by Jack Kerouac
EVELYN. Yep that’s where you belong—(laughing)
CODY. Y-e-a-h (semi-laughing) and, oh it was real great, maids cuttin in and out and up and down…it was apartment…places, you know, oh it was everything, Atlantic Bleach club, and ah, (Evelyn laughs), yeah, beach, bleach, oxyd or closol, likesol, Clorox, and so, ah—Well finally it got—course Bull and I slept together one night too, that’s when I showed him that full length drawing you’d made of me nude, and it didn’t look like me at all—
EVELYN. (laughing) Why?
CODY. The…figure and everything was very but the head—
EVELYN. Too little huh?
CODY.—yeah…that’s right…
EVELYN. Too little—
CODY. Yeah…that’s right…. Yeah, tool—that’s right, but it didn’t at all, though you know (Evelyn laughs), I thought it did at first. (Evelyn murmurs) Yeah…
EVELYN. (yelling out laugh) I know it!
CODY. (both laughing heartily) No, I was amazed though ’cause I remember when I pulled it out
EVELYN. (laughing) Who said it did!
CODY.—you know I hadn’t seen it—for a long time (laughing), no that’s right, I know it didn’t…so ah (their laughter subsiding), but it got too expensive, so Bull after a week gave up the room and decided to keep the jeep out at Atlantic Beach (Evelyn yawns Hm Hm)…to retrieve, see? And, ah, so I said, “Well I’ll bring it out to you—”
EVELYN. What were they staying in New York for anyway?
CODY. Oh I know, he just decided to come to New York for awhile, so ah—(Evelyn murmurs) Oh they sent him money, you know, he just didn’t have any then, the check hadn’t come or something, see? Oh yeah, they gave him about five hundred a month, or somethin, and every two weeks the check comes, well…anyhow, so, ah, by God, but, I still had the jeep though, no I never was without the jeep although that threatened a time or two, but it never quite happened, you know not in terms of a threat, or anything obviously but the just the idea (sniffs), so but anyhow I lost the room so then Harper and me, ah, were together there…that day, and so in the meantime—
EVELYN. Harper was a waiter too, wasn’t he?
CODY. No, Harper is an old—you know how he makes his money? stealing overcoats, you remember the overcoats—
EVELYN. Yeah, but I thought you told me he was a waiter
CODY. Oh, man, no—Jack says no—
EVELYN. No, huh? Huh! (laughing)
CODY. And ah, (Jack flutes), so ah, Harper, says, ah “Well, we’ll…go up and see—I been stayin the last three, four days with this kid Jimmy Ransome, although he’s not a kid, he’s a waiter I think (Evelyn murmurs) Yeah Jimmy Ransome, yeah (Evelyn murmurs), yeah, that’s right, so when it went up there; Jimmy was a real queer duck you know, he was, ah, he wasn’t queer, as far as—but I think obviously he was queer come to think of it—
EVELYN. Something about him you had his name written down when you came out—
CODY. I owed him fifty dollars!
EVELYN. Oh that’s right…
CODY. Yeah, I still do to this day owe him fifty dollars—(Evelyn laughs)…. It, it’s all for Jimmy Ransome, hadn’t been for Jimmy Ransome darling, none of this would have happened—
EVELYN. (groans) Oh!
CODY.—you can blame it—
EVELYN. -I hate you!
CODY.—Yes!—Wal I think something drastic happened to him, or was about to, or will, or has; if he hadn’t a give me that fifty dollars, in two days Jack and Irwin would have been there…er I didn’t know that though, and they would have given me the money and then I’d—(Evelyn laughs) They didn’t have any money either…so all you have to blame is yourself (imitating melodrama) for listening to me. Really it’s a—it’s my fault—(Evelyn murmurs)…yes, it should have—you should have, listened to—(Evelyn murmurs), mop, (laughs, Jack flutes, a peaceful moment) (Evelyn murmurs again, What did Mama say Mary Saral?) (Jack flutes, Evelyn murmurs: Too near its aral? talking to little Emily in stairway who came down to see grownups in the kitchen like Proust when he was a child in the staircase of time and memory) (steps going up)
EVELYN. Oh!
CODY. Phew…yeah, down here (laughs)…so that’s the story of Oscar Pettiford and his quintet, and Joe ah…Os-s-s-s-s-s-s, O-s-s-c, OH-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-shrunski…the Third. (Evelyn murmurs) He’s old friend of my father-in-law’s’s’s’s’s’s’s (imitating W. C. Fields) law-w-w-w-w-s grandmother’s son’s, wife’s, aunt’s s-s-s-s-sister’s s-s-s-s-s cousin…I think. It might have been, he was an old friend of my father-in-law’ssssss, ah, and grandmother—sister…. aunt……son-…in-law’s…. (dish clanks)…. well anyhow I know cousin’s finished. I was trying to remember what I just said but I couldn’t, ’cause I didn’t try to when we were before; that’s pretty bore—poor I guess, hey? But I always like the way Humphrey Bogart tells it…
JACK. Is Svenson still open?
