by Jack Kerouac
JACK. It was the same way when we had that dream about driving up the hill in the whiteness and you fell out of the car—
CODY. We had a dream?
JACK. Oh pardon my hard-on, I had a dream
CODY. Know full well that I’ll never succumb to your advances
JACK. It was only your manly built, your beautiful eyes that attracted me so fair, on the cobblestones there
CODY. Don’t think you can hang around here and make passes at ME
JACK. Tut, tut, nary a thought; I told the Judge I was a confidence man
CODY. And he let you into this cell, to watch cockroaches race with me? Fah, man, I don’t believe a word of it
JACK. Ask Charles Laughton, as Captain Blah? Go ahead, ask him! ass him!
CODY. Sir, you sully my honors; they were won at great expense in Carthage
JACK. Or Carthage never raved; or Carthage never
CODY. Carthage never is such talk; you have the wit of an adder, a tongue made to pry, like ends of iron padgets; you make a mouse hole out of the cheese, and find nothing to do but pole, or sit on my pole, or make a grab for it either way—Nay, I know, nay, nay: a pole, a pole, I have a golden pole
JACK. A golden pole? With rings of frazzly slagrous iron from the maw of dinosauric hill bottoms up-wheedled through a rackshaft?—when the steaming cranes mix thunder with the mire, and men make monkey dances in the snow, all muddy, mettled to their extremes, thorny, caucuses in their shacks—
CODY. Ah me morning-star
JACK. It’s a blue rose, the morning-star is like a blue rose in the Hair of the Archangel
CODY. Saint, believer, sinner—you think your Ippolits were Idiots? You think your Raskolniks were Apostolic? were Jewish? holy?—we had an Indian called Harold Jew, don’t ask me where he got the name, and he ended up going mad in a Miama hotelroom, flat on the bed in the middle of the night, dying on peyotl, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, where he saw an image of his Great and Sorrowful Face, Bending Over the World; completely killed, self-killed, like jazz killed itself; (jawbone jazz, t’was dreary): and when the face of Jesus departed from his mortal sight he suddenly knew he was Jesus Christ Himself Returned and this was the Second Coming
JACK. And wasn’t that the time that kid said the Second Coming would be televised, you would see the sprawled gray print figure of a young hoodlum slain by cops lying arms outspread in a pool of blood in front of the National Maritime Union or nearby on 17th Street New York City, Manhattoes, and televised coast to coast to the entire nation as the first of its series, but suddenly everybody all over America is stricken with the realization that the Second Coming has Arrived and all arise and go forth; everywhere the image of the beautiful and the dead, the dead hoodlum, the naked punk, laid out flat with also a baseball bat sunk in his skull and a woman screaming, a Spanish woman screaming for joy nearby, ask me why; he lies there, the mailman let him go, he asked for the postman twice, he went too far with the babyface act, he was too beautiful, he too fell out of an airplane and landed on the frontpage with a bandaged head and—except that he is on television and dead; everybody in America realizes that this is the Image of Him Again and they all rush off somewhere, clouds of dust rise, as if War was the Excitement of the World, the rave of events; war starts, he rises, crosses depend, blood gulls in the sky with a semi-abstract pattern set to the music of mambo on a synchronized film. Man, he’s dead
CODY. Yeah, about that time—but this Harold Jew arose, decided he was God, and headed back for his homecountry, the Kwakiutl country up on Vancouver Isle and parts of (island) it in British Columbia and around the Yakima or something but really—to resurrect among his people, you understand, and ends up in the last climactic scene of his life—certain hip people were there who were digging peyotl—ends up screaming at potlatches, throwing his mother’s dearest possessions into the raging Dostoevskian fires of pride and heroism. Finally he throws himself in and roasts to a crinkler. Tasty around the cheekbones. Yes, I knew him when; he was, he, an Indian through and through, a splendid—fact of the matter, his father was a rough hombre in and around Grants, New Mexico, boy, where the flint-star sits on the side of the mountain star, and man it’s dry and high and keen cold, his old man had black eyes and hated continental busdrivers with bullnecks, he shot one outside the town of Abilene, Kansas, in a sudden rage erupting from the back seat of the bus and puttin the muzzle to the driver’s neck, opening fire. The bus ran into a grain elevator and seventeen pigeons flew out of the loft; Mrs. O’Flaherty Old Wives Tales, a volume by Arnold Bennett, fell on a piece of broken glass and a dry bird turd that happened to be lying by the side of the road where the Wild Goose left it last spring, durn his limey hide; but do I talk too much. (JACK, No Pa, you shore don’t, you shore do) That was the last I heard of any of those road characters—I’ve grown old since. They don’t concern me anymore. How could they have even concerned me in the beginning, I’m serious about a road when I’m traveling on one, I gotta go somewhere, I go—course I can goof, and have goofed, on roads, on the road, but, usually it was a big—well you know, distance, time, mileage, blah, bloo, bloop; of no particular essence of meaning, in other words
JACK. Truer words
CODY. Just as silly as the rain’s really milk, see?
