Visions of Cody

by Jack Kerouac

  — while Melville made murky matter of the Battery, the Day Break Boys (busters of the river, raft bandits, hansom hustlers, still axing from the hills)—Handsome Herman, the Abyssinian King of Whorly Prints, the Assyrian busy beard, the Weaver of the Net, the Albatross, the Dung of the Albatross, the Calmer of Waves, Singer of Spars, Sitter of Stars, Maker of Sparks, Thinker of Helms, Rails, Bottles, Tubs, Creaks and Cringes of the Shroudy Gear; Seaman, Rower, Oarsman, Whaler, Whaler, Whaler…observer of rock formations in the Berkshires, dreamer of Pierres…. O old Thoreau, hermit of the Woods, Spirit of the Morning Mist in Reedy Fields, Stalker of Serpentine Moonlights, of Snowy Midnights, of Forests in Winter, of Copses in May Morn, of October Rusted Grapes, of the Bushel Basket of Apples, of the Green Ones, the Fallen Green Apples Turning Brown in the Wet Grass in the Morning; the dam, Beaver Brook, the Sudden Mill Dye, the pure Snow Creek in the Upper Land, the Dell of Flowers, the Warm Scent of Flowery Fields in August, Homer and the Woodchips, Koran and the Axe, the Hot Pinch of Grasshoppers, Hay, Hot Rock, the Whiff of the Country World, the Sand Road, the Wall of Stone, the Snow, the Star Shining on the Glaze of the Snow in March, the Barndoor Slamming Across the Snowy Woods and Fields, the Moon on the Pine Cone Glaze, the Cobweb in the Summer, the Waters Lapping, the Night, the Wind at Night and Lips Clinging in the Fields at Night, the Hump of the Meadow at Night, the Milky Hump of Lovers in the Grass, Me and She, Humping in the Grass, Under the Apple Tree, under Clouds Racing Over the Moon, in the Broad World, the Moist Star of Her Cunt, the Universe Melting Down the Sides of the Sky, the Warm Feel of It, the Moist Star Between her Thighs, the Warm Pull in There, the Action on the Grass, the Rubadub of Legs, the Hot Clothes, the Thirsting Mosquitos, the Tears, the Shuddering, the Bites, the Tonguings, and Twistings, the Moaning, the Moving, the Rocking, the Beating, the Coming, the Second Coming, the Third Coming—

  The old void’s still got it in him.

  * * *

  IN 1949 THAT’S WHAT WE DID, his wife threw him out just as I got there and only because it was a climactic moment, and we bowled back to the East Coast in a trip that was so frantic and so crazy that it has a beginning and an end, began in the heat of wildest excitement, great jazz, fast driving, women, accidents, arrests, all night movies, and ended all petered out in the dark of Long Island, where we walked a few blocks around my house just because we were so used to moving, having moved three thousand miles so fast and talking all the time. It began in Frisco—with that look, that came from those sources and from his old jalopy and the life with his father who must have smiled at him like that in the darkest moments of beat luck—we started off the voyage by dedicating two nights of jazz to it.

  At that time Frisco jazz was at its rawest peak, for some reason the age of the wild tenorman was piercing up through the regular-course developments of bop, as if a few years too late and a few years too early, and of course really too early, only now it’s the fad; then, before it was a fad, the wild tenormen blew with an honest frenzy because nobody appreciated or cared (except isolated hipsters running in screaming) (“Go! Go! Go!”)…friends and hepcats and they didn’t care anyway and the “public,” the customers in the bar, liked it as jazz; but it wasn’t jazz they were blowing, it was the frantic “It.”

  “What’s the IT, Cody?” I asked him that night.

