Visions of Cody

by Jack Kerouac

  Cody came to my door—but this is dull, but yet it isn’t—Ah, that this loud and frosome crabble—Val Hayes said, kicking the door by the clean trick of stepping on it and at the same time turning the knob at a rush down the hall striding into the door, “if you want to lay Joanna ask Cody.” I had no—But later, when I thought I’d never see Cody again and was busy in the sorrowful eternity, he himself came to my door knocking.

  “I want to learn how to write,” he said. If was after supper one evening. I formed all kinds of impressions of Cody that have since been discredited as he maniacally but sometimes not so maniacally continues his life—but this all wasting time.

  Yes, there is the—grave—

  While he was in New York in the winter of ’46 and ’47 Cody made friends with Irwin Garden; twice or so a week he did come to my house, and one dawn in my bedroom as I lay on my bed and he on my dead father’s bed (this before we moved it and drank strawberry soda) he read me an entire condensed version of the life of Jack London from the Reader’s Digest, just I think for me to become accustomed to his voice and style of reading, his particular Western intonations as though he was wearing an old black hat in the rain of the badlands on a grim—but also really a ceremonial fondness for words like a bigfist—but we never became really close, the only thing we did was agree one m-e-l-t-i-n-g warm afternoon on the snowy boulevard as he strolled with me to catch a further bus stop towards New York and I was on my way to a little sort of little kid’s library at the corner of Jerome Ave. and Crossbay, where (of course adult books too) old silver rimmed ladies answered all your questions about (if you’re question-asking type) where to find the Cimarron River—agreed to go out West together that spring, to Denver, his hometown, and wreak havoc with the wild drunk nights of lawns and big trees under wild snowcapped mountains in the jackpine moonlight that I imagined then…no Larimer trolley tracks. But nothing came of—he went off to Denver prematurely, with a stolen typewriter, or a typewriter he just bought, or something desperate and crazy. (I saw him off at the Greyhound Bus, 34th Street, ate beans with him; when he went for extra bread in his new pencil-stripe suit, and patted his belly as if it was ample, and puffed his cigar like my father used to do, I said to myself—And Irwin, who was there, that wretch, that, why that, he said, I said, “Say Cody’s kind of a thin guy ain’t he,” and Irwin leered, said, “He’s got a good hard flat belly; I know a good belly when I see one; don’t go talking him into getting fat or nothing; I’m an expert on bellies now you know.” We took pictures in the twenty-five cent booth of a—my picture came out very strange. Cody looked coy, profile, long sideburns, like the side views in the post office, plup; and Irwin looked, with his glasses off, he being the hornrimmed wild hip kid type you see everywhere like for instance that year he was in the Strand Theater when Lionel Hampton blew mad from the stage and jumped down in the aisle and they say some kind of CCNY hipster madstudent ran up and danced wild and sexcrazy in front of him to the beat so that Irwin says “the whole theater vibrated as one great orgone that suddenly took on a wild octopus like existence but only like a Negrer preacher flapping his hands to heaven and calling for the Rock and the Rise to come down and with big shrieking harpies in the air like evil suggestions under the water Eternity” or something like that saying it with serious nod of the head, this being the great kind of buddy Cody and I had by gad…but so, we saw Cody off, after the pictures) (mine of course was cut in half, both kept a half in their wallets, and I looked “just like an, a dago who kill anybody says anything wrong about his mother,” this statement about the snapshot was put forward, by somebody, I think Julien later—) in the bus station Irwin kept saying, as the clock came to five minutes of Cody’s bus, Hurry up please it’s time, from T. S. Eliot, and Cody nodded; on a bus that said CHICAGO on it so that my eyes popped, I’d never been west of Jersey, I suddenly saw that Cody, this guy, so anxious, busy, was going home, going home, he roared off into the night. Joanna by that time was herself already back in Denver, working someplace, she’d had her wild arguments with Cody in New York—coming in across, so that the horses of dawn that they had seen together in the Greyhound Bus coming in across the plains towards New York only a few living months before the horses had passed the meadows of loss, the horses of dawn, the grays racing for the ghost, the blacks followed by the grays, some vernal sight from the buswindow, when probably poor little Joanna leaned her head on Cody’s arm and really seriously dreamed her first, and Cody himself probably with one drowsy dormant eye uplidded to coming day outside the rushing windows, his legs stretched in the dark plush of the snoring bus, probably he too, drowsily in the winter dawn, like a farmer may open his eye at 4 A.M. when the first redness comes in across Dakota snows and hugs his wife a little and closes his eyes on that mortal vision of heaven and earth which is the sky in the morning, Cody too probably saw those horses of dawn—scented the first fresh fields of the East, of his dream—But now he was on a Denver-bound backgoing bus, off into the night, disappointed, back you go, zoom, CHICAGO, and we watched him go.