* * *
DULUOZ SAT IN HIS SUNDAY AFTERNOON CHAIR at Cody’s, having just taken his afternoon cold weather walk like he used to do in the ice-cold red-whipping January Sundays of the East, and looked out the nursery window. White houses of Frisco, a grayboard arrangement for the steps going down, wash on the line (here in the alley you’d think it was a void the world, not a round pursy earth, the void is in the mind and in the city), old lady with neat and frazzled tow-chin and rosy mother-cheeks peers forth from her graywhite house and hauls in wash, one or two pieces, for something she needs Sunday afternoon, no, she’s hauling little by little more and more…all’s left is (I’m a tattlegray spy) towel, two bibs, and a slip, how should I know, what would she say (as she looks up to hear plane) (in all this bleakness of life so far from her girlhood) if she knew I sat here noting down mentally her wash piece by piece, she’d think “That young man is insane, there’s something wrong with his mental faculties, he plays with himself too late” and me hiding in the closet with closed eyes, gasping, or the time Ma sneaked up on me in the Sarah Avenue house and at noon it was, endeavoring to see what I was doing to make (as she thought) my handkerchiefs wet when all I was doing was washing my own handkerchiefs—my mother was real rough on me in that respect, she wouldn’t allow any kind of sex in the house. They say that makes a man nutty. I guess I’m nutty then. They say you know the sun, the moon and the stars.
Well, thought Duluoz, this lady is just like Ma. I wish I could get Ma to come live in Frisco. Yeah, that’s what I oughta do—In the white woodsteps (there’s old Cody downstairs laughing to inferior subsidiary Amos ’n’ Andy programs of four o’clock Sunday afternoon in Frisco—and I thought I was going to be Duluoz the newspaperman on the San Francisco Chronicle instead (like of the Sun) Duluoz the brakeman).
He stared out of the window and watched the flutter of a diaper in reflection in a sun porch window, in ripply reflection too, like Eliot’s fog just merely slipping into his mind as a kind of observable phenomena. Two green tin cans of olive oil on the clean white steps of that Italian family. (O the beans of home! thought Duluoz at that moment.) Duluoz sat and rocked in the chair. I’ll write that letter to A. A. Quinn tonight, he decided.
Cody is the brother I lost.
* * *
IN THE DIM…Oh by the wind, and by the wind grieved, lost brother depart, O!, not!—‘ere sallyings into the pale, or sulks in bigdome clocks, go crashing by the vale. A day! a day!
But it wasn’t a long time till I saw her again and then that time she said to me “Charley boy there’s shore something wrong with you, don’t know as I can tell exactly what tis but you, you my boy, you, candy eater, cheater, can go sulk by the moon, and make nippets of
milady’s apples, idle off a July on the same stonewall or crack pits in your pupple guns, fit for the walking wounded and all the mysteries of thy orisons—to wit, to woo—go now.