  “We’ll all know when he hits it—there it is! he’s got it!—hear?—see everybody rock? It’s the big moment of rapport all around that’s making him rock; that’s jazz; dig him, dig her, dig this place, dig these cats, this is all that’s left, where else can you and go Jack?” It was absolutely true. We stood side by side sweating and jumpin in front of wild be-hatted tenormen blowing from their shoetops at the brown ceiling, shipyard workers; altos too, singers; drummers like Cozy Cole mixed with Max Roach, a kid cornet of sixteen (little Negro grandmother’s favorite), a cool bop hepcat who stood slumped with his horn and no lapels and blew like Wardell; but best of all the workingman tenors, the cats who worked and got their horns out of hock and blew and had their women troubles, they seemed to come on in their horns with a will, saying things, a lot to say, talkative horns, you could almost hear the words and better than that the harmony, made you hear the way to fill up blank spaces of time with the tune and consequence of your hands and breath and soul; and wild women dancing, the ceiling roaring, people falling in from the street, from the door, no cops to bother anybody because it was summer, August 1949, and Frisco was blowing mad, the dew was on the muscat in the interior fields of Joaquin, the money was flowing for Frisco is a seasonal town, the railroads were rolling, there were crates of melons on sidewalks, chipped ice, and the cool interior smells of grape tanks; the Little Harlem, Third and Folsom, it rocked, in back in a funny alley that seems to be connected to the bar but not to the street, ten, twenty teahead men and women blasting and drinking wine spodiodi, whiskey-beer-and-wine; and we had some too, and wham, got drunk, as well as hi; saw a little colored alto in a high stiff collar and a square suit and looked just like a square Alabama nigger standing by the side of the road twirling his keychain in the Wilderness in front of the shack where his father sits, on the porch, leg up on a chair, leg ruined by fieldwork, poverty, decades of malnutrition, old age, ordinary mortal old age, standing there the kid is (with a new gray fedora) on a Sunday afternoon and watching the cars go by, go by, go by, to cities and news of wild things, old Kaycee the alto town, old Frisco the tenor town, old Detroit the baritone town, old New York the jumpingnest town, the Dizzybird Town, old Chicago the open town, old San Pedro the seaman’s town, the pierhead jumpin town, the bottom of the land town, the jumpin off town; he looked just like that, and more innocent, and blew his head off that night; a fellow coming in from work came running into the room where the jazz was yelling “Blowblow-blow!” and we’d heard him yelling that all the way up the stairs (Jackson Hole, after hours) and probably he’d been yelling that all the way from Market Street but that little alto, his eyes fixed on Cody, his feet flopping and dancing in a monkey hop that was exactly like Irwin Garden’s monkey hop that he used to pull in the streets of Denver, Texas, New York as he followed the trail of Cody and gave it up, that little alto blew one chorus after another, each one simple, blew two hundred of them, just a blues number, he’d say “Ta-potato-rup, ta-potato-rup,” then “ta-potato-la-dee-rup,” “ta-potatola-dee-rup,” like that, repeating twice for emphasis each time, with the simplicity of a kid learning to write in grammar school with the eraser in his mouth or a young Lincoln at the shovel, smiling into his own horn, completely cool in the shower of frenzies that poured from his lungs and fingers, saying to Cody “Ta ra ta ta, the Angel Gabriel is really black” just as from the top of St. John the Divine Cathedral in New York blows the Angel Gabriel on his horn over the rooftops of Harlem…Dizzy Gillespie in stone.

  “He’s the kind who sleeps all day in his grandmother’s,” yelled Cody above the fury, “he learned to play in the woodshed, dig him? see his kind? he’s Tom Watson that’s who he is, Tom Watson learned to blow and go continually and cast off the negatives and completely relaxed, though not hung, in, or behind, bumkicks of any kind, realizing, also, as, for instance, there’s what I’m saying, but, no wait, Jack and listen to me, now I’m gonna lay down on you the truth—but listen to him, listen to him. It, remember? It! It! He’s got it, see? That’s what it—means, or I mean to explain, earlier, see, and all that and everything, Yes!” as little alto rose with the band that sat behind him—three pieces, piano, drums, bass—working the hound dog to death, rattle-ty-boom, crash, the drummer was all power and muscles, his huge muscular neck held and rocked, his foot boomed in the bass, old intervals, blump, be whom, blump, boom; the piano rapping his outspread fingers in chordal offbeat drive clank, beautiful colors emanating from the tone of his crashing-guitar chords; blues; and the bass like a machine slapping in through the chugedychug of time with its big African world beat that comes from sitting before fires in the crickety night with nothing to do but beat out the time by
the great wall of vines, a tuck a tee, a tuck a teek a tuck a teek, and make your moan, go moan for man, the disaster of the world, evil souls and innocent mountain stones…and the sudden occasional harsh yells as everybody all the drummers and mooners and cricketers with the tingpin wires (this thing has a proper name in the Belgian Congo, home of the “conga” drum, the heartbeat drum, the heart of the world, Adam and Eve, Eden’s in Abyssinia), all realize they’ve got it, IT, they’re in time and alive together and everything’s alright, don’t worry about nothing, I love you, whooee—