EVELYN. (laughing) Yust until meed-night.—No!
CODY. Until eleven
EVELYN. Until eleven
(a finger snapping)
JACK. What? We just missed by ten minutes, the Rocky Road…
EVELYN. Seems to me he said he was going to stay open later…
JACK. Sure!
CODY. Well you might catch him just as he’s closing, takes, hm, about five minutes to close
JACK. Eh!
CODY. Man, three Rocky Roads. (JACK, Eh!)…Get your shoes on, huh? (JACK, Yeah) And hurry though, because no kidding, he is closing, ah—
EVELYN. Probably is closed now
CODY. Yeh, well, just…say…hiya! Wait a minute, he knows me, no wait—
EVELYN. No, no, no hon!
CODY. No he does know me!
EVELYN. Yeah but he doesn’t like you—doesn’t like you (long silence, Jack is gone, tape ends on a radio blues singer singing Ba-by…)
(TAPE CONTINUES WITH COLORED REVIVAL MEETING ON RADIO)
PREACHER. (screeching) WE KNOW HOW TO PRAY!
PEOPLE. PRAY!
PREACHER. MEANWHILE HE TOOK CHANCE ABOUT JE-SUS ONE DAY
PEOPLE. OH OH!
A VOICE. BLEST IS THE LORD, WUNNERFUL!!
PREACHER. AFTER AWHILE THEY KEPT UP ON PRAYIN
PEOPLE. YEAH!!
PREACHER. AFTER AWHILE!!
PEOPLE. AFTER AWHILE!!
PREACHER. JEEEE-EE
PEOPLE. JEE-EE!
PREACHER. ZUS!! I SAID AFTER WHILE!!
PEOPLE. AFTER WHILE!!!
PREACHER. JEE-SAS!
WOMEN. JEE-SAS!
PREACHER. I WALK IN THERE—
PEOPLE. I WALK IN THERE!
PREACHER. I WILL—
PEOPLE. I WILL!!
PREACHER. I HEARD THE WAY HE WORKS—
PEOPLE. OH-OOO!
PREACHER. AFTER AWHILE HE TOLD HIM!!
CRASH! BOAA!
PREACHER.—AND WHILE HE TOLD—
PEOPLE. YEAH. HEAH!!
PREACHER.—SIGHT!—
PEOPLE. YES!!
PREACHER. I HEEEARD—I HEEEEEEEEEEERD—I HEERD A MAN MAY DO WORKS
PEOPLE. MOTHER!
MOTHER!
PREACHER. I GOT MY SURANCE!
BUT THEY CAN’T DO IT!—
I HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERD!
Imitation of the Tape
Composition………by Jackie Duluoz.…. 6-B
“Now up yonder in Suskahooty,” said Dead Eye Dick—no, I exaggerate, his name was Black Dan—“up yonder in Saskahoty,” said Dead Eye Dick Black Dan, “we used to catch suckers every day on Main Street down by the bank, you know the one with the red bricks, that I was standin in front of when—but you introduced (ain’t that right?) me to them two suckers from Edmonton or somethin—yeh, that’s right (just when you said that you reminded me—“This was in Muscadoodle, Wyo., many years ago, had a circus there, we was makin the line from around Ogallala, Nebraska, clear to the Willamette Valley—my old lady got sawdust on her dress in Ohio that year—shucks and god-damn, I’m gonna go to Charleston,
West Virginia Saturday night, or jump in the river, one.”
But no, wait in here, don’t you know I’m serious? you think I’m?—damn you, you made, you make, the most, m—I guess—but now wait a minute, till Il—but no I’ll jump on in, I meant to say, w—about whatever—well, I swear, I swow—whar’s home just like that little character with Barney Google or that used to be Barney Google the hillbilly, the little bald guy with the jug always yellin “Lowizie whar do you put my—corncorb pireper? or (English almost wasn’t it?)—hee hee hee—what? No, I wandered that time, on peyotl which is total I’ll tell all. Baby won’t you laff?—I had to stop and th—it really is almost impossible to go on w—and yet so deciduously silent or something, my dear says the British Noble like James Mason at the moon, but now I forgot what he’d say and go on with my p—so stoned in Boston the time I had my suit pressed in a little tailor shop on Beacon Hill before I went to my—nor can I ever forget the young fellow with me—Ladies and Gentlemen, move aside please, let me introduce, ascertain and try to keep accumulating—meet the one and only Roger Buttock, descended from the Buttock Bank Indians. Too, there was a movie house (what? house?) around the (wah? corner?) of the Strand Theater not to be confused with hair strand, in my dreams: this perfect little B- or C-movie full of Sunday afternoon children—a dream! See? Never no hassles there, (they had a toilet. I go down to it in the dream and hang around and drink rotgut when I get too old to enjoy the picture), nothing, no hassles, I love my sweet dreams, they sustain me, I see—I see—what! Wake up to reality my boy! Howk? Signed, for today, for now—no we’ll continued right along the monologo.