Yes, Cody is the brother I lost—he could very well have been my brother instead of the actual one I had who died—did he die a dead death?—or a living death—?—Cody, when he lets the crumbled folds of his old black braky hat that of course he doesn’t wear anymore, the other night he happened to find a brand new brown gentleman’s felt hat in the attic and put on to go switching in Oakland (I went with him, watched him run and race that kicked boxcar or about to be kicked boxcar and slip the pin with a dextrous step into his work, flip, and the boxcar’s loose, or the gondola’s loose, or the flat, or tank, or reefer, any old reefer’ll do on a rainy night, sends the car reeling by itself as the Diesel hoghead engineer eases in his mighty brakes that can brake a hundred-car line buckle by buckle and indefatigably emphatic about it; Cody, in his new brown hat looking very rakish and Irish and not at all any more like a hero of old roads, like a young Buck Mulligan O’Gogarty but really rakish, tilty, jaunty, but businesslike and bemused in the dark. The Oakland yards have innumerable tracks and this was one subsidiary among-all-the-others yards that Cody pounced on the pins in, with his new hat. The agility that once made it able for him to overtake tremendous athletes in the gloomy sports of his youth which was so tragically mis-spent in those reformatories and Sunday afternoon railyards. But would anyone deny a man his father? Cody is the brother I lost…. In that new hat he is not the grim Oklahoma posseman pursuer that he is in the black slouch hat…with its rainslopes and dark weathered, square, Rocky Mountain and Larimer Street crown; with his just teeth, showing, and his unshaven prognathous jaw, he looks like a marshal who just murdered a marshal, Cody in his maturity having finally attained a measure of success in that he is now indistinguishable from the culprit and the Assistant D.A. at the same time and to boot. Wot, now, that bastard, he makes me mad; he makes me think he’s nothing but an empty minded, vacant, bourgeois Irish proletarian would-be-Proust tire recapper—a nothing, who won’t listen to what anybody says: “Nothing personal, I just can’t think or even assume terms for what might have called thought if you wished, and be concerned—fah!”
So in the black hat he meers and makes mouths and imitates one thing after another; the other Saturday, just like this, in the car, with the girls, shopping, he said, “Lessee now, we gotta get mee-ilk, and beer-yed, and greem-yeld—” Cody is the brother I lost; he’s the brother I had, too, the spittin image of Mike Fortier, old whooping Mike with his boots and visored cap pointing his flashlight through the woods at night in search of his bear trap in back of the dump, Cody is Mike all inverted and twisted and torn, and inhibited, neurotic, restless, too-intelligent, gone, blank, a stud who is down, man, really down; (d’I ever tell you about Cody’s prognathic face, as though it was concave but the power of his bony nose and almost silly obfusking out-humping wild muddleman face you see twinkles and yurkles and something that makes you think of the side of the big facewall of the world so to speak) “Why, J-a-a-ck, (imitatin Hubbard) d’I ever tell you about that t-i-me when me and Ma was aimin to buy that paper mill in Fillville I said to my last attorney lost otturney rup-r-r-r-up—wup, hup, hap, ap, wap, a, ack, ack, a, aaa, ahe, em, hem—urp—ock!”
Ock is one of the characteristic things that have been happening in his throat, including a terrible cough by which he coughs up all our money, or mine at least, or is it his?
The brother that I lost—that was always laughing on Saturday nights and I haven’t seen him since—Cody was there, by the washtub on the porch on Saturday night, making the sisters laugh and the little siblings cry—the ones that grow up to become anthropologists and modern jazz tenormen. A terrible heaving rack of grrs come out of Cody’s voice sometimes while kidding like this that makes Evelyn say “Oh don’t do that with your voice!” and lately “Cody, don’t you hear the sound of it?” To laff this off Cody attains newer and more horrible noises with his mouth. The children giggle. Gaby is always giggling it seems, her eyes shine, shine; Jimmy said she had her father’s eyes: “She must be high”; Gaby laughs when Cody is being exactly like the brother I lost; but like him too he has to get hell from the woman, the great mother-women of the vicinity of the presences; wherefore I love Gaby for loving Cody when I do too. He treats Gaby roughly because he feels sorry for Emily who was always in tears in 1949 when he was running away and more so in her mother’s; he’ll grab Gaby when she says she wants to go and pull her pants down and by the palms haul her in one sweep onto the seat of the little bowl, almost throwing her across the room on it, and she’s laughing; so I learn Cody is really not hurting her but playing a great adventurous game that no one else dares and it’s Saturday afternoon, it’s that fetched time…those streets outside, that night coming, Denny Dimwit will sit in the washtub by the light of the moon surer than hell and the cat on the fence, in the Bronx Jail in New York murderers will sit in iron cells enclosed from iron halls and listen to Lava Soap and Gangbusters with wide-eyed interest, leaving their cards on the table a half hour, the same interest and later skeptical criticism of the show from practical points of view that little kids all over the country at that moment Saturday night in rocking chairs of the thrilling livingroom—in fact Happy, the father, French-Canadian Happy Bernier who works as bouncer in the Laurier Club and once operated the rollercoasters at Lakeview, that is, helped build them, or paint them, he’s rocking his chair most furiously as the gunshots and roars come (in Bronx Jail they tensen) and cries harshly when the poor crazy mother Layo (called thus by the naborhood young gang) fiddles a poor pot in the kitchen, “For Crise Sakes Jesus God cut the goddamn fucking noise in there,” and she replies with a wild screeching laugh that I used to hear from six blocks and across the river if I had cats in my ears, the laugh resounding also in the children who pick up, but immediately then, all eyes of the world now on the last chapter of Gangbusters, the final scene, the moral, Layo’s in the door, Happy’s stopped rocking, in the Bronx Jail they smile slowly (and outside it’s the red sun sinking blood red in the world and the United States of America from Portuguese French-Canadian tenements of Cape Cod to the outskirts of heather in San Luis Obispo).
