The Town and the City: A Novel

by Jack Kerouac

  But in the succeeding days he found himself consorting with scores of cheerful friendly boys, he had excited talks with his coaches and teachers, the studies began, the little campus grew wonderful as the leaves on the occasional maples began to turn red, and the air sharpened. There were bull-sessions at night in the lamplit rooms and the light streamed out on the walks and the pines, there was music in the village hall on Saturday night and many pretty girls to dance with. Something strided jubilantly across the land. And Peter almost with tears in his eyes late one night realized that other people were also strangers to themselves, and were lonely and troubled like him, and sought each other out cheerfully and with friendship, and perhaps even sometimes felt like he had felt the first night, like confessing everything, confessing all that was so dark and lonely and crazy and fearful in the heart. And he shook his head wincing at the thought of it. He had never felt anything like that before—yet somehow he knew that from now on he would always feel like that, always, and something caught at his throat as he realized what a strange sad adventure life might get to be, strange and sad and still much more beautiful than he could ever have imagined, so much more beautiful and amazing because it was so really, strangely sad.

  That year at Pine Hall Peter had a “great year.” Everything he did was excellent and wonderful. He was a devastating fullback on the team both on offense and defense and as a triple-threat. He led the track team in scoring, and played on the baseball team in the Spring. He was on the honor roll in his studies and liked by his instructors. He was one of the most popular boys in the school and had scores of friends, and he shone with the young ladies of the village both in the dance and out in the lovers’ lane. He ran a typewriting agency for extra spending money, and also composed English term papers for the others at a fee. He contributed stories and articles to the various school publications and rather fancied himself a Hemingway that Winter after creating a minor sensation on the campus with a story entitled “The Counterman, the Drunkard, and the Collegian.” He learned to go around in dirty black-and-white saddle shoes, and sloppy lounge jackets, he played tennis with the girls from town and was to be seen going in Marty’s for a coke after a fast set in the hot sun all dazzling in white ducks and sneakers. He became conversant with the profounder “procrastinations” of “Prince Hamlet the Melancholy Dane.” And when he wrote home he sometimes pulled out a beauty like “inordinate” to mean “too much,” or “raffiné” to mean “refined”—all for the edification and amaze of his family.

  He was seventeen years old, of medium height now, and weighed a hundred and eighty-five pounds. He was a real bozo, yet very sharp—if he wanted to show you how well his coat hung and draped he stood with one foot turned aside as in the Esquire ads. He knew all about jazz: his chum Dick had a “terrific” collection of Eddie Condons and Kid Orys and Muggsy Spaniers; and another chum, Jay, had a “great” collection of Roy Eldridges, Choo Berrys and Coleman Hawkins. Someone else had Gershwin, and Debussy, and Stravinski. Everybody had music. In every room there was a little radio blaring on the dresser, and the occupant was always combing his hair and getting ready to go out on a date. Peter himself had a tom-tom drum which he pounded with the “Sing Sing Sing” beat—“just like Krupa” too.

  They were madcaps too, and the maddest of them all, the “crazy” Mac, had a job in town walking a ninety-year-old man up and down Main Street in the evenings, for which he was paid a wage of fifteen cents a night—and he never, never cracked a smile. Then there was Tony the halfback from Somerville, Mass., who got drunk one night on a half a barrel of beer and tore up a small tree by the roots out on the green and took it to bed with him.

  On the bottom of Peter’s scorecard the Dean wrote: “A good scholar and a fine citizen,” and Peter sent that on home, along with a copy of the school paper with his own stories ringed in pencil. He also sent home photographs of himself to his Galloway girl friends, and he even had one of them up for the Spring prom, and sent her back home properly impressed. His relationship with this poor girl was completely blank.

  There was the whole round of liniment-smelling lockers, the musty classrooms, the boiling odors of the dining-hall, the chilly assembly hall, the library smell of bound volumes and varnish, the crisp evergreen and ivy smells of the campus—all the odors and sensations of a prep school for boys, and with it all, the incessant chatter and activity and eager excitement of the busy regimens, and the constant glee and snickering that goes on at all times. It was funny and wonderful to sit around and talk about how really “crazy” a certain instructor was in his private life, how he had once registered in a hotel as “Apollo Goldfarb” and another time as “Arapahoe Rappaport” and how he really was a “very funny guy.” It was amazing to discover how so many things were really funny. It was fun to shout and joke in the dining hall, and to choke with laughter in French class when Mac deliberately mispronounced “Monsieur le Coq”—and never, never cracking a smile, the triumphant wit and hero of three hundred gleeful souls.

  It was funny to see Rocco the big Italian guard from Bridgeport, Conn., conversing seriously with little Rodney Mason the president of the Philolexian Club (probably about exams)—and in the school paper they would write it this way: “Buddies Moose Rocco and Rod Mason seen talking over old times on quad—” which would convulse the entire school. “Flash Mason and The Moose.” It was the funniest thing anyone had ever heard, it was dark and daemonic with furious glee, and in the old dorms at night in the creaking halls there was wicked, ravenous, brooding joy.

  During Easter vacation Peter received a letter from one of the great school madcaps and wits, which ran convulsively as follows:

  Dear Hashoodfludnistnizaaflem,

  I thought I would write you a letturd as I just found your undress among my things. Short of that I was going to ask Rod the Flash for it. I hear the Moose is seriously thinking of grabbing off the ingenue part in the Pine Hall production of “Ah Wilderness!” That sounds good but I’d rather see him in Oscar Wilde’s “Lady Windemere’s Fan.” As I write you the stomping, rollicking, scintillating, solid, hot, strains of Guy Iturbi Ignacz Lombardo are filling the air. To say his occarino and glackenspiel sections have improved is an understatement. Look out Blue Barron and Leo Reisman! Give my regards to Kensington Kaplan. I hope this reaches yours, Rodney Martin.

