my mother the great and final protector of my life and soul who sleeps or maybe doesn’t in the next room right now, O who can I pray to for mercy, I prayed to my Pop to make her happy and that’s a futile thing to ask—there she lies, when I go for coffee I hear her waking, it’s a bad night for her too, for this is the night I came home and said “I’d better leave once and for all, it’s the only way to save trouble all around,” and so in effect, “This is my last night in your house, mother, that you so lovingly prepared for me yet how could you foresee or even prevent my evil which precipitated its own evils, and the first evil was not putting her down when I first realized I didn’t love or like her at all eight days before our marriage”—O dull clown. And now to make up for the botch of my days I think I can create a great universe and of course I can—) as I say, I look at the H from the C galleys in the basket and I remember my Pop the printer and how he’d have treasured them and never allowed me to throw them away. Maybe I’m throwing away my life there but I swear I’m not—This night is so tortured it’s unthinkable—I’ll come back and catch it all on sober gray mornings of the sea, of Alaska, of South America, of Javanese cities. I’m in love with my life and I’m sticking to it—I mean the belief in it. I may be a distracted wretch but I am still a man and I know how to fight and survive, I have before. Gods, if not help me, if instead barb me, be careful of me, I can catch thunderbolts and pull you down and have done it before. Adieu!