  I myself didn’t travel till two or three months later, and when I did, Irwin himself was already traveled to Denver, but via Texas, to see Bull and June and Huck in their shack or beat farmhouse in the Texas Bayou down near Trinity or Bleeding Heart or whatever; a rickety hipster kid who would someday be so thin, nonchalant, cool, complex in the same envelope of skin that then made him look like a Ticket’s ape, a monkey-doodle dandy, a Raskolnik, an undergrounder, a subterranean hipster star, a basketball riveter, (he was a poet); I myself took off, in the dew, in the dew of things, towards that evening-star of the West that eventually I did get to see after many days’ travail and wild ride on the road in the form of a drooping old moist heap in the eve, in a bed of day-blue, shedding with sparkler-dims and showers her soft infinescences or infinessences, or infiniscences, on the baldy grain, of Iowa, Keota, the Buckle of the Golden Belt, to make you wise like an Aryan King in the blue desert; and such, just thats; and I got to see Cody in Denver again. Had very little to do with him. He, shortly after I continued on my way to the West Coast to get a ship and meet Deni Bleu, and get a ship I mean, went to Texas hitch-hiking, with Irwin, to Hubbard’s, after Davies, his old mentor, had—that is, but wait, I wanted to refer back to this Davies, his grown mentor in Denver, whatever you can call him, his whatnot, his, but it appears I’m tired of telling over and over again about Cody’s history in Denver when everybody including me knows it, unless you impute something strange of it, or make remarks, I don’t know, I’m sometimes, Rendrovar, completely at a fucking loss.

  (In others words, I didn’t know Cody too well except as a Western guy I had known—I mean—On a soft summer night, only thing we did in Denver, a night like in a dream because I couldn’t see anything beyond the windows, we rode a trolley from downtown to Denver U. campus talking about hotrods and midget auto races, and occasionally passing great Western white Washomats of cars gurgling and gleaming and spewing whiteness in the inky night—along by a few brown street-lamps.)—to Texas they went to see Hubbard, a Texas yon eté pour voire Hubbard, et lay’on passez une couple de—so I didn’t—but again, wait—I’m hungry—to go and see his new girl Evelyn perform an ingenue role in Ibsen’s A Pillar of Society. A striking blond, commented upon by old ladies in the audience—I sat far back, in the reverberating hall I behaved like a French poet anarchist—Cody was wrapped in Evelyn—this was my last sight of him till another year and one half—a lot of things happened, but, he divorced Joanna in Denver, or Frisco, drove her from Frisco back to Denver over terrible blizzards in the Donner and Berthoud passes for divorces, married Evelyn in Frisco, this after hitchhiking to Texas with Irwin kneeling on the road (like Rimbaud and his Verlaine, every rose’s got a summer, Julien and his Dave, I had my Sebastian; Julien’s Verlaine was murdered, my Verlaine was killed in a battle of war, Cody’s Verlaine though is Irwin—or was—). When I returned from California in October 1947, and after nothing but strange nights stealing groce
ries in cafeterias in canyons with Deni Bleu, an entirely different and other story, and after having picked cotton in the San Joaquin Valley with a beautiful Mexican girl, same, Cody had just left my house after crisscrossing me from Texas and then crisscrossing me on the map of the country, in Indiana I guess bound for his big Jerichos of the Golden Gate in the Final Land of America, California—so I didn’t see him till 1948. At which time I was in North Carolina visiting relatives and boom, one day in December a muddy Hudson pulled up on the sand road out front and out popped a tragic rough-hewn Cody in a T-shirt in the sharp Christmas cold and knocked on the door, and this after I’d only vaguely mentioned, in a letter, where I’d be around Christmas. What he did, one year married and a new father, working on the railroad, pockets full of money, or no, not that, pockets empty but money in the bank, he saw a new 1949 Hudson in a show window on Larkin and bam, bought it. On time and down payments. Slim Buckle was with him, his long tail buddy from poolhall Denver days; they decided to blow across the country, take off like the modern Indians do in jalopies from El Paso say to as far as Montana on a whim: but for money Cody persuaded Slim to marry Helen, who became Helen Buckle, money for the trip, abandoning her in Tucson when she either didn’t fork over or spent too much on motels enough to make a man sick; in L.A.—they pointed the Hudson south for that snowless southern road to New York—they picked up travel bureau passengers at a fee and then conned them, the sailor especially, for meals. Neck taut, exploded, Cody was pushing the car through Las Cruces, New Mexico, when the vision of his voyage flashed and exploded: Joanna!—he shot the car offcourse and north to Denver; picked up Joanna there after horrible tearful scenes and tears and cocksucking in hotel rooms; and off, the three of them, eastward flying into the snow, through Kansas, where he went off the road, and Missouri, where his kinfolk came from and were still in all that snow measuring their thoughts and snapping their suspenders in the gray void of a drizzly day, over the river and into Tennessee and over the Great Smokies, the rods blasting to hurl them off the icy rims; and to Rocky Mount where I innocently was spending a meditative Christmas in the bosom of my family. It was then we drove those two trips to New York—to help the family move things; and when New Year’s came, parties—friends—but these were my first close views of Cody (and of course I went back to the Coast with the whole gang, we drove naked through a good part of the state of Texas, Cody, Joanna and I after leaving Buckle in New Orleans with Bull Hubbard and June, in that old swamp mansion in Algiers where Helen had come to lie or that is reign in wait for Slim on Cody’s return southern swing to Frisco)—(and I thought Cody was, and still do, one of the most remarkable men I’ve ever seen). He has excitements that are so wild and all-inclusive—but wait a second there Joe—