The newspaper lengthens, but ever without true dimensions within the lyre, the gyre, the—oh—the—the—oh—well, grier. (Laughter). Wait a—how they skirl the edges of Endeemion! O brassuges! Oh peyotl total bongoola, Oh mogul rogal portals! Mawrdegras; fine too…with an s but never…(pause)…jungled…(dared); first, voodoo, written by Bud Powell and Miles Davis; well and so I said to him “Hey sweetiepie lay off my old cunt” and the cop was off duty, standing in the door, with a hard-on! Reading that little twenty-five cent pocketbook “Marihuana”—“Sally you old (Nova Scotian whore) tuffle!” Then high on tea I came to the Indian plateau and drew a deep breath, and made the following introductory speech (to the voice of Yma Sumac?)
1. Definite depth
2. Cattishness
3. Sitting on a stool
4. Loves to sing
5. A woman, a woman
6. Handy hands
7. Fainting Desdemona of the Andes
8. Twirling Barrett from Wimpole street
9. Her musicians say Motherfucka, fuck-a
* * *
“Eee! ee!” she says—even editors of great publishing houses listen—“oompaca-a-g—”
Growl! I didn’t know the jungle was so (man this is a r—of, why, ah, in the Cathedrals of Europe I used to weep and wail for sight of such—ah—such fine and wondrous metadinal finure; if they call th—I’m—you’ve got to be serious, I feel—I hear—calls on horizons to which I can never reply because it is completely impossible for me to go that far without a Safari. But I’d love a Safari in Mexico, or in Peru, or Chile, or Ecuador, or all the headwaters of the Orinoco where only several weeks ago a party pitched camp, in the area of the Quarhica and Quarahambo tribes—but here’s our B-movie again. All my B-movies, all our B-movies, taught us what we know now about paranoia and crazy suspicion. Yet would you throw away a good B-movie?—get high on T, and go and see them mope and murp and muckle in a mad dream? Now I want to lie among the salmon plasters of the Plateau Monastaire, the monastery among the muskat and the showering Judean maguey madrubber, cactu spiritu; with Hugh Herbert.
In Africa with the eye fixed on straight (they’re trying to scare us, the Indians are trying to scare us, I love the Indian, I am an Indian, my mother has Iroquois blood and I have not fathered a Cherokee, nor a Sioux—nor an Omaha short, sad, ting-haired and squat in the rainy dusts of Nebraska, of Shelton, Nebraska where the railroad eats up a watertower as it smashes by for or from Chicago. But, ah, not to get hungup, man, now you’re to listen to me now, and let me tell the story—see?—right—of the Omaha I’d ever, or Woo!—interestinger tales about the—and then there was the Kwakiutl (teach ’em how to spell! codutl will save the world! codutl will save the world!).
This movie house of mine in the dream has got a golden light to it though it is deeply shaded brown, or misty gray too inside, with thousands not hundreds but all squeezed together children in there diggin the perfect cowboy B-movie which is not shown in Technicolor but dream golden (incidentally some of the Mornings of those Sundays I have definitely spent riding the freightcars of a spectral little Canadian choo-choo railroad which however in one dream suddenly became so vast that it took me to great tremendous distances, in Siberia for instance, where on a gray month I paddled up the Obi, yes the very Obi itself, in a canoe, or small boat, with my mother, deeper and deeper into the pounding drums of the North Pole behind the ass of Siberia and the Salt Mines); but dream golden with silver arras of mist; across the street (I’m not kidding) is a coalpile with blue diamonds in its dust but this is only noticeable at night: Listen if we’re all going to be serious—but now I’ve already lost my seriousness, or that particular one that came there, since the time you said, boo, too, or did you say boo? if at all, anyway—but stop yelling my name over the air! Bunch of sweating phonies! Oh the sins of America! O poor deal! O Depressions! O wanton—O soft fields of Virginia when they crossed the river on a May night, news of junctions ahead, signs that a farmer’s barn would soon win a name to rank it with the tumble name of Waterloo! O weep not Chekhovs! Oh boy with the dewy musket, in a doorway, or a flaptent, or under a tree by the hanging carcass—O soldier bugler, soldier lad, SOLDIER BOY of sadness—(and over by the courthouse Grant lets out a fart heard around the works, the earthworks). O redoubts! O rebops! O mighty name of A. P. Hill! Oh Oxford scholars—O merders of Paris! and murgers of stock!! O murkers!—A. P. Hill, tell you more about—A. P. Hill soon as the U.P. News comes on and the results of the Eleventh Race at Arlington Park purse five thousand million dollars, Bloom let the soap melt in his backpocket he was so hot. I used to be a sports reporter (on the Kwakiutl Herald in Winnepunk,) on the Lowelltown Sun, up in the musk country, the French-Canadians come mushing down from Canado to visit relatives and for several days there’s nothing but laughing and scratching on Moody Street—joyous clear cries in the—what? Roy Eldridge?—Roy Eldridge was playing with a band when I sold candy in the theater—or is—was—playing—and do you know how far that goes back?”
