by Jack Kerouac
High, I’m telling you, high. What’s the law against being high? What’s the use of not being high? You gonna be low?
All kinds of things like that are occurring to me in the finalities of the peyotl day. “Well,” I say to Cody, “and so you are Cody Pomeray” (saying this to myself) and out loud to him: “Well, so there you are sitting there.” I felt like a portrait artist; I felt more like he was a ghost I’d come to see, which is exactly what he was when I left New York to come here.
Now I shall leave Frisco. I am going off to another ghost, to report…I hope it’s a girl, not a baby daughter either. (Do I have a baby daughter somewhere? I have not troubled to find out, and bird’s on the wing again, I lost) (and am lost)—My ghost sits nearby in his miraculous chair. How long a way I’ve come to report him to myself, to comport or omport, from his newspaper-material life of day by day, the story and significance of his spirit to mine and to others joined with mine. What freezings have I felt; what dark days seen; what old December’s bareness—every where. (with mightolicum furious armed powers gesticulating furled flags upon the rale, not ounched or made turbigity in a cloxen wale; fartitures, meadowlarks and darkeningses-arecess Dimogenes burned): a wit, a woo, downy dull fit make the reel, tolly doll came in the whirl, rammedon saw his rivers: vales swallow blood. The ruined choir in the tree. The stone that hung me on. The clime had airs when that wind moist comes fanning his dew feather from a sea, lowing the bay cows in the field, to make silos whale, tops sir methinks, where cockadoodledo, adoodledoo, adoodledee, till grime cakes in a burning lake. But gospel me not, Crown!—I had kings in my navvies, and knew a French corount, one inpurpled but only gently, couronné, crowned, as upon a spire, gleaming like Nes-tor’s spear in the keen. Shakespeare, thou art flagellous of the time. (Fragile act, fragile act.)
Time is of the essence, I must run on, “right?” I says to Cody and he is sitting there quietly running the whole room with some magnificent action watched by everybody enrapt, except me, that was staring at the floor. “Whee!” I says, “I don’t know what’s happening.” But then I realize: it’s not for me, or you, to know; it’s got to come to you, and does, eventually and always does. How can I be suspicious of what C. says behind my back to his wife, when I always learn later that they have nothing to talk about but themselves and I can do anything I please such as lighting matches in the pyromaniac attic. Music, sax, saxes, quivering light, trumpets, voices, lights, shakes; all’s happening; voices, song, toy-land, eek, giraffes, zoos, circuses, fidos, parkings, awl-hoots, toyland, jubilee, big red fox, red nose, big Jack Little, girls and boys, Brooklyn Dodgers, joy, summer, New York, ice cream cones; blues in old saloons, of New Orleans, short ones, at bar, King Cole, stories from ringside; cigar-smoke, leather cases for lighters, a golfbag; mysterious conversations through floor, the brown moth light in the corners of the room, the little dusts, the little dolls and ragamuffin dusts in the floor, so sad, tiny (flecked) specked, upon the toy wars of the floor, the little toys of children always mystify the air they occupy, they have been wished an identity by a breathing soul and therefore live. Listen, I have wished myself into heaven, there are more people dead than alive; dead eyes do not see? Dead eyes see.
And rain sleeps.
* * *
EVERYTHING’S ALL RIGHT; dead eyes see, are not blind. Roses riot everywhere. Sunflowers, Ah! I love you. Abstraction. You think? See rain. Comes afloat. Fell. From stormclouds in the racky north, strifed and blew-melted aslant skies like a warm frost melting in the savage huge infinity over the world and Kansas. (The Great Dustclouds of Kim!) Kim, Colorado, 1932; with cactus blown from Mexico mebbe. Sadness of the soul. Dimness of the inventive heart. I see heaven through everything. Heads bowed on scaffolds. Puddles of mud in Casablanca. Dull movies about Monte Carlo. Unmailed letters (or just envelopes). Baseball mustaches in old poems about home runs;
Lowerin the boom on the bosun;
The labels of unknown whiskies;
Cartoons about jealous wives.
Atlases to hold up shelves.
(Sweet and Sour Lyrics)
(That Ed Williams read like a young idealist in the attic,
to our gratification, Cody and me, and surprise.)
Songs about populated boats singing.
Hello to an old flame.
Putting on your coat at midnight.
