Visions of Cody

by Jack Kerouac

  But HOW am I going to keep my mind filled like this and incidentally also talk about everything with everybody first of which is Deni—by sober energies in the gray morning off gray Seattle.

  O BROOKLYN, Brooklyn

  where I have lived

  all these years

  Did they build a bridge

  straight into your heart

  And past that spectral

  stupid Squibb

  Raise airs of rosy night

  all for nothing?

  but now to Brooklyn, this is like the night I watched Boston Harbor, same situation, and same distant lights but New York, vaster, seaward, with spectral rosy Brooklyn across the way but now I’m stuttering like Tony—

  O sad night—O waterfront!

  * * *

  PIER 9, the Pres. Adams is my ship of destiny, it must be, I keep knowing everything about it ahead of time—I’m waiting herein New Jersey before it’s even arrived and I know that a mountain of Four Roses whiskey is going on the Pres. A. to Yokohama and glassware to Hong Kong and machinery to Frisco and other things to Singapore, Kobe, Manila where I suppose further is to be picked up for the Venices and Triestes of the return swing round the world—but more of this later, i.e., the cargo, the shed at Pier 9, the enormous Erie railyard of the world, the truck ramps. Just now, in the Erie railroad waiting room (same railroad that had such a rainy wilderness sound when that Old Ghost of the Susquehanna listed it among all the others in Harrisburg Peeay and the actual stops of which the announcer with a W. C. Fields lilt is now announcing but all the little New Jersey stops with names like Arlington and Montclair, not interesting wild names like Erie itself)—here in the station on a bench with arms I suppose to prevent bums from stretching out, I took a nap after calling Blackie, but of Blackie in a second. In my nap-waking I suddenly remembered that beautiful whore from Washington Mildred who stayed at Danny’s with sixty-year-old Madame Eileen that I screwed all night, and the morning Mildred came back from a night of hotel fucking with the rich strange millionaire guy from Vermont and took off her clothes, sat in the chair in her slip as I watched from Eileen’s couch (smoking and just having had a morning marijuana forced on me by Danny) lifted up the slip, which was black, grabbed her own cunt which Danny says is the greatest in the world because it squeezes your cock like a soft fist, and said “Old raunce need a ride.” If it hadn’t been for that T which only allowed me to goof and stare I would have done either of two things as I look back on it from my bench here in the Erie Railroad waiting for the Singapore-bound President Adams and my meet with Blackie the Bosun for my last chance to get on board the dark ship of destiny—I would have said to Eileen who’s her madame and old buddy, “Eileen fix me up with Mildred,” loud, with their peals of laffter rising, or I would have kneeled at Mildred’s feet and said “If you stroke that pussy too much it’ll start purring.” Now why in the fuck didn’t I do that!—how could I have passed up such a piece of ass!—what effeminacy, what narcolepsy has come over me from overstaying my “leave in Manhattan” from 1943 or even 1944 or worse 1939—a cunt like that and then we would have fucked sweetly in Danny’s red bedroom, I would have said “O my God what a perfect saddle” and she’d have said “Iffff, oooo, drive it in daddy” and don’t you think I would?—with old sinister Eileen, naked, sixty, white all over, tall, bellied but well breasted, watching closely every movement of interlocked limbs and with a look like that look of madames in dirty books (in fact we’d been lookin at dirty books all morning, photos of Paris 1910 the best one being a guy in spats and hat ramming his finger into a woman’s cunt as he bends her back, dress up, over an ironing board), that careful heavy-lidded halfsmiling half snaky look of lecherous voyeurs in rooms so sensual you can come just by looking at them. So I vow to hit Washington next go round the world (if I get on the Adams and if I don’t all this waiting will have ironic uselessness although I will be managing to get round the world in a less direct way, ship by ship willynilly) and look up Eileen and Mildred, dig gone whorehouses of congressmen, fuck, eat, drink and see my former landlord and maybe even introduce Mildred to him just for kicks and as if I was pimping so as to surprise him and make him think that’s how I get my dough because he would tell her whatever he knew about me. These were my thoughts as I woke from this refreshing little nap and I needed it. Last night at home I talked with Ma, promised to take her to a show and dinner (I pick Sweets for this) before I leave (if I can) and hit sack at eleven, woke up at four restlessly, hurried to Jersey City in a long foolish ride on the E train with those miserable whitecollar Queens commuters who swoon in stuffy trains not only going but coming from work, five days a week, all for comfort and habit while I endure it only once (it was my very first morning ride on the citybound E, and this after two and half years in Richmond Hill) for the sake of Singapore—then, at Chambers Street, I dashed out to hit the nine o’clock call in Marine Cooks & Stewards and there was no Adams job so I dashed back, hit the Tube, got off at Exchange Place, mistake, re-routed in a complication of tokens and refund’s with refund slips, elevators, ramps, got off at Erie Station, followed signs through the waiting room halls to the footbridge that’s just like the one in This Gun For Hire with Alan Ladd (a pix incidentally that I saw the afternoon before I signed on for Arctic Greenland in 1942, when I lay in the grass of Boston Common thinking of death because then it was torpedoes and war and certainly no Singapore except that Duluoz that same year earlier made mention of it in his smoky newspaper