  There was something frantic in the air anyway Christmas 1948—I had “The Hunt” Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray cutting each other with tenors, I had four of the sides blowing them good and loud in the little white house in the country when Cody drew up with Joanna and Slim like dead people when you looked in over the windows, victims of Cody’s frantic tragic destiny, he was always bursting to blow. Cody was rocky and strange; “Hey man,” we greeted; nervous, rubbing his belly, he immediately played my record, but louder than I had ever dared because of my sister’s misunderstanding of bop, a stranger for all intents and purposes from California with corpses in a car outside, just a T-shirt, bowing and blowing in front of the phonograph, like good oldfashioned oldtime jitterbugs that really used to lose themselves unashamed in jazz halls; and Cody wanted his jazz powerful, simple, like the early swing of Coleman Hawkins and Chu Berry; my mother, sister, others, great troops of somber relatives of the South with the great faces of Civil War generals and frontier(matriarchs)—Oh goddamn—(making the mistake of following a bum story line already written)—watching him, really, in amazement, and later the other two when they woke up all pimply and gray and acted cool.

  In the car I saw that Cody was completely in charge of the souls of Slim and Joanna and had been so for thousands of miles; “Now darlings we all sit in the front seat, Joanna honeycunt at my knee, buddy Jack next, big warm Slim at the door whereby he gets to use, damn, that fine, ugh, Indian, wow, Navajo, blanket, zoom,” shooting the car at the road as, after a few hours sufficient to let a little dark fall and Christmas lights come on and a meal, we whaled north the four of us, an absolutely perfect driver, wham, zam, maniacally excited every moment and sometimes screaming like Ed Wynn laughing, we were in Washington and on to Baltimore, Philly, where we washed the dishes—but never, mind, I mean, New York, long ago excitements on the snowy road and for reasons long forgotten. That’s why I rush over these historical matters—Cody has marched on since then though still like a fiend I see him rushing, gliding, like Groucho Marx in heaven—Sufficient to say, in California, after Joanna had—he abandoned me with her penniless, that is just drove away from corner O’Farrell and Grant saying he’d be back and not five minutes after the car finally stopped in Frisco from hell and gone east, our gear on the sidewalk, her high-heel shoe sticking out from my sweater, his explosion was over—but not really, a few nights later—in fact when I left he was planning a breaking-and-entering with Joanna—but not really—she’d had a sugar daddy, he had a pad, they stood on the sidewalk—talking about it, high—there were memorable jazz nights—Slim Gaillard who is so hungup on just goofing and blows a gone load, Cody said “He knows time”—Then I returned across the country, alone, back to GI school to New York, by bus, via Butte, snows, the Bitterroot night, howling blizzards in North Dakota, Minneapolis, Chi, stealing apples in Pennsylvania grocery stores, rearriving New York just in time to see Ed Gray, Dave Sherman and Biff Buferd off on the Queen Mary to Paris, and France, the lucky bastards—but events do drag—but time passed—I won’t even mention time again—and finally in the spring of 1949 I myself came out, alone, to Frisco to see Cody and he returned to New York with me at one point in Nebraska at a hundred and ten miles an hour. But all that—Gad—there had been guns with Joanna, pointings at the temple—“all that winter had a gun to my head, yessir!”—(through her mail slot he could see her screwing sailors)—further arguments, arrangements, rearrangements, babies born, Cody being, say, called by the railroad in the middle of the night and going off in the fog in his Levis with brakeman lantern, keys, jacket, bareheaded and earnest and wild in the halo lamps of railly night, (till later in the seriousness of his maturity he came to wear blue conductor’s uniforms as passenger brake-man and looked splendid). From New York to California Cody and we in the car were stopped twice, 1948 trip (the song “Slowboat to China” was popular, it was really the name of our Hudson), 1949 again, three times, by the police who suspected our looks, once on a lawn in Detroit, in my former wife’s neighborhood; once in the street, frisked; on the road in Iowa again—but later, all that. Our fates are very mixed and intermuddled, wild!