  * * *

  THE GREAT SPINDLY TIN-LIKE CRANE TOWERS of the trans-territorial electric power wires standing in serried gloom with pendant droop of head shapes (the upper insulation Tootsie Rolls strapped securely in space by the pull and tort of the wires—and not really Tootsie Rolls but pagodas of Japan hung in a gray mist of South San Francisco to save from shock the void, the empty California gray white air with its roll of fogclouds marching to the beat of Bethlehem Steel mill hammers). Faroff the misty neons of subsidiary, little used diners for the airport, with fried clams, ice cream, waffles; either that or it’s an empty factory shining in the night an advertisement of itself in the nowhere of industrial formations; a rusty weedy marsh here, not a real marsh, a slag of drain waters from rusty foundry cans and pisspots, but muddy like a swamp, inhabited by frogs and crickets that madly sing at dark fall, croak.

  Trucks growling up the 101 overpass surmount the South City yards where Cody worked, lines of shining headlamps coming up the faroff ditch marshes and headed for the city; the sense of rain and steam everywhere in the fragrant distance of oil, mist, steam of engines and pure Pacific brine with that special California white raw air.

  All hail the Giant Rat beneath the Stockyard platforms!—hail the poor whiteface cows drowsing in their evening stockyard fattening meadow with its call of faroff trains and almost Iowa-like valley green softness, that will be hamburg tomorrow when the wheels of industry have churned them through to reality and death.

  nippets for pisspots

  The Pisspots of Thought

  I

  The dangling rain filmed

  a sperm across the night:

  the Night is not the Future.

  II

  And you always get the best

  prices in the West!

  Tough to beat! You can’t compare it!

  III

  Disposes melodiously

  their boding gory

  doles, makes holes

  Of their radon dungs;

  Means nothing,

  But a Lark was poorfool.

  And what was that place the fellows took Milly (Crawford) the maid riding that rainy afternoon of Lawrence road cemeteries, that I later saw in the night, from car or train, strange darkness, factory, or stockyards, or whatever, in the 1920’s nighttime?

  * * *

  THE GREAT VOYAGE WAS READY to begin. I was standing on the corner of Folsom and Fourth but nearer to the alley with old Ed Laurier the altoman, and we were high; we were waiting for Cody who had just gone in the bar to make a phonecall getting Earl Johnson down to drive us around, just like Cody used to call Earl and other members of the poolhall gang at any hour of day or night in Denver arranging orgies in record time, in the activity of which he just automatically ran into Joanna (golden highschool sodafountain) his number one wife and that’s how it all began, only now Earl Johnson himself was married to a fresh slender little blond, a doll, from Wyoming, Helen Johnson, and living in Frisco, and could only come at great expense to his marital bliss. “Trouble with Helen,” Cody said out the corner of his mouth, rasping like those Texas Okie farm boys but now big old farm bulls with tufty beards and booze on the floor of the car, having just snuck from their chores to go brawl in drinking fields, loose disconnected necks hanging surly heads into the black of a boozy old Oklahoma Buick made crack and matter dust by forlorn interminable storms and drought clouds searing the harvest the souls of juicy men, hunglipped, booze shining on their guêles, their mugs, pugs, mouths, like gleaming starlight in the rainy night, “Which way is it to Houston?” the driver’s asking me, having just forced me to the side of the road in the rainblind to ask this counsel, this direction, and Cody and Joanna asleep in the backseat; just at the last minute I swung the Hudson over as the head-on lights showed they weren’t simply on the wrong side of the road but head-on; “Which way to Houston?”; the tremendous rainy darkness splattering all Texas around, the dim view of just edges of muddy plowed fields, gulches, sand bars, bushes, whistling thin trees hidden in a solidwall right over, the wilderness enow of all tragic present rain, drenching; swung the car, luckily onto sand level, got out, woke Cody, Joanna handled wheel, we pushed our backs to bumper with hair in our eye, and mud in our teeth; took all morning to dry and drove on. Just like that, Cody rasped it, “her nose is too long.”