office), a footbridge over a solid halfmile of (almost) tracks with boxcars that Alan Ladd jumped into and are from all over the raw American land lined up facing North River with all its barges, tugs, piers, smoke and ships and the one huge green shed of the American President Lines that says “Far East” on it, boxcars that say “Route of the Phoebe Snow” and “Canadian Pacific” and remind me of Cody, his old man, Nebraska, gray day in Denver right now and raw men with big hands standing under foggy trees right now in the Far West or just soogeeing Railway Express cars in the railyards of Portland, Oregon or Kansas (as I think this, to my left is a big sign the kind that advertises plays and Radio City in railroad stations clear to Boston and Lowell, and this one tells of AFFAIRS OF STATE with June Havoc, written by none other than Louis Verneuil, the same I met at age eighteen when secretary for Professor Schiller at Columbia, N. Y.A. job, shortly before I worked for New York Central R.R. dragging mailbags across le grand plancher sale…the big dirty floor…and French is so simple, a job I remembered so vividly last spring when we left Ma alone and I began reviewing all the jobs I ever had in this earth of labor and sorrow, thinking to myself “The night is my woman,” the same Verneuil who was in his dressing gown, had dark rim glasses and apparently since then has been going along successfully for they call it a “comedy smash!” (according to Garland of Journal American, the same I read during hamburg-sizzling suppers of home in New York that are now no more) and so while I struggle in the dark with the enormity of my soul, trying desperately to be a great rememberer redeeming life from darkness, he calmly goes along filling in forms like plays and making name and money and with same Gallic coolness he displayed when I delivered that envelope to his apartment with the glittering Gershwin Manhattan view that was the sudden realization of my dream of New York which flared briefly then and also at Marshall’s party in a penthouse on Central Park West near Winchell’s but never to flare up again) (and Marshell being that New York hero who takes two girls to the nightclub with “Daoulas” in the abortive attempt to resume the writing of the Vanity of Daoulas back in the city of desires) and since then banking down a flame of dreams into this bottomdark night from which at the last possible minute I now make my EXCAPE back to the sun of decks and the dewy mornings under Guam trees like the trees of the Marine base in Portsmouth, New Hampshire with Joe and the French-Canadians building a fence, back to the sense of life I had as a child uncomplainingly getting up at seven in the morn to go to school and on Saturdays joyously to go play, back to the open air of th
e world, out from dark enfer New York where, if a pine tree stood it would only stand in Rockefeller Plaza with bulbs, where there’s now freshwind blowing through window of kitchen or galley from rosy morn or from piney dews. The footbridge overlooks miles of railyard and some of it is overgrown with brown weeds, unused tracks, nameless smoke-puffings far off at the other side, sooty mudground, views of New York across the Hudson, then the Pier and the place where the stevedores are waiting by the adjustable gangway one hundred feet spectrally over the water of the slip for the President Adams to come in at one, as soon as barges are gone, a platform I leaned out of to check the river to see if P. A. was coming but found out, calling ship at Staten, it wasn’t even shifted yet, a platform like something I dreamed and I kept thinking of diving off, continually, till at one point (all the time positive I could handle the dive and live, easily) I thought the frantic secret thought over a barge and as I pictured myself falling through the air I tried to fight the air, squirm, so as to fly off and move over to hit the water not the barge, and the futility of that!, this platform reminding me I dunno why of the dream of the enormous apartments in the Paramount Building, I guess the hugeness of it, who ever heard of a warehouse platform one hundred foot off water and of a shed a quartermile long. It took me ten minutes to penetrate the shed; lines of trucks were winding up the ramp and going in, some of them the huge trailer trucks of Georgia, one said “Ruby S.C. and Atlanta” and I said “South Calina aa-haa!!” Big crates everywhere, for instance veritable mountains of Chianti crates (just got in)—and most of the crates, barrels, boxes, bags, rolls, etc. said Pres. Adams on them with the destinations, and they were as I say, “S.F., Yoko, Kobe, Manila, one Malayan port I can’t even pronounce or recall, Hong Kong, Singapore” and that’s all, no sign of further ports like Karachi or Suez, which we also hit! So I’ve just got to get on and if as deckhand, well, I’ll keep thinking of William Faulkner, make myself a man, like him the boiler factory, work the lard off my belly and lines off my pasty cheek. If I don’t make it, goodby Singapore and Den and the red lifesavers, the same lifesavers that struck me so deeply like a dream that only they alone now seem to be assurance from my pyschic future-sense that I will get on! Blackie sounded like a real friendly intelligent guy on the phone, he’s bosun or carpenter, the delegate on the ship, S.I.U., I will make friends, work hard, I meet him, or that is yell for him from the gangway at one o’clock in the huge green pier over the footbridge from here…the pier of the world, at the foot of the railyard of the world, across the great Wolfean river from the World City, and huge spectral awe in the early morning air and workmen who don’t give a shit talking and smoking on all sides in their lovely conspiracy to enjoy life as much as they can. En route I’ll watch from the footbridge: (but further events).