Cody listens to Gangbusters too: in the dark he sits or wants to sit, but Evelyn hates Gangbusters, Evelyn likes Dragnet better; her problem is furniture, there’s no way for them to listen to the radio in the dark kitchen at feeding time, and the parlor like the parlors of Polish coal miners in Pennsy, French-Canadian millworkers in Massachusetts, and Irish barbers in the West, is unused….—rocking his children on all three knees, saying “Shh,” “Listen” “Now” and all eyes big and little, dull and shining, are fixed on the blood red dial of the radio. Somewhere a cock was crowing. It was the cock of Shakespeare, that on New Year’s Eve Evelyn crew. Cody married a woman from good society who wants him to sit up straight in the light when he listens to Gangbusters.
Cody is the brother I lost—He is the Arbiter of what I Think. I’ll follow, did I ever say I wouldn’t follow? or did I ever ask to follow?—We sit and speculate about high prices, talk practical about actual grocery bills, (that I have nothing to do with), chew fingernails; “It’s a goddamn shame,” says Cody, “yep, that’s what it is (cough).” He looks at his wrist for signs of a hive or to examine a hair line or think. “Hem,” he says; in a reverie he looks away like Caesar. I begin to suspect he knows I’m watching him. His eyes turn slowly to mine; it’s absurd; but he doesn’t laugh, he stares right at me, grows red all over, looks like he’s holding his breath, oh yes that’s right he’s only holding his breath and wants to see if I’ve noticed how long and well he did it; also he’s bound to be saying “Oh real good shit.”
Well, the world is all made up of people.
Let’s swing a camera down on Cody and catch him hurrying up the ramp like Joan Rawshanks in the fog, but Gad he would outrun the camera!—he would astound the lighting with his
furlibues, eye-flutters, show-offs, piper jigs and “shining eyes”; he wouldn’t even make the son of the villain he’s so dishonest looking…fah! He is a hero, a champion, he wrote “Laura”; he married Frank Sinatra; he gave David Rose his very first kiss, or was it Thor Heyerdahl Axel Stordhal. Kon-Tiki! A man committed suicide because he couldn’t write a song like that. I am amazed by this in America. “Brother, have you seen starlight on the rails?” O delicately they dive, delicately they dive, for Greeks, beneath the railroad platforms (from which the torn letter in the basket had been supposed to dive and therewith swim away, or that is, to say, whale away).
O brother Cody Pomeray of Night! Why do you not speak to me! Who has spawned your Fear in the Foggy Dark? In the foggy dark, the goggyfoggy dark—Cody stands, a brakeman, on the front platform of a Diesel switch engine rolling twenty-five miles an hour down the rail-yards down fifty lead, to the ten-track switches; Cody stands, implacable, unforetold, expressionless, almost dull looking and ridiculously serious, Cody Pomeray, showing me how he will die, and how well he does and also not showing anything to anyone but just being there, dead in void, (Cody Pomeray alone at the railyards). “He make a living and moo in the dark,” as the French-Canadian says, “in the place of the box-cart,” where his father was lost and he was alone, when Frank Sinatra was singing his first heart-out “This Love of Mine” and Cody was fourteen and heard it from the doors of swinging bars like the refrain of his anxiety and anguished love-loss of his cat that just got killed, the little skull-crushable lost brother kitten minoux of these tortured eternities, these bloody infirmities there—why does Cody insist on the rails? “It’s all on rails,” he said to me at first; so he fell on one last Fall, ten years after those first poolhall days, and almost got run over by the cast-iron wheels of a drag in the hills. It’s because six makes six and Junior is the son of Senior as well as sun of, and he repeats older’s habits in the inversion of his prime, and focal history. Likewise, therefore drinks sweet wine to ease his smoking throat only, not because he is a wino; who would winos bear? who—But since psychology is a two-edged sword, and the siblings have become a GOOF, enough.