* * *
THINGS HAVE A DECEIVING LOOK OF PEACEFULNESS, THE BEAST is actually ready to leap—lookout—yet what about those French dreams last spring?—what, sweet hype? can’t write?—find no machine to relabate your fond furlures; furloors, vleours, or velours, we know that in French, in print à main we cannot fail—
O Telegraph Hill!
Strange graces came to occupy this back seat, you mind, in (own) tides. (time?) Furbishoors, fruppery, nosootle, nonsootle, nonsottle, sweattle, don’t wrestle with this—trestle—(to prove I can go on efficiently, otherwise I’ll begin an abstract drawing)
(an ABSTRACT drawing)
The thing to do is put the quietus on the road—give it the final furbishoos and finishes, or is that diddling? Kind King and Sir, my Lord, God, please direct me in this—The telling of the voyages again, for the very beginning; that is, immediately after this. The Voyages are told each in one breath, as is your own, to foreshadow that or this rearshadows that, one!
I first met Cody in 1947 but I didn’t travel on the road with him till 1948, just the tail end of that year, at Christmas time, North Carolina to New York City 450 miles, and back to North Carolina, and back to New York City again, in thirty-six hours, with washing dishes in Philadelphia, a teahead ball, and a Southern drawl evening drive in between.
And in all that time Cody just talked and talked and talked.
We had met in 1947 when he first came to New York from Denver with his first wife, the sixteen-year-old Joanna Dawson of Denver and L.A. where her sadistic handsome father divorced from her mother, was a cop; Cody, all bare ass standing in the door of a coldwater pad when we first knocked on the door, me, Ed Gray, Val Hayes. They were students at Columbia University, close friends of mine, Val was a dear close friend at the time; they told me Cody was a mad genius of jails and raw power, that he was a god among the girls with a big huge crown wellknown wherever he went because he liked to talk about it and made frequent and assertive use of it and also the women talked about it and wrote letters mentioning it; sometimes frantic; a reader of Schopenhauer in reform schools, a Nietzschean hero of the pure snowy wild West; a champion. In the door he stood with a perfect build, large blue eyes full of questions but already thinning in edges, at edges, into sly, or shy, or coy disbelief, not that he’s coy, or even demure; like Gene Autry (exact appearance) with a hardjawed bigboned—but he also at that time bobbed his head, prided himself on always looking down, bobbing, nodding, like a young boxer, instructions, to make you think he’s really listening to every word, throwing in even early as 1947 a thousand manifold yesses and that’s rights; testing his knee muscles, thinking of his next piece, plotting it on the sly while his wife buttons from the last. When we walked in Joanna had to jump up off the bed and straighten; Cody didn’t warn her, or shield; she hastily fixed up, her hair, her wrinkled dress (I guess) I No de hesitatee. I was amazed how young and beautiful she was, though a little pimply then; and Cody I had expected to be, from reading a letter he wrote from Colorado Reformatory, a kind of small, thin, shy guy with dark hair and a poetic sadness in his jailness, like a sick criminal genius, or a saint, an American young saint, one who might even be boring and eventually turn to some strange Seventh Day Adventist type religion, like you meet in bus stations in Minneapolis, with wide eyes of fire and phony phenomenality, turning his body to religion or just sadkid goop; but Cody was dishonest looking, a thief, a car thief, and that’s exactly what he was, he had already stolen over five hundred cars (and served time for some of it); not only a thief, maybe a real angry murderer in the night. The “kid” I had imagined from his letter, I never imputed any kind
of crime for—other than some kindly
Robin Hood-type theft, giving a widow, exit, giving a widow a window, sadly in the late afternoon. Cody was serpentine he was not sad—Cody had long sideburns like certain French-Canadians I used to know in my boyhood in Lowell, Mass. who were real tough, sometimes were boxers, or hung around rings, gyms, garages, porches in the afternoon (with guitars), sometimes got shiny boots and motorcycles and rode voyages as far as Fall River and New York just to be on Times Square in their buttons a half hour, and had the bestlooking girls, and you saw them the couple coming up from the dump and the river at night along the baseball fence as nonchalant as nothing had happened, he just threw away the rubber and his dark eyes flashed across the night. Cody was vigorous, his actions were tamed to his will—the “kid” never had a chance; I thought of Cody immediately as a lion tamer, he looked a little like Clyde Beatty had looked to me in the great circus in Boston, from a distance, stiff and strong, the visiting Ringling of thunderous May nights. I didn’t think of Cody as a friend.