  * * *

  MISSED IN NEW YORK, I missed the boat, the O.S. and the B.R. jobs were both snapped up by bookmen and I stood there in the pier watching the Adams warp in with a feeling that I’d miss. So now Deni says I must stick it out and follow the President Adams overland to San Pedro, Calif. where it arrives Christmas Eve and the Chief Cook Antonio writes me a letter to the union agent so I can snap up the fireman’s mess or anything else in steward’s department—and so the plot thickens for now I’m going to follow the dark destiny ship and do so ON THE ROAD—

  Thinking this on cardboard boxes that are stenciled for Hong Kong. A longshore truck roars by sending blue fumes over me—There’s the drowsy racket all over of hundreds of men working—immortal lazy clouds gave way to gray afternoon—a red Clark truck sends hot exhaust in my face. Out of a huge house of a truck they’re unloading wooden crates—There’s ammo in the hold and a special locker is full of some priceless cargo bound for Penang, probably champagne—There are rowboats or skiffs, crated, for Singapore—Valentine’s Meat Juice from Richmond, Va. is also bound for Singapore in crates—barrels for L.A.—the complicated and tangled rigging is working, they’re loading on and I, a poor ghost, have to run on land like I used to do in imagination along the car—If I don’t make it on the Coast I shall have committed a frantic foolish blunder but Deni says “You are a frantic fellow, it will not be unusual for you.” The drowsy shed, the racket of winches, the smell of cinnamon and oil, the whine of trucks, the smell of coffee beans (a mad longshore truck going backward among cities of produce thirty miles an hour)—Almost four, everybody’s knockin off and I’ve missed the last four o’clock call at Marine Cooks & Stewards and am sunk, doomed again for the goddamn road, Den will lend, I go to Cody’s—

  On footbridge, and now the sun’s going down on another mad day of mine at the hem of the Adams, going down in a big red ball that blinds over the boxcars (Boston & Albany, M.D.T., a faded khaki wood car, Chesapeake and Ohio, El Capitan), over hundreds of boxcars on tracks extending from the impossible smokes of intown Jersey City where I can see a big white neon frame Davis Baking Powder to where the sun is setting over black grimes and further entanglements and gatherings of steel that are lost in a rosy distance behind the sun, including one faint crazy smoke-begrimed-from-sight steeple—white smoke, black smoke, hundreds of cars of workers everywhere parked, the huge scene of Erie, the old buswagon hotdog trucks, two of ’em, below, men with grimy caps coming up the footbridge steps, the footbridge extends along the waterfront, the actual oily wet waters which connect us to Penang, towards the station where I dozed and beyond which I am now going in this mad immense dusk to get two cases of Budweiser in cans to be drunk tonight in Den’s cabin with cook, first engineer, etc. The light deepens and so the smoke seems to increase—and at last far off at the termination of a pinpointy track I see red signal lights that without knowing it are preceding the neon night of Jersey City—so next I watch the whole land.