by Jack Kerouac
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NOW DOWN IN L.A. TO MEET DENI’S SHIP—L.A. XMAS, the Great American Saturday afternoon but in L.A. and at Xmas shopping peak-just like Lowell is South Broadway but in a warm strange sun—Little Mexican girls in pink blouses cutting along with their mothers, shopping bag over the shoulder flung—sharp characters by the thousands in every kind of jacket, shirt, shoe, sometimes half sharp on top with wino pants below—And cunts! Purple bandana, red velvet skirt, long legs—Beauteous Mexican girls with those full tits, lips and cougar eyes—Colored cats in black shirts with light hats and checked coats—Girls in floppy sharp jacket-coats over loose slacks, looking doll-like just like Evelyn in her shirt and dungarees—it’s a California dolliness—whole families eating in Clifton’s celebrating the shopping—Just like Queen Street must be right now in Kinston, North Carolina and Ma and Nin are cutting along—A carful of Negro sharpies—sailors—crazy trolleys—the people different and crazier than New York and refined to the sun in clothes and feel—Pouring pouring, this poor mind can’t compete or even these eyes—Girls in short tight skirts, barelegged, in sandals, long hair, I die.
* * *
L.A. PLAYLAND, but there’s something inexpressibly sad right now—in this beat old Playland, at the coffee counter, Bing’s “White Christmas” on juke, some sadness that draws my mind apart and makes me want to moan—I remember how Irwin years ago used to dig these joints from New York to Denver to Houston and back and how it took me so long to follow suit—but without selection for he chose his monkey image in this maze and applied it to the interests of that day and all I do is roll along anyhow—from across South Main Street it’s like looking at a realistic American painting—PLAYLAND, the great square stage, and racing tip sheets tacked up on right—a family, mother with long tumbly hair in overalls and black jacket fiddles pennies into weighing machine with the kids, the old man in yachting cap with anchor and wino pants and who brings his family to South Main Street on the big pre-Christmas Saturday afternoon only because it’s the street of his own hangup just as old Cody must have brought him and Ma Pomeray in her mad tubercular Okie overalls to Larimer on this day or in Lowell the poor sepulchral farmer comes not to Central Street but to the brokendown stores of Bridge Street (though not really comparable)—the little kid therefore remembering his Pa in his own appropriate sad setting—Sailors and Marines, one Airforcer studying those nude magazines, I see him poring over two crazy cunts reclining in the sun together bellyup, legs closed, “health-y,” and “Europe-Nude Impressions of Europe (!)”—the incredibly beat fortune machines, a gypsy woman plaster head with plaster wart—the antique pistol machines—a great amateur canvas depicting destroyer on blue sea, now torn at one end to show dusty electric fixtures in back—a hole in the floor, cubbyholes of tools down in it to repair crazy kickmachines—hootchy movies with actual flapping white electric dolls that Jap and Mex kids dig (those kids who comb their hair sleek and horizontal at back and vertical up front like movie stars, they have no loins, just a Levi belt and presumably a cock although there seems to be no room even for an ass, they float disembodied or that is dis-hipped, dis-loined over the sidewalk like spindly sexless ghosts, either that or they slouch loose in huge sharp suits with those L.A. sportshirts that are the maddest for this is home of sportshirts)—Saturday afternoon in Playland, some of the families I dug 1947 who drive from the Zorro night to Hollywood and Vine to see stars filtered in here now (I saw the Pacific feathering the night shore south of Obispo, wow). All the machines, muscle machines, photos, ordinary bowling, etc. and the juke blowing Ella, Mr. B., Bing, and blues and across the street down a ways my shoeshine friend who goes falsetto squeal while shining shoes, keeps digging street first over one shoulder then other, jumps, yells Blow!, spends all his money on juke in shack, wears plaid bop cap, says “I love money I dunno what’s the matter with me” and in course of talking and jumping (played “Illinois” on trombone and Lester and Hawk together records) tried to hook me with $1.25 “dye” shine but I got off, in genuine disappointment in him, with thirty cents, but I blame it on his morose boss Negro that when he showed up the saint stopped jumping and digging street, a big hype—South Main mad and L.A. too, more than ever—The “Optic” B-movie right across Playland here with fiddly little marquee and “open-all-night” boxoffice, colored cats digging pixes in front (“Little Egypt”)—Now a Negro family comes to Playland from hotsun street—Now I’m being swept away by a broom!