* * *
I THINK I SLEPT in the chair that night, starting after dawn, when the others in one of these typical youthful New York parties straggled off only the last possible moment before roaring morning; Cody and Joanna (and the kid whose friend owned the pad) must have slept with their clothes on on the couch, the kid, Bob Markan, in the kitchen sink or floor or something. In the morning I was sitting with an ashtray butt between my ashy fingertips smoking, by the gray window, as old Espan Harlem woke slowly to another day and already the first cats were, like in San Juan, already standing on the roofs and looking around the horizon and down, rooftop sentinels of the great Indian World that you see in all Indian cities all day, Havana, Mexico City, Trinidad, Cuzco, Mongol towns in shaggy Siberia must be, respectable collector of unemployment spending the day with the pigeons on the roof overlooking the street that’s all—I commented on them, in fact; and also later to Vicki when we had the place to ourselves one morning, and she said “Oooh daddy, I dig those motherfuckers all the time.” Joanna like in a sad French painting of 1950, not a Modigliani but that emaciated Breton genius with the sad longbodied Bohemians in the room, that I saw in that there New York Times, sat on the edge of the bed with her hands hanging in her lap and her broad country face under its sea of golden curly tresses fixed in a dumb stare like a farmer wife waitin for her turn to pump at the well while Pa swooshes with the soap pan, under cool pines of dew and a red sun reflecting on the lake; but Joanna is in an evil gray New York pad that she heard about back West and gapes.
Cody was pacing up and down restlessly; he came to his decision in the middle of talking to me about those roof sitters and saints above. “Well now, Joanna, what we’ve got to do is sweep the floor and then scramble up those eggs and have a breakfast, we’ll never crystallize in our plans or come to any rockbottom pure realization, decision, whichever, or nothin without perfect action and knowledge not only philosophical and on an emotional plane but pragmatic and simple.”
And Joanna automatically got up and started up the breakfast. And Cody had made his speech in utmost anxiety and tenderness but complete domination and control, and I saw that in his wild life of car-stealing, girl-conning, poolhalling and hustling he needed order and a certain amount of help. He was very youthful and severe, and I marveled at him—openly with myself I thought of him as a heartbreaking new friend, in fact very beautiful to whom the only thing I could ever be left to say would be, “Ah but your beauty will die and so will life and the world.” I walked beside him on tiptoe, I didn’t want to disturb the delicate balance that existed between this angel and me; as for Joanna, because she was a woman, I had designs on her, I kept looking at her breasts and thinking of her lips and her legs spread revealing her cunt, and me there bending over her naked heart with my hair falling over my eyes like moronic French actors or the pimpish characters in Parisian postcards and dirtybooks especially those with furnishings in back and sometimes (the girl with the cigarette cunt). My feeling for Cody was ethereal, like for a character in a book, for Joanna, earthy—that’s to say, sexy, malevolent, manlike; Cody accepted us as he accepts everyone secretly severely and especially impersonally as his present wife now knows better than anyone—Cody paid no attention and never did later to Joanna and me, even when she flattened me on walls in Harlem after-hours joints and pushed while Cody stood not far, and almost even when we—definitely when we lounged on couches or almost even when she sat between us golden bare in the front seat of the ’49 Hudson as we drove across the state of Texas in 1949 and she applied cold cream to our respective organs, a flash sight of which opposite rolling trucks must have had from their high cabs so that it seemed to me that I saw them go swerving off in the tail window like drunks in amazement of course; gorgeous Joanna with her yellow cunt in the sun, the first warm sun (approaching by the hour red old El Paso in the Sunset) since the blackened snows of New York winter, her squishy delicious cunt, wow, that Cody repeatedly penetrated and lubricated with his finger as he drove on and where we’d said goodbye to our friends in a squalid snowy winternight in upper York Avenue by the tenements those three, four days from New York to New Orleans to Frisco, and smelled deeply for the taste and reminder and sense of Joanna the girl he wanted; sitting there, blushing, laughing, but just as composed as Queen Elizabeth, her pendant breasts full, round, soft and real in the light, that neither of us dared touch in front of each other, though I playfully and masterfully once in a while rubbed up with my palm her inside thigh till she tickled and laughed (at El Paso she squeezed my balls through my pants as we waited for Cody and a young crazy reformatory hepcat we met in the bus station when trying to hustle with our