Visions of Cody

by Jack Kerouac

  SUNDAY NIGHT

  Dear Evelyn—

  Guess what’s going on while I’m writing this—“The Hour of Charm”—this has been a beautiful winter day with bright sun, no wind and the thermometer up to 20 d, better than the 5 d of last night. We’ve been comfortable though and nothing has gone wrong.

  We finally did get a night at home last week after all but it took a sprained ankle to do it. Thursday night we went to the Arts Club musical program and as we came out mama turned her ankle so we had to cancel one appearance—…I’m making her a chest out of those two walnut doors she brought from Ravenswood…. We are planning a Christmas at home and probably by ourselves—

  …Ever, Pop (Cody’s wife’s father)

  * * *

  GALLOWAY ROLLS ON. On summer nights when a boy decides to stay up late sitting on the porch he hears rising from the valley of the river…but I always say, like I did say orginally, Galloway rolls on, you can’t help it, and then I was to say, now, hep, don’t run away, don’t move, to say, yes, to say On summer nights when a boy and I meant to say a little kid decides to stay up late or halfway gets the chance to do so from his parents who are sternly intent on sleep as a health measure as well as necessary, ahem, (driving my car through the Saturday afternoon sunny streets of Los Angeles ever blessed week has finally made a man of me,) why, that river, that rollin old river, why, that Roanoke, that roanokin river, that…decides to say to stay up late sitting on the porch he hears rising from the valley of the river, well that’s really from the hole of the river, or the valley hole, the river bed, bed of the valley, from the valley bed the great big hush of dark waters no I meant to say waters, of waters plain and simple, that is like the sound of darkness to anybody who ever was raised and lived in galloway massuchussetts and so on, the hassle…being, you have to think of words at the same time that maybe you have to think of actions, like say, the actions of the damned and dead cemeteries…to coin, but the old ladies of Galloway can tell you, and the voices of the old ladies of Galloway are somehow commingled in this hush of the river of the night, that “old eternal” hush, old spontaneous eternal hush, saying, and in noble great tones, I have no tones, apparently no mind, just twit, tweet, what a day this might have been, Napoleon might have fallen lot to my pillar of glass with its cargo of golden piss falling out of Billy’s broken eardrum…why they, he, Doc Holliday shot off the tips of Billy’s ears, and all the day’s woes piling up on Drumm Street in regular riptide intervals, like, say the dead are laid out in the suburbs row by row, and I come from a land where they let the children cry, that’s a pooty good land, valued at ten shares an acre, if you can’t boogie, but, and trying to return, origin—yes, yes, I’m (saying, the voices in the Greek tragedian night of Lowell are saying, “O go back home, go back home…”). But actually it’s been so long since I’ve heard the sound of the Merrimack River washing over rocks in the middle of a soft summer’s night that I can’t make poesies out of it, or if I did, wouldn’t they, are they not, false? Pure and simple, all you got to do is make your statement, and here is mine: “For Claude the river was the…the little Merrimack in Missouri…the playpen, lot lost a wife, lot lost a wife, lot lost wives or wives lost lots, if not lot lost lots salt.” That should make the greatest difference in the world, etc. I really want to go back to North Carolina and watch that dew shudder on the morning corn. On Saturday nights I want to have a mosquito bite my neck while I take down a swig of Old Crow in the flickering lights of a fishfry, with pretty drawlin girls in well-tailored suits stretching their slender legs in such a way in the firelight that you can almost see, as Hubbard always did say, their, that is, “clear to their cunts,” to quote him; but really, I saw one woman in Carolina she was a beauty, engaged to a Marine I guess, hugging looking at rings in trolleys, no, bus, the bus ran through the leafy night among old white houses that ain’t a stonesthrow from crumbly log icehouses now converted to tractor storages, a most beautiful complete rounded perfect woman; one like that in the South, where, when you hear the guitars of the hill country in scratching far-off Smoky Mountain or Georgia stations etc. and the bugs are asleep in the cornfield at night—there’s a moon as bright as a bucket of ice, there’s a cobweb across the old sand road and I can hear the doe-dove coo from the nightfog tabernacle of the owl. I want to stretch a pretty girl with soft lips who maybe usherettes on Sundays at a B-movie on Main Street, or whichever street that is, over a sandy old lousy bed in a fishing shack along the brown sluggish old Neuse River, and lay her.