* * *
SOUTH MAIN STREET, bums with bloody foreheads—Indians-buddies of Marines in bloodred sport shirts—Indians in hip blue serge suits—Prado’s Mambo coming from Over the Top Bar—Gayety another B-movie—Negro kid in dungarees, black suede shoes and old red sport shirt—Every cocktail bar has inviting B-girl on first stool and blue interiors waiting—Old Indian worker (or Mexican) in brown leather jacket but regular felt hat though somewhat Western—A family: a Mex lil hunchback Pop, wife, cute, and cute little dotter five with present—he wears farmer coveralls—white shirted Mex goes by with dark tragic mouth—
* * *
WILMINGTON, ATE TERRIFIC MEAL in Jack’s Star Cafe—short ribs of beef, sweet candied yam, buttered beets, was full for first time since Evelyn Pomeray’s mother’s wonderful hickory smoked ham at Cody’s filled me (ham feast). I was weak with hunger from walk—Catholic Marine Club to Berth 154, a one-and-a-half-mile walk in cold raw California winter night which earlier at work in Frisco gave me this terrible cold that literally prevented me from seeing out the Zipper caboose window and which I personally checked with twenty-four hours in bed, a pint of bourbon, lemon juice and Anacin—a ten-dollar treatment (including a turkey dinner in L.A. bum cafeteria). Meal earlier today at Clifton’s, lamb rib, was too small and not half as good as this Wilmington Jack right by Pacific Redcar tracks. The ride down phenomenal—after Compton the bourgeois town and rickety wild L.A. suburbs of garages, cottages next to tire mountains, green stucco box houses, nigra coal and coke shacks, there arose on the plain whole metropolises of oil drills and then refineries, all sides, pumping, smoking, mad—And the S.S. President Adams is now turning in at Berth 154 and I’ve come overland to meet her—Suspicious characters around dock, Matthew Peters? Paul Lyman? I have to be alert for Den’s safety, really. Same shiny waters that connect Penang and Jersey City are here too.
Four days of hard work at railroad baggage department Frisco heaving mailsacks, $10.40 clear a day; spent ten-dollars on kicks and Marie-came to L.A. in Zipper freight caboose Cody put me on, with thirty-dollars—half dead with virus pneumonia, three different conductors forced me to retire into sleep or I get questioned—walk two miles in bleary sorrow with burden bag from L.A. railyards clear to South Main and Fifth and lifesaving hotel and lemon and bourbon. This is records. Lonesome for Ma, Nin, Luke and Kinston today—I’m going to go over the entire Tragedy No. One of my early life on my ship whichever it may well be. Hope it’s Adams, old dark Adams now in the vast Pedro night reaching to touch me.
* * *
YES, TO RECALL, MARIE, DUG HER, SHE DUG ME, in Little Harlem at Third in Frisco—gave her hincty Mex wallet, got rid of that though worried—on a cold rainy morning at 7:30 they told us to come in work at 6 P.M. so Cody and I’d rattled in his old green heap to housing shacks across tracks and beyond junkyards at five-mile house—woke up Marie with pint of bourbon and split bottle (poorboy) tokay—her sister asleep with her dotter(seven) in bed, white sailor in bedroom, but records right off (Five Games Named Moe, Little Moe, No Moe, Half a Moe, Big Moe, Never Moe etc.) and then breakfast and brother-in-law and we bang in bedroom, talk of her $4600 inheritance, Cadillac or goose farm—Slim Buckle came with fifth burgundy—drove around Third Street for T, none, characters in and out—Old Jabbo—then home to sleep two hours in afternoon, Evelyn had fits, wow!—And in L.A. I never got that ship!
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THAT WAS IN FRISCO when I was still sure I could get the Adams but now it’s the San Pedro blues, walking back from Joe Wilkinson’s M.
C.S., Xmas Eve, missed the ship, along the tracks stumbling in a universe of burning rubber and oil refineries in the hot dumb sun, loss, loss, my charade, tirade—worst of all meeting sexy box juicycunt Rickey in Long Beach at Stardust—after that mad day in Hollywood and Santa Monica walking with Deni drinking champagne and spending one hundred dollars on all kinds of nonsense (Larue’s, five-dollar taxi rides with no destination, case of beer for girls that put us out the door, etc. Lola, Anne, Monroe Starr by swimmingpool).
NUTHOUSE bar, after Xmas Eve of Cruiser at 4 A.M. silent with star and stem-to-stern lightbulbs—trudging in dark tracks with Mr. Leonard and his bop cap—Xmas dinner of turkey and Danish beer on Adams with uproarious cussing laughing crew—hot sunny Xmas afternoon in NUTHOUSE bar Wilmington, Rickey no go, crazy fistfight between Okielovers, I’m hot and unfucked, drowse, beer, shit on it. Where’s wife?
At LaCienega joint the pretty couple (Encore Bar)—the fireplace, the L.A. night—again later at Sunset Strip bar with Lezes—My vision of men enslaved to cunts, to women who at or near thirty become lost in a dream of maternity as men die in the night with slavering thirst for the eternal food, the inexpressible security of a conscious caress (or dreamy unconscious)—poor Mac, Cody, broken by their cunts—but not me—the son of the Nuthouse proprietor riding a foolish singlewheel in the afternoon horizoned by pumps, tanks and towers—issempassem—Den’s many expressions—What do I love? Den says my own skin. I have $14.50.
Sitting on a stool facing blinding open door—parking lot beyond little porch of concrete—post—then brown fields, wire fences, oil cranes, blue haze, telegraph wires, shapeless black steels, hills, trees, houses, Pacific Sky over Pedro and then ocean.
3
Frisco: the Tape
JACK.—and during the night he said “I’m an artist!”
CODY. Oh no! he he ha ha ha, he did huh?
JACK. Yah
CODY. Well, you know, ah, Bull…all Bull does is sit there and read all day, and so I just happened to pick up this Really the Blues and I read the whole thing through in a day or two, you know, just sitting there high, and readin. I’d sit opposite him, see I wouldn’t do any work either. Huck and June doin all the work and there’s Bull and me sitting there readin all day. You know this Inside U.S.A. of twelve hundred pages?—and I read every WORD of that, of that motherfuckin thing
JACK. Just facing Bull?
CODY. Yeah, just as we…read a book. I read that book and I read Really the Blues and a few others. And that’s all we’re doing, we’re just sitting there all day readin, high, see, him and me, and so what I’m sayin is—he’s—after I was all done—
JACK. Oh you’d read to one another?
CODY. No, no, no, silence
JACK. Silence?
CODY. Yeah, silence, yeah, he’d be reading and I’d be reading, the rest them in there workin, that’s right, and so then he said “What do you think of that Really the Blues?” “Oh it’s alright I guess.” He said: “That guy’s nowhere,” he says, “I read that goddamn thing”…you know how Bull viciously—you’ll see him attack something—doesn’t mean anything one way or another but he’s always saying “Well I don’t know, that’s no good.” You know how he’d always do—THINK of him! Lots of times I’ve been amazed and looked sharp, when I was younger I used to look at him as though to take him seriously, you’re not supposed to take him seriously, you don’t know what he’s saying about—and he’ll say these horrible things “Ah Jack that’s no good, that fuckin shit’s no good, I’m gonna build a house last thousands of years,” ’cause he don’t know, he’s sayin “Well, well…”—well man what I’m sayin is, “That poor sonofabitch,” he says, “I read that fuckin book,” he says, “the goddamn thing was”—you know—he says—Jesus I can’t think of it, “The guy’s just nowhere,” you know what he’s saying, “this Mezrow character”—Oh no! then he said: “Sure a nigger lover ain’t he?” You know, he he he, just like that, you know how he acts with that Jimmy Low, that Louisiana—have you heard that story of his that he’d come and he’d say “Oh man it’s FRANTIC,” you’d get high man, and he’d say “And so we got in the schoolbus with the bunch of them young girls,” he says, “Old Jimmy went w-i-l-d, completely wild, he raped all the young women and the thirteen-year-old g-i-r-l-s,” he was the schoolbus driver, see, trying to get himself—man the whole thing, it goes on for an hour like that, Jesus, that sonofabitch
JACK. Is that what his job was?
CODY. Yeah Jimmy Low
JACK. His job was driving the schoolbus—
CODY. No…no, he just invented that, y’know, Old Bull, he just gets high and invents that story. No, Jimmy Low was the guy that—
JACK. Farmer huh?
CODY.—yeah, that owned that store down the road, the country store, yeah, Bull would go down there to this country store and dig this Jimmy Low
JACK. And Jimmy Low was supposed to have these Little Orphan Annie eyes, like buttons?