“No, how far does go back that hype?”
“As far back as a faroff horse, don’t ever let that horse catch you, he’s got a shroud that rider.”
“Oh now you’re just trying to scare me you dear fool—shrouds? a rider? didn’t we gently kick him off our plateau with Phillip?”
“Oh no; Rendrovar, they shoved his glittering body down into the ice; seven masked men and a cabinet in which a clock ticks to its own mahogany echo, undampened by human hands, awake, alive, by its virtue of engines—ah, being a machine—it has won the ability to live and tick by itself till the spring runs out, and can Shelley be far behind, with this damn generation not doing anything but waiting for spring, summer, and fall to come.”
“Oh Mowdelaire! He leaned and gleaned, balcony—say, why did I say balcony? Hand me that bloody handkerchief, I guess I done gone to meet the (in Washington, D.C. the young hipsters who run the White Tower late at night and freefeed their subterranean flipped chicks have no conception whatever of the dignity which we are supposed to employ in the contemplation of Abrahaam Lincoln or even plain Abraham) gone to meet the Nay-z-eye, the neigh-zye, the Na-zi menace by myself, in the everywhere I go, gigolo bop to my furlined boots upon which I wear a pearl necklace like Billie Holliday and her dog (Nobody Digs My Dog Like I Dig My Dog) (This movie house—) Saying, ‘This movie house’ is obviously a camp, is
n’t it?”
In the morning the campfire girls ate the ashes of the night before in their breakfast bacon.
* * *
OF COURSE WE CAN’T POSSIBLY conceive of ruining your weekend but could you possibly leave the machine under my tree or I’ll flip my wig.
LADY GODIVA. (clad) Thev knocked me out on a stone of hemp the other—AT THIS POINT IN HIS DREAM DULUOZ WOKE UP and recall—though admitting the blue blur of that—Duluoz woke, recalled that he hadn’t seen his father for the longest of times and that possibly he must be dead just as real as death. “Well then,” he thought, leaning on the boxcar down the edges of which ran the stain of his sperm, “if I’m to be bat-eyed in the night for no other reason”—or in whichever way he must, then, have phrased his thoughts, being nineteen ears or years (not corn) old and…. Well, you see, I hung myself up. Duluoz….
On the North Atlantic Ocean at dawn, in the month of October, the gray light turns bright fog white and shines whitely on the wet decks of great irondecked vessels groaning to the fro fray. (Meade should have lost an arm at Antietam, the ditty batath; look at all the boys kid under his command, the bloody genius! “…enlightened by the vollied glare,” as Herman Hankering Melville says, or sez, (Hey Millie!) (this, just then, see, an imitation of my father’s column, written, my ah, father writing a column called Ferd or Ez or Ed or something where the humble little guy takes his wife to the movies every (opening) Thursday night to see (oops) the show and to comment about it, picture first, for it was a movie column, and then (oh um)…the seven acts of Hespasi, Vaudeville, when fellows with the leftover white paint of clowns on their necks used to cut through redbrick alleys with that one white or brownish light illuminating the gravelly entrance, with, as in cartoons, sad sleepy 3 A.M. (oh it’s three o’clock in the morning) houses, or apartment houses, with the cats on the backfences where a tree in Brooklyn dearold grows, and the front part, where, somehow as in a Kafka sweet nightmare, a great clock telling the time is installed: as if, now listen I know I m—where, I say, and as if some landlord so beneficent as in feudal times had installed a giant clock for his tenants to tell time by when they come home drunk with Moon Mullins at all hours and wrap themselves around rubber lampposts with X’s in their eyes or X’s for their eyes.) (But X’s will save the world!) Here, not, who, now these people (I am not incoherent) but the matter at hand, harrumph: