by Jack Kerouac
Joan Rawshanks in the Fog
JOAN RAWSHANKS STANDS ALL ALONE in the fog. Her name is Joan Rawshanks and she knows it, just as anybody knows his name, and she knows who she is, same way, Joan Rawshanks stands alone in the fog and a thousand eyes are fixed on her in all kinds of ways; above Joan Rawshanks rises the white San Fransciso apartment house in which the terrified old ladies who spend their summers in lake resort hotels are now wringing their hands in the illuminated (by the floodlights outside) gloom of their livingrooms, some of them having Venetian blinds in them but none drawn; Joan Rawshanks leans her head in her hands, she’s wearing a mink coat by the wet bushes, she leans against the dewy wire fence separating the slopeyard of the magnificent San Francisco DeLuxe Arms from the neat white Friscoan street-driveway sloping abruptly at seventy-five degrees; in back where the angry technicians muster and make gestures in the blowing fog that rushes past kleig lights and ordinary lights in infinitesimal cold showers, to make everything seem miserable and storm-hounded, as though we were all on a mountain top saving the brave skiers in the howl of the elements, but also just like the lights and the way the night mist blows by them at the scene of great airplane disasters or train wrecks or even just construction jobs that have reached such a crucial point that there’s overtime in muddy midnight Alaskan conditions; Joan Rawshanks, wearing a mink coat, is trying to adjust herself to the act of crying but has a thousand eyes of local Russian Hill spectators who’ve been hearing about the Hollywood crew filming for the last hour, ever since dinner’s end, and are arriving on the scene here despite the fog (move over from my microphone wire, there) in driblets; pretty girls with fresh dew fog faces and bandanas and moonlit (though no moon) lips; also old people who customarily at this hour make grumpy shows of walking the dog in dismal and empty slope streets of the rich and magnificently quiet; the fog of San Francisco in the night, as a buoy in the bay goes b-o, as a buoy in the bag goes b-o, bab-o, as a buoy in the bag goes bab-o; the young director eagerly through the rain like an Allen Minko (crazy type in floppy stylish bought-at-Brooks-Brothers-deliberately clothes who talks his way entirely into his careers and stands there, gesticulating, ducking to see, measuring with his eyes, hand over brow to estimate just right, darting up, shadowing himself, looking furtively over his shoulder, long director’s coat flying, hang-jawed sullen face, long Semitic ears, curly handsome hair, face with the Hollywood Tan which is the most successful and beautiful tan in the world, that rich tan, intent in the foggy night on his great- genius studies of light on light, for he has technicians standing around with punctured boards that they adjust and meander in their hands to cast certain glows and shadows on the essences at hand, hark, though methinks the ghost now comes along the splintered pale, entry made for him, intent on his great-tennis studies of the night) eagerly through the rain he watches Joan through his fist telescopes and then rushes down to her.
“Now baby, remember what I said about the so-and-so” and she says “With the flip on the end of it?”
“Yes, that and what I’ve been trying to explain to Schultz for ten minutes, the meaneander there when you come in at the end byazacking along the trull, I told him and he won’t listen, we called Red, it’s absolutely—got the rest straight though?”