three abilities for gas fare to Tucson and nobody was there but the cat who kept saying “Let’s mash somebody on the head and take his money” and Cody went off with him high and laughing and excited to dig the streets and bars, and in the dark Joanna and I played little games tenderly); almost even, Cody paid little attention, when, at his request, we all were in the same bed, the bed in which my father died and that I’d given to furnish our New York pad, actually held by Irwin who was working nights, therefore giving that bed some life to renew it and give it direction in the empty void (and sagged in the middle from a once-mighty weight); lay stiff as an iron board at or upon his edge of the bed, Joanna sunk hot in the middle and smiling and a little embarrassed and thinking of something else (“Gee, what an honor to have two men at the same time, Cody and Jack”); and I on the other protuberant end, amazed, complicated, plotting, and none of us breathing or moving until Cody said “We must all be cool and relaxed as though nothing was on our minds at all, dig please, man, Joanna, be straight in your soul and admit whatever feelings and act on them right away, don’t let even a second rot—” as the saying is, blow, or anything, or go, so, do it, start, begin, now. So we fiddled and daddled and nothing really happened, just like highschool kids in a hooky, in a truant bedroom with Coca-Cola and aspirins we sent each other out of the room to do it alone, one by one, and were frightened by the darkness in the house, in fact the creaking mystery, philosophical void, the missing of the point, the obvious sadness of having to die never having known something about everything and ourselves we’re dying by the hour to know and act upon immediately, that might very well be as Reich says sexual, some mystery in the bones themselves and not the shadows of the mind. No, as I walked on the sidewalk that first morning with Cody—
In Denver the summer of 1947, which is after these first meetings, Irwin took a picture of us with arms clapped over each other’s shoulder looking straightly and severely into the eyes—whatever happened to that picture, I’ve never seen it? (a nurse he put me on to has it) but life is so huge and complicated I can’t go into the nurse now, or Denver 1947, or anything, and time flies…in this case, not in any case, though.
* * *
THAT FIRST NIGHT of meeting I didn’t bother to do anything but laugh at Val and poke Cody in the ribs whenever Val, his mentor in Denve
r, the kid his age who’d told him poetry was more important than philosophy, made any mentorial, positive, educational or advisory remarks. As for Joanna, she cradled Val’s head in her lap; I detested her at first I guess, I don’t remember; all the guys said they’d laid her, half of them boasting, after a few weeks, after Joanna had the cops after Cody as revenge for something in their great brawling roominghouse and hotel roomfights, Cody: “Listen, honey, bitch, whore, or, O, no, darling, yes, no, O yes, you, don’t, O, bitch, whore, damn, fuck!”
Joanna: “…and you didn’t tell me you meant the other side of the street so by hiding that you hide goddammit sonofabitch I don’t know what you hide—” Joanna soon learned to hide better, it appears. Later she began to out-lie Cody. But his relationship with his women is something I can’t rely on to cast any light on the fact that whenever, on the East Coast on some warm spring evening, I happen to be thinking of the overbulge of the land all the way to California and all of it all in that same red light, a common idea of mine, just to relax the soul, or make a pretty picture to hang and re-hang in my brain, I see Cody’s face occupying the West Coast like a big cloud and that must be because after him there’s only water and then China out there for me or he represents all that’s left of America for me. Loving China as I do, I have endeavored—
It wasn’t until some time later Cody and I renewed the early meetings, which also included a walk from Spanish Harlem, where he stayed for that week or two, to the campus on Morningside Heights, during which he said he wanted Val and others like me to figure something out to get him into Columbia as a regular undergraduate, freshman, so he could get on the football team and amaze Lou Little (as I’m positive he would have done) and he didn’t even have highschool or even complete grammar school credits if anybody can go digging those kind up; and a few strolls, experiences looking for a new room for him, in which, later, in his absence, Joanna, on the bed, confessional, intimate, repetitive, told me and poured into my ear the sob glob story of Cody, Cody, Cody, till I hated the sound of the name and pictured the muslin curtains and outside redbrick of the hotel with what must have been just the same in Denver and the same tears and story; and a meal, a spaghetti meal, actually on the occasion of Cody’s and Joanna’s first night on the Columbia Campus, at Jack’s on Amsterdam, with everybody around the table, Tom Calabrese, (met him for the first time that night), Mac, Gray, Val, and Allen Minko bless him.