  Why when

  I was down in

  New Orleans that year I came across the damnedest old boy. He reminded of a man I knew in Washington, D.C. in 1942, in the spring, when I went down there to work on a construction job—the Pentagon Building in Arlington, Virginia, scene of the unknown soldier; in the afternoon I used to look up from the dusty shimmering haze of the big job-scene (it was like about as if we were building the new Gethsemane) and see the pillars and portals of Robert E. Lee’s mansion, and say to myself “I finally got to the South.” And a year later, from the window of the hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, seeing a little dirt road winding off into the gray woods, towards West Virginia, I’d say “And now I’ve got to explore that old gray road that goes out West.” New Orleans, that man, I tell you, a hot town, a fine town course you can starve there like everywhere else; and a good man, his name was—I forget, but, forgit, but he was once Governor of the State of Florida believe it or not and shaved with me under the hot tropical ceiling fans of old palmtree Nola with its rumbling big river that’s been rolling ever since the environs of Butte picking mud as it came down and now’s as big and mad as the last day of the Flood. New Orleans, where Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner drank bad shit together and staggered in the Vieux Carre, and where people like Truman Capote cut along like undersea monsters on the streets, with Tennessee Williams—I know New Orleans only half well, though, and can’t really say, except, as I say, I knew this damn old boy who came from down there, name was Bull Hubbard, Big Bull Hubbard from Ruston, Luzeeanna, and here’s how and when I met him and what happened afterwards. First sight I had of Washington’s old redbrick I guess you might say Georgian houses one sunny hot afternoon in May after I took a nap to rest off a long trip by bus from New York and Boston, I thought, in the waking minute of the dream of life and all that, that I really was in New Orleans and New Orleans has never looked prettier since, because after all Washington IS the gateway to the South. The time has come for every single one American male to go out and be a pimp. This I added on in the spirit of the thing. And of course what I really mean is, the woman has got—the women have got up such an upper hand that there’s no other alternative to salvation. Let all the young women be whores, the old women ladies…who like to do it still. Just like in France, like in Henry Miller’s mad dreams—In New Orleans all you got to do is sit on the levee and play with your balls, let your hand dangle over your balls as though you didn’t care and finally you won’t. We’ll all be like we were on the dump long ago; or like the guy you knew when you were little who used to slap all the asses of the women, including your mother, at a party and laugh like mad. That guy has disappeared from the American scene; without him we’ll all—why did I ever tell you about how a Mississippi River or Red River flood can flood a golf course and undermine tees? and make men in white knickers weep? and remind them that mud is where they came from? and that people are still living in mud all over the country, and liking it? like W. C. Fields living on a riverboat in 1950 that’s now become so old and weather curled that it’s just left sitting in the bare St. Louis waterfront in the hot sun of afternoons when the only people on the cobbled shore are nogood nigger boys who played hooky from Progressive School or the old hermit of the river smelling drift sticks probably from Fargo, North Dakota. Why, boy, my beard grows longer and to think of it. Why, but I saw, and say, now, to mention, I won’t fall apart NOT JUST NOW!—eeeeeeek! eek! eeek! I should, I mean Is—mean I used to write E
ek and Shit all over my college days…on gray November afternoons…sittin…room…cutting…Contemporary Civilization. I had nothing but disrespect for my perfessor, I did. Later on, when Mark Van Doren made me realize professors could be real interesting, I nevertheless spent most of my time dreaming on what he must be like in real reality instead of listening to what he was saying. The one big thing, though, I do remember him saying, is, “A perfect friend you always meet every two or three years, accidentally, and you can’t stop talking with him; and when he leaves for another two, three years, you don’t feel sad at all; when you meet him again, it happens again. He is your perfect friend.” This must have been Van Doren himself. They give that man banquets, his alumni students do, and cry, all sarcastic professional men, too. He looked up from a paper I had written and said “Giggling Lings?” to make sure I did say “Giggling” before the Chinese name “Lings” and that was the only question he asked. Can you wonder that men love him? I don’t know who this guy is, I just came across him—while this man tended his farm in spare hours, or that is, did a few chores among the flowers, and dreamed, my father sat at a linotype machine puffing a cigar and spitting in a spittoon into which occasionally also pieces of hot lead would fall, smoking. The difference in their class…styles of accomplishment. (I was going to say that I was sorry etc…. it would sizzle in the spit…a linotype (machine used to save madness from wild scripts).) All this…. They tried to drag me back in the pit of darkness but they failed. I’m talking about all the people, all the monsters that exist in this world. You can’t teach this old maestro a different tune.