“Yes and tell Rogeroo to make room for me at the other end; o those horrible bores in there”—Joan adding the last to mean the people who live on the bottom floor of the apartment house and who invited them in, while waiting for exact arrangements to get underway, offering Joan Rawshanks tea and warmth in her hard stint of the night; the same fog-stint she must have gone through when she was a poor dear hustler but now and everything is happening all over at the exact moment. In the back is Leon Errol—suddenly you think, “No this is not Leon Errol” (he’s dead) and yet he walks exactly like Leon Errol, on rubber legs, is on a movie lot, has a big floppy gabardine coat in which he must have got drunk at the racetrack in that same afternoon; the two local cops on the beat, according apparently to Hollywood custom, consented to have their pictures taken by a member of the camera crew, who if not delighted was appealed upon to take their pictures; this being Leon Errol; and the police stand passively, side by side, two blue coats, one fortyish, one a boy cop, a thirty-year-old-married-with-two-children-might-have-been-brakeman who instead in the brutality of his instincts migrated to the police force, though with a mild and malleable nature and without military ostentation; these two men, father and son in their nightly duty and relationship in the cold torpors of Russian Hill haute through which their tragic figures cut, swinging clubs, in the rare occasions when residents of the neighborhood happen to cast a bored glance from their evening window (there being nothing to see or do in these streets, morning, noon and night); so the cops stand there having their picture took but suddenly and everybody watching (crowds in the cold fog, hand in pockets, like little kids at the back end of semi-pro football games on scuffled wild neighborhood fields of Saturday afternoon cold and red and hard in the month of November in the North;) everybody in the crowd realizes that the Leon Errol fotografter is actually only just fiddling with his lightbulbs and put-up arrangements of tripods and subsidiary lights (with a cat standing next to him again wielding those strange riddled cardboards they use for estimating the inch-ounch of light they want, though how can anybody in a movie audience get to detect that when the picture finally flashes on the screen;) so the cops are temporarily and suddenly under the glare of floodlights and there they are, they don’t know what to do, perhaps they should look coply, very well they do, folding arms, looking away. But actually at first they waited with comradely joy while the fotog took his first bending licks at the dark rig, with accommodating nineteenth-century buddy joy they in fact almost locked arms, and waited, as if with mustachions and beer-jowl, were posing for the Beanbag Afternoon Set of the German Band Union that invites the Police Force to participate in the old days; the dark suspicion crept now around the crowd perhaps (it certainly did on me, I was alone, watching, Cody was at home not letting anything happen but himself, lamenting in his dark heart’s house with lovemasks and tangled flesh shrouds, as usual) that the Hollywood cameramen were such cynics and played such stupendous private jokes in their travels around, that they were putting the cops to a phony hangup; evidently however Leon Errol did snap their pictures, because when it was all over, while the cops nervously took his name and gave their own (to have the pics mailed) he, with the gesture of the narcotic cameraman, sucked the film out of his box and plopped it, hot with reality, instant, into his pocket; just like a teahead might lick the ash-end of a roach for the exact feel of his smoking hots, like a linotypist must feel late in the night before the groaning hot machine that somewhere in its balls and bowels it has some metallic heat that would be good to lick, would kick you like a can of beer; evidently, Leon Errol, sucking, had made the picture alright and would actually—but now, the cops for just a moment had been in the glare of floodlights, watched by others, by a thousand eyes, by my eyes, the eyes of conmen and maybe murderers in the crowd, the poor cops stood there dumbly for the first time in not only their careers but lives that they had been subjected to scrutiny by thousands of eyes under the glare of floodlights (this being of course the Hollywood cameramen stunt trick, they’d get their kicks making cops pose like that all over the country, at least till the cops joined the unions); but now, the leading man was standing at the fringed end of the crowd and he was a strange one, I told Mrs. Brown standing next to me, “I think he looks sorta handsome and all that, you could say that he’s handsome—but my God when he turns this way and looks this way I can’t stand the great hollow sorrow and strange emptiness and alcoholic lostness and vagueity of his eyes…and what is he looking for? look how eagerly he bends and grins and fawns; wouldn’t it be terrible to be married to a man like that, you’d never, you’d have to make faces all the livelong day,” but Mrs. Brown said, “Yes but on the other hand look at that sharp, almost shroudy clothes he wears, it makes him look like a