  * * *

  I CAN GOOF if I want to, that’s the name of this chapter; but far from talking, but, to con—The thing I couldn’t get over then was the magnificence of the actual car trip, in a matter of hours, from one ocean to another across a country so interesting apart from horrors that exist in it from one point to another, from Tennessee to Dakota, from Massachusetts to Maine, from the shores of Kitchigoomi to Abacadabra, Florida, or what might not be horrors so much as just life and way it is in a necessary culture and roaring along just like the weather or the sound, the mighty seasound of all the blowers in all the factories and apartment houses of New York, why, and say, that isn’t what you might start out saying if you were a successful owner, a repair shop proprietor, radio repair, and however—but lived in Jackson Heights, but that’s another story (on Mission Street, well on Howard Street, that wildbar, that’s where I got drunk last night).

  The trip proceeded, like the unrolling of a mighty thread of accomplished-moments, accomplished-ments, I want to go now, you better go now, wow, that girl, how I’d love to have her sitting on my lap, saying “I want to go no
w,” softly, meaning I want to fuck, let’s start, she’s learned all the tenderness of the new generation, the hip generation, the modern generation, the generation that ten thousand years from now will lie in ruins beneath the decays of worn fossil, like oil under the cabbage leaves of old Carboniferous, if not Carbonomnivorous or better Carbonitis, the Dinosaurs rolled their own roaches in an ugh, ploppy sea, with Mormon fishtails rising slick and viney from the wet pluck and muck of mires, dismal, dawn, dumbdawn of reptiles. The final capture of Moby Dick around February 1952, by the crew of a Scandinavian whaler equipped with a harpoon cannon (dig, they call it a gun) and the subsequent cutting up of its hunks and hanks even at sea off Japan, is much more tragic than this midnight oil burnt by the doom of mesosaurs, mausosaurs, daguerrosaurs, roarsaurs, horrisaurs, rawsaurs, sosaurs, sososaurs and saurs musical—Moby Dick is Dead, and Had to Die—it outlived Ahab more than a hundred years, and predated Melville a century, whole centuries maybe more; longevity was its only secret. It should have been Thoreau, or Thoreau too, saw that whale at sea, that hump like a snow hill, that White Vision, the Albino, the Albatross, the Tibetan chalice rag, the Leprosy: Thoreau would have said “Humph” and predicted the harpoon cannon and turned away. “Enlightened by the vollied glare” was not Melville’s personal experience, but A. P. Hill’s and Danny Sitfence’s from the red clay lands of South Carolina, and in a way Whitman, and President Abraham Lincoln with his stovepipe hat at the breastworks of Bull Run (Melville milled in draft riot crowds, Bartleby-ish and pale, on 23rd Street, the hotel they posted notices on’s still there, they rolled beer in barrels off waterfront gangways, the dung breaker got a fistful of suds in his eye, the stout ran in the gutters, they cut fish heads in the warm sun and threw them to the cats, they lolled by the Seurat sundecks of excursion boats, and counted sails, and clouds; and Whitman bareheaded and holy and all White like the Melville dream (from darkness) among them strange, demure, queer, maybe a slouched hat, maybe a book, a Bible, Leaves of Grass, Montesquieu, Abner Doubleday, the Koran, astronomy, physics, woodlore, the paper, a pigeon in his hair, a turd on his brow, a strange dream, a queer gleam, a something insinuating, intense, almost a very well maniacal in the darkness by the rail there, leaning, by gulls bisected, bedecked in moons, tranquil, fragile, China-like, fleecy, stormy, browy, snowy, graced, steep, bony, sweating, like Cody, saying “Yes!,” wondering if, looking under the pale, prodding, poking, doting, pruning, Old Spontaneous Me, spitting prune juice, squeezing oil out of olives, a haunter of basketshops by the rigging, my Man Friday, old Herbivorous Whitman the Saint of Long Island, the Ghoul of Shores, the Former of Granite Rhymes, the Maker of Sweet Music, the Master of Hammer, Han, the Kind King Ming, the Doodling Wing, Eagle, Claw, Beak, Power, Mountain Top, Star, Lay, Rainer of Rivers, Mooder of Mowders, Sea Splash, Spray, Air, Wild Goose, Pine, Soarer, Thinker, Pacer, History Maker, Haunter of Cemeteries, in the streets at night solitary beneath a lamp, or the moon, on the corner, digging, a cat).