  * * *

  The caveman had the right to kill his wife and child and move on to another woman; of course it also meant moving on to other men, to git the woman from, to fight with rock clubs; but the Master Impostor in this week’s Life (this is what you hear in New York all the time, this week’s Life, last week’s Time, their concepts are all bought up…well, that was pretty neat I must say)—ah, but, ahem, kaff kaff, Major Hoople coughing in the wilderness I mean by that, he’s standing by the parrot cage with its wild crimson parakeet and coughing while the bird, from its tangly bushes, yaks at him and tries to beak his eyes out; his fez is on stormy waters, it’s about to fall to the bright linoleum, he and the bird are spending an afternoon together waiting for the missus to get home, on the sun porch, I forget the old name they had it, among pillows, gloss, and beads…. he walked away swaggering and lumbering, all hairy, all wild in the scraggly morning mists of Upper Neanderthola, southwest county, they didn’t have fences of course but monolithic Robert Frost New England stonewalls; ahem, and there, swaggering, spitting blood, he hurried, across the brush, the harsh twigs and rose thorns snapping at his skin, making it bleed, of course, I added, it also meant moving on to the other men—the question is, did they fight or had they just an agreement, in order to protect their own interests as members of the organic race, otherwise men wouldn’t have survived; yes, they must have arranged systems of shuffling and shuttlin wives, like through a master male agency, almost a union, where you waited in line and kept your eyes peeled on that Reindeer Man board with its buffalo signs for who’s the next cunt coming to, and will she fill the bill; all hurlyburlying in cave doorways with massive stoneclubs in their hands because there was nobody decadent enough at that time to flunk at the door checking firearms just because the boss proposed it might be a good idea and of course didn’t have the guts to do it himself so got a flunk to do it, but a flunk with a will, like certain flunks that throw out Ernest Hummingbird from Greenwich Village parties and instead of flattening them across the wall, which he can very well do and easily do, he, Ernie, with a bottle of gin and bananas, goes off laughing in the night. But now that swagger, descendant of the caveman who made his wife a gore, and added fillips of the child in it, Fillip Gore, is softened by the same man taking a powder from a dull party and a party from which also he can’t leave without creating a scene and creating a scene is only possible at carnivals and Zanzibars, really, say, for instance, you can get high as you want in the balcony of a burlesk show with your hat on the pack, I mean the back of your head, a whiskey bottle in your right hand, a cigarette in mouth, preferably cornsilk really, and yr. cok in yr. left hand.—you can do that and get real high, or you can smoke marijuana and float down a small Indiana river that leads to the Mississippi by a series of subsidiary creeks and rivers, on a raft this is, with a good stove, maybe, a supply of meat already cooked wrapped securely in a good big sack that you can open and slice into every night, some coffee, preferably some Nescafe or Bordens, and a part in the middle of the raft where the wood is so thick and so wetty that you can always plant your camp-fire there over some sand that you carry on edge of the raft, or, really, that is up aft with the galley and the rest of the leavins, the woiks, the home quarters, the heart, the soft of the safari, the place where you light the candle and drink black coffee and smoke your pipeful of marijuana, without deep drags but justpuffing and passing it through your nose, just like with Prince Albert, only real great shit, but you can get this marijuana pipe tobacco regularly because you grow it along the river and harvest it no matter what county you happen to be in at the moment when you need it; and you go floating down that little Indiana, river, further and further down into stranger, lighter, greener ever expanding adventures that must and do ultimately take you to a flat marsh by the sea, great ears of sea corn along a waving grass veldt, scents of something, smoke of a city, something mad and wild and far far gone from the tangled viney place where you started when the dream began, or also, I tried to write this at eleven it was called “Mike Explores the Merrimack,” but now wait, I’m not supposed to enter into this but I guess I might as well, now the thing that we’re gonna talk about now is not limited to anything really specific and generally antecephilic, that word I looked up in Web—but making—it’s just like Hemingway says, in the swamp the fishing would be more tragic. My Mike started in the swamp of the river Merrimack somewhere, this was the river along by the—but wait a minute, ladies and gentlemen, are we still supposed to communicate? did any of you ever make a speech on Union Square? have you loved my shoe box, my black box, my great black cunt, and Jesus Christ and the great black cunt, have you ever seen Jesus Christ, as I have, standing next to a nigger naked woman with a black cunt, a big black cunt, and Jesus Christ is standing on top of the hill with the wind blowing through his eyebrows and is surveying a rooster about two miles away that happens just at that moment to be perched on a fence not unlike Farmer Brown’s fence except it is a Judean fence in the long ago of the earth, and Jesus Christ is saying “Yon rooster crowing…” preparatory to that night’s dark (that nighted and dark fitful) and fitful woe-adventures when they plant bleeding thorns on his head, and drag him spitting blood around, and push him, and cajole him, and mill about him in awful sorrow, thousands of men and women in dank robes wailing, o woe, o woe, and fires are burning someplace up ahead and out of the crowd jumps this lady with a clean handkerchief or scarf and jesus mops his face with it, like say W. C. Fields suddenly borrowing a handkerchief from a stranger at the Worlds Fair in Chicago some ten, twenty years ago, thirty years, whatever and on the clean rag is left the imprint of his face, including blood and features, and the woman runs away not believing it and staring at the rag and bundles it up under her arm like a flag and runs but once in the dark (and now the great thunderstorm and earthquake is forming) she unravels it to see if all the colors, the blood and features ran off into one another, but no the face of Jesus is still neatly imprinted on that rag and stares back at her phosphorescent and frightening and crazy in the night and she creams, screams, doesn’t know what to do with it, drops it on the ground, kneels before it, wishes her husband was there to help her carry it home, or to pick it up himself, like a piece of dead meat, and the husband is nowhere around, and the visage of Him so meek and morrowfull, stares from its stance in the desert dirt, idly upjaw thrust as when he descended it to his face, but now the rag on
a hillock makes a lean—and she, the woman, finally running off ten yards, returning wavering, leaning, swaying, like Whitman’s wives in Long Island, then she sobs and with a gesture just like an Indian woman in Peru bending to pick up a little she just dropped from her shawl while busy cutting up a fruit, she, Magdalene, or whatever her goddamn excuse me lord name was, picked it up off the dark dark ground already beginning to shudder and roll from the earthquakes of Golgotha, and ran home through narrow Algerian streets, past pimps and dope addicts, to her home.