  Well, not all, Helen Johnson by God has a real cute little nose and face, God bless her fine looking little ass. Having, (back now to phone-call) finished—Cody came running out to rejoin us, his buddy and his jazz connection (all-American white guys, almost all of them, have grown up with some special Negro friend or acquaintance they boast about continually, it’s a point of contented honor). But Cody came, flew out the door, into the night, the soft and crazy California night, hear me, but not running, rather, gliding, on the balls of his feet and with his body bent forward like Groucho so that his T-shirt flies not the ordinary backflap coattails, with the Stooges in suit right in back of him (just imagine that, just think of Moe bent and gliding like that); but Moe and nobody and no Groucho bless his great Jewish heart for which I offer 17,000,000,000 dollars to the lowest bidder, neither could have the great seriousness and anxiety, time-anxiety, of Cody as he flew, like a Dostoevskian fevered rickety midget hero dashing at his psychological skull to blam it on the wall of Russia and his Friends, here comes Cody, the wind is roaring back from his nose as it cuts through the air. “Godalmighty” says Ed Laurier “That’s cat’s crazy; buddy, that cat’s crazy”—and looking away to hmp it in, stomping, rolling his bones with one shuddering yes-indeed of his whole frame the way Jelly Roll used to stomp and roll in poolhalls of Southern Alabama, a halfdollar shining in his hand, the point of contentious laughter, yet, the point of his emphatic steps down on the ground to give a zing, a lift to his whole meaning when he said that and he really said that, and it, anyway—“Yes, your buddy is a crazy motherf—looka him rolling out of that bar and all dem goddamn guys in there turnin to look twice to believe their own eyes what it was swished by just a second ago, Lord have a mercy on me, whoo! he’s all got this, his pore thumb there that he says he broke off his wife’s haid, damn, all bandaged and sticking in the air like a mule’s pecker. Hey Cody!—what you—hey—hyah-hyah!” (slapping Cody’s back, and Cody looks at him with a silly goofy wondering “Yes? Yes? What is it? You were saying? Oh? Yes—the shoe, no—yes—I mean, the—whiches—Yes!” and looking down the street for a cop, hitching his belt absentmindedly, glancing furtively at some point beyond me, ahemming, pulling down his nose, smiling, “Yes! I know, I see, my thumb! stuck up like a balloon, yes! I hear you! ee-ee-ee-ee!” a tremendous idiot giggle in the streets of man). He rushed into the car the moment it arrived. Why, at one point coming out of that bar he looked like a maniac actually just broke away from his keepers who took a gamble to take a drink in a bar while taking him, eager and glad, to a padded cell in the hills beyond the road. What he done, run out to see what street, for Johnson on phone, for directions, looked all which way for sign, whirling in his steps, under the lamp, bandaged thumb upheld like a white goose into the night—till bandage turned Gray in Salt Lake City.

  These were the moments preceding what I guess was the greatest day in Cody’s life. It was some day or other in August, 1949; I’d say the 25th, or the anniversarial 22nd, this was a night or two before. He was mad and feverish enough that night; it was later after the jazz, after the altos and the singers and the sad kid in the beautifu
l filthy suede jacket with street-eyes in the brown world mooning “Close Your Eyes” and kicking into the mike like a great jazz musician which he was then, he was singing nothing but “Close Your Eyes,” he was in that woodshed wild-bar learning, the only place where jazz can be learned, as Cody now knows, till later Freddy Strange that was his name, he blasted in the car with us, he called his diminutive boy to blow us clear across Frisco in a fishtail Cadillac and “nobody even noticed he passed all red lights he was so good,” or something like that; later Freddy Strange sang with Dizzy Gillespie on the apple; after this music, we hooked elsewhere, with Ed; there were dawns, scatterings.