part in a nineteenth-century castle picture, he’s the hero, the son of the Count, the favored of the Peasants, a carriage awaits him by rainsplashed rose arbor down the road, they’re going to capture a lovely gowned lady in a black mask tonight; he looks exactly like that, I know what you means about his awful falseness and iridescence of almost homosexual charm but consider that he is a gentleman, a nice fellow, not harming anybody, sorta sissy, probably loves someone very dearly, maybe he has seven kids how do you know? maybe he lives in a rose covered cottage in Catalina and paints rococo Gaugins of his wife covered with suntan lotion with the kids around the big candy ball; so what’s it to you that he fawns and flickers all over” (Two misplaced verbs there.) Joan Ashplant stands in the fog, the director is explaining what he wants done; they sound like they’re arguing about prices in a delicatessen, or with a ski attendant in Berne; over at the misty stone steps the lights are strongest bent; under a canvas that flaps out from the back of a truck that has red boards in the back to make it a proper circus wagon but nevertheless (it’s a kleig truck, with tools) a real cluttered up truck, coils of wire, you’d almost expect to find a clown’s mask among the solders, it’s so damned…under the tent top sit the great generals of the vast activity which is the filming of Joan Clawthighs running up the white driveway (asphalt) (hic) and up the white stone steps and to the door, pausing, at the foot of the steps (not steps where she goes, but gradation of concrete, a driveway, garage ramp, deluxe style, creamy in fact) pausing there to cast a frightened glance into the general night; which she did but when she had to, the glance had to be in the direction of the crowd; at first Joan apparently wanted to weep in this scene, the young director dissuaded her; this explains the early head on hands business, she was fixing up to cry, in fact the scene was run off and shot and Joan, weeping, ran up the ramp to the door; nope, the director made her do this over again, substituting for the tears a frightened run from something down into the general driveway of the night so that he had all of us in the fogs wept audience fearful already of some new menace to come from his fantasy; in fact people now began to crane down the ramp to, I mean down the driveway to see; I expected a Cadillac with crooks; (doesn’t it seem as though the script would have been materially altered on the point of this decision about whether to cry or be frightened?…it must have been some wild decision and inspiration in the clear ear of this post-Kwakiutl American culture, the clear air of early times) (of course I stood amazed) all the crowd was amazed, little teenage girls took care to notice that the director, absent-mindedly explaining to Joan in the wind, swept and held her scarf when she took a drag off a cigarette, the teenage girls thought this to be extra-special polite to her as Movie Queen but actually I noticed to make his point clear and to do so drawing her head down by the scarf noose around her neck and really make her listen his pithy best instruction; I thought it was just a little on this side of cruel, I feel a twinge of sorriness for Joan, either because all this time she’d been suffering real horrors nevertheless as movie queen that I had no idea about, or, in the general materialism of Hollywood she is being maltreated as a star “on the way out”; which she certainly is not at this moment (probably is), though of course all the teenage girls were quick to say, in loud voices for everyone to hear, that her makeup was very heavy, she’d practically have to stagger under it, and leaving it up to us to determine how saggy and baggy her face; well, naturally, I didn’t expect Joan Crawfish in the fog to be anything but Joan Crawfish in the fog;—(there were subsidiary love affairs that is, apart from the movie one, going on in the audience itself): but I was determined not to let the audience distract me. It was so arranged finally, so decided upon: the area of grass where I’d originally stood to witness my first kicks of this debacle spectacle was finally and suddenly used (I say suddenly because it apparently was not really necessary judging from the scene being shot) and the whole crowd had to move over into a limited area (as though that’s what the directors wanted not for kicks but in serious fascistic interest in the movement of crowds) which was also cut off from the street by floodlights on restricted ground, truly “cameras” area, action, cameras, so nobody could go home in these fascistic intervals; there was no backway out, the audience, the crowd had been finally surrounded and looped in and forted in by this invading enemy, the crowd was cooped up in an Alamo, I heard one woman say “I’ll be damned if I don’t go home between scenes!” though no one, not even the Inspector at the rope line hastily thrown up, had mentioned or heard of between-scenes or anything like that, if someone in the crowd hadn’t used some democratic social intelligence the crowd would have stood rooted on forbidden ground freezing all night before some kindly and courtly state trooper decided to tell them they didn’t have to stand there at all, perfectly proper to walk right up to the kleig lights and even in fact bump into them. Personal, or private, property still prevailed in the presence of several portly gentlemen from upstairs, excuse me; gentlemen, bankers, businessmen, who lived in the creamy Russian Hill apartment and others on the same little driveway semi-privated street (a street, incidentally, with a vista that draws unofficial tourists like myself on sunny red Sunday gloomdusks that show you the Golden Gate opening purple to the wild gray banners of the orient sea way out, and the quiet of the wild hills across the Bridge, Marin County, bushy, dark, filled with cragous canyons of strange traffic, oversurmounted as a scene by Mt. Tamalpais, a real vista and one which now of course in the foggy night no one and none of the Hollywood cameras could see) businessmen who lived in this charming district congregating as interested neighbors in an unofficial spectacle (impulsive, organic spectacle) taking place in their backyards, on their private but not hotly debated property, their hospitable property that’s it; so that when a cop, a trooper Nazi type with sharp jaw, boots, protruberant gun, etc. steel eyes, told everybody with equal icy calm to move back, women included, but went up to our cluster of neighbors they apparently looked back at him with ample-bellied slow surprise and one of them decided to say that he had talked with Mr. So-and-So the producer or Assistant Camera Technician and they knew certainly well the entire proceedings by which the apartment management itself had rented out its grounds and impedimenta for a Hollywood location shot, so that if the trooper should try to make them move back, he would do so under duress of the knowledge that they were interested clients of the management of the property upon which that hired taxfree trooper stood, only fat businessmen having the gall nowadays to stay by the letter of the law give or take; so that, damn it all, when I tried to winny my way into the center of the camera crew (I was dressed exactly like they were, at least in the dark, I had a leather jacket with a fur collar, wino chino pants, etc. in other words like a soldier in the arctic, a worker in the fog, etc.) why when the trooper came up to me he wasn’t quite sure where I belonged and said “Are you with the company?” and had I said “Yes,” and I was just then walking or on the movement of deciding to walk up to the midst of the cameras and wires nonchalantly, I went and said “No,” automatically, and, automatically, he sent me back to the crowd, where I spent the rest of my time craning, which is an occupation in itself, proper old men move away from you slyly, enjoying the suspicion that you’re a pickpocket. Joan Rawshanks stood in the fog….
I said to her “Blow, baby, blow!” when I saw that thousands’ eyes were fixed on her and in the huge embarrassment of that, really, on a human-like level, or humane, all these people are going to see you muster up a falsehood for money, you’ll have to whimper tears you yourself probably never had any intention of using; on some gray morning in your past what was your real tear, Joan, your real sorrows, in the terrible day, way back in the Thirties when women writhed with a sexual torment and as now they writhe with a sexual frustration, they used to, now they don’t, they learned to be a generation not liking it; everybody can see her plain as day fabricating tears on her arm, but she really does; there’s no applause but there is later when she finally gets the apartment house door open after three or fou
r instructed yanks…now there’s only the great silence of the great moment of Hollywood, the actual TAKE (how many producers got high on Take do you think?) just as in a bullfight, when the moment comes for the matador to stick his sword into the bull and kill it, and the matador makes use firmly of this allotted moment, you, the American who never saw a bullfight realize this is what you came to see, the actual kill, and it surprises you that the actual kill is a distant, vague, almost dull flat happening like when Lou Gherig actually did connect for a home run and the sharp flap of the bat on ball seems disappointing even though Gherig hits another home run next time up, this one loud and clout in its sound, the actual moment, the central kill, the riddled middle idea, the thing, the Take, the actual juice suction of the camera catching a vastly planned action, the moment when we all know that the camera is germinating, a thing is being born whether we planned it right or not; there were three takes of every area of the action; Joan rushing up the drive, then Joan fiddling with her keys at the door, and later a third take that I never got to see, three shots of each, each shot carefully forewarned; and the exact actual moment of the Take is when silence falls over just like a bullfight. Joan Rawshanks, with her long pinched tragic face with its remaining hints of wild Twenties dissolution, a flapper girl then, then the writhey girl of the Thirties, under a ramp, in striped blouse, Anna Lucasta, the girl camping under the lamp like today you can on a real waterfront see a butch queer in sea-man long shore man peacap bowcoat toga, with simpering fat lips, standing exactly like Joan used to do in old pictures that followed the Claudette Colbert of I Cover the Waterfront (busy little girl): Joan Rawshanks, actually in the fog, but as we can see with our own everyday eyes in the fog all lit by kleig lights, and in a furcoat story now, and not really frightened or anything but the central horror we all feel for her when she turns her grimace of horror on the crowd preparatory to running up the ramp, we’ve seen that face, ugh, she turns it away herself and rushes on with the scene, for a moment we’ve all had a pang of disgust, the director however seems pleased; he sucks on his red lollipop.