CODY. Is that what he said, that? I never heard that one
JACK. That’s what Irwin says
CODY. Oh yeah
JACK. Garden
CODY. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah I remember Irwin, he was there too, when…(mumble)
JACK. He says that one day you were all high in the livingroom, and all high, goofing off real high, and in the door suddenly Jimmy Low was standing, with his Little Orphan Annie eyes fixed on space
CODY. Gee
JACK. Not saying a word—
CODY. Yeah…those old eyes
JACK. He’s just comin in to say hello, that’s what he’s doin in the door, he’s such a country farmer—
CODY. Yeah (laughing)
JACK. Well, he’s a real hoodoo…June said—
CODY. Yeah, I guess he is…man
JACK. Bull goes up to him and he says “Say, ah, how does that divining rod work?” And Jimmy Low says “It ain’t exactly a divining rod, it’s a divining twig that I balance on my fingertips.” Bull says “How does that work?” “Well, all depends on instinct.”
CODY. On instinct
JACK. To find water, see?
CODY. Yeah, that’s right, hee hee hee
JACK. Jesus
CODY. Hee hee hee hee all depends on instinct
JACK. You find water there, it’ll balance off your fingertip when there’s water
CODY. Yeah, by instinct he does it
JACK. He actually DOES find water
CODY. Yeah, that thing works, yeah
JACK. So, ah, and one day somebody came up to—somebody was sittin there—and it’s started RAINING…THAT’S WHAT IT IS! When he came in the room, and everybody was high, and he’s staring into space? It started to rain and thunder
CODY. Oh y-e-s, phew!
JACK. Thunder crashed outdoors?
CODY. Man, instinct
JACK. He said “Wal, I guess I brought the rain with me.”
CODY. Oh man, like that guy in “Lil Abner,” Gloom, goes around, with the rain comin down on him? Irwin told you about that? about an actual happening?
JACK. That’s the story he told me
CODY. I never could remember it at all
JACK. He said June told him this
CODY. Oh yes, “I guess I brought the rain with me….”
JACK. The type June would have remembered, see? And I remembered the other story about a horse? And old Bull was practicing with a shotgun?—
CODY. Yeah, I was there
JACK. “Hey, the redcoats are comin!”—and he sticks his gun out the window and shoots
CODY. Yeah, I was there, yeah
JACK. Why—why did he shoot?
CODY. He didn’t stick it out the window, we was all sittin on the porch, Huck is playin his Billie Holliday, see, right here, and Bull’s sittin there on the porch with his rifle ‘cross his knees, see, sittin there like this, and we’re—I’m sittin there, and that’s—so when he says…somethin like that, he didn’t say that at all, what he does, I don’t remember tha
t, he might have said somethin, but, the horses, I’m sittin there stoned, and I lookup, and here’s Bull, C-R-O-W-S-H, at a dead treestrunk, which he thought see, for kicks, he’d shoot the tree-trunk, see, there was a big tree-trunk, it was about a hundred yards away, fifty yards, seventy, about fifty yards, yeah, seventy, sixty yards, and, ah, it was rotten, see the tree-trunk was rotten, you know the rest of the story, you know, the ball went through the treetrunk, it was rotten like paper (baby cries)
JACK. Yeah
CODY. See, it hit the treetrunk alright, but the horse passed right behind it at that time. Of course Bull can’t SEE, what really happened the horses were fifty yards away, you know by now, when the report sounded, but Bull can’t see and he thought he hit the horse, or he knew he came damn close you see with this aimin at this trunk, so he goes “Hey I hit the horse!” and he jumps up, you know, says “Oaiy!” and he jumps off the porch, hee hee, the horses are trottin right along, he hasn’t touched nothin see…. Here’s this Bull, he’s so high, he’s just sittin there with his bad order high, see he can’t see a hundred yards, y’know, that sonofabitch, no wonder he hit June and killed her, imagine, no shit, he can’t see with them glasses…. Why we drove to New York, it was so awful, a truck or anything would be anywhere near him, within fifty feet of him, see, and he’d put on the brakes like this see and pull over to the right hand side of the road, just like an old woman, not because he can’t drive or nothing—but he can’t SEE, no kidding! I dug that! So we made an agreement that I’d drive all night and everything and if he ever wanted to drive or anything why sometimes he’d drive in the afternoon an hour or two…so…that’s what he did…but, he’s, ah, crazy, man, that Bull, hee hee hee…. Phew! naw, but man, what I’d tell you is, I didn’t know that I’d appreciate remembering these things more, so therefore when I was there I didn’t pay much attention to any of this, I was hung up on something else, you know, so I can’t remember, say, like for example, I can remember NOW for example, but now that I CAN remember it doesn’t do any good, because…man…I can’t get it down. You know…I just remember it, I can remember it well, what happened ’cause I’M not doing nothin, see?