  (signed) Cunny Keane Tracer of Lost Loads.

  There was all this gleeful demonism, and a thousand absorbing and wonderful things to be done, and parties and dances every week, and the fascinating vistas of new study, new languages, new knowledge—vistas that were just like the blue pine hills and the gray dimness to the north that they saw outside the classroom windows.

  And Peter went on long solitary walks through the woods with his copy of Thoreau in his back pocket, he tramped contemplatively across birch fields and groves of pine, paused at the frosty brooks and saw the sloping red light of Sunday dusk move across the blue snow, and came tramping back to the roast beef and the noisy dining-hall raging with hunger and joy.

  Even though he was homesick at times, it was a “great year”—and he only realized it insofar as it promised other “great years” of joy and success in college, he only enjoyed it insofar as it pointed to the future. He was bulging with youthful confidence and vigor and health, his cheeks were smooth and pleased, his eyes sparkled, and the whole world was singing.

  In the Spring when graduation time came round, the raw Maine Winter gave way to a sweet and lovely May, incredibly tender, fresh and green, full of morning musics and cool gold-flecked shade in the campus yards. Peter opened his window on the morning of graduation and looked out, and felt like singing. Everything he had done that year seemed excellent and wonderful, and all was warm sunshine, peace, birdsong, and loafing young joy. The bells rang in golden light, the boys walked the greens in dazzling white attire among the proud visiting families and girl friends, there were rippling soft sounds of voices in the May morning air, laughter—and something gleeful and
wicked that promised the night again, the dark wonderful night that had been their partner in crazy snickering joy all the year long, and that also promised a whole golden and richly dark summertime of home again, home again.

  When Peter got home he found himself swamped with scholarship offers from several of the bigger universities in the East and from two in the deep South. He was definitely “hot,” he was the “flashy Massachusetts back” they spoke of in athletic offices and coaches’ locker rooms, he was scouted and discovered and tabbed and grimly sought after. He was going to become famous, he was going to be the dark swift figure with twinkling feet that is seen in the Pathé Newsreels galloping across chalk-stripes in the terrific, mob-swarmed, Autumn-dark stadiums of America as jubilance strides across the land.

  At home that Summer he put on his old blue denims, went swimming in the brook in the pine woods with his chums, loafed around reading Jack London and Walt Whitman, went fishing, played baseball and drank beer with the boys.

  And it was that Summer that he met Alexander Panos, who was to become a great friend of his youth, a comrade, a confidante in the first glories of poetry and truth. Panos was the first boy Peter knew who was interested in books and things for the sake of themselves, who spoke of “ideals,” “beauty,” and “truth.” One of the first things young Alex did was to read him Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn” while Peter was swimming in Pine Brook, and their friendship opened up into a springtime of wonder and knowledge.

  This boy was a Greek who lived across the river in an old ramshackle house with a huge family of wild emotional high-strung sisters, brothers, parents, aunts—and one old grandmother who still longed darkly for the Isle of Crete again. It was a noisy turbulent household ringing with the sounds of loud argument and emotional voices all day long and night, there were tears, tantrums, furies of recrimination, sulks, tender reconciliations, laughter, music (Greek records on the victrola, and the radio, and the piano, and a mandolin)—there were great celebrations on all holidays, and an awful tearful grief whenever some relative died in Galloway, where most of the Greek families were related to one another so that there was always a funeral someplace. The mother was half Russian, and the whole family was tumultuously religious in the Greek Orthodox faith. The children and the grownups all looked alike, with curly black hair, broad expressive Slavic mouths, flashing dark eyes, and olive-skinned complexions. Alex himself represented in his appearance the very sun and zenith of their fiery romantic look. The Panos house was visible from Peter’s house across the river; he had seen it many times in the past, a rickety mournful-looking thing, but he could not have known that one of the great friends of his life lived there.

  The strange thing was that young Alex had known Peter when they were little boys, although Peter couldn’t remember, until Alex told him the story:

  “Oh, I remember you well, I’ll never forget it!” he cried excitedly. “It was during the time of that Greek-Irish fight in the sandbank, remember?”

  “The Greek-Irish fight! Sure I remember! That was a war that lasted almost three years—slingshots, fist-fights, rocks! Sure I remember.”

  “Well,” resumed Alexander Panos with a sad smile, “that was when I met you, and your brother, your big brother I guess it was.”

  “That would be Joe.”

  “Joe—yes, his name would be something like that. Joe! You see, one day I was coming home from school, when a bunch of Irish kids surrounded me on the sandbank and began pushing me around and hitting me and everything. And your brother Joe was going by with you, you had fishing poles, I guess you’d been fishing—”

  “Oh, now I remember you! You were that little curly-headed Greek kid they were shoving around that day—yeah!”

  “Precisely, Peter. You forgot, probably your brother Joe doesn’t remember either—but I remember, oh, how I remember!”

  “And Joe broke up the fight!” Peter recalled triumphantly.

  “Yes, he broke it up. Do you remember I was crying?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And your brother Joe just stood there and looked at the kids running away and he was swearing at them, and you—you walked up to me and asked me if I was all right.”

  “Did I? I don’t remember that.”

  “Do we ever remember our true selves?… I remember, I remember,” said young Alex with a sad smile. “Oh, God! after that I couldn’t forget you and your brother. But it’s strange that I never saw you again after that—until this Summer. We had moved away. God, that was years, years ago.”

  “It sure was!” laughed Peter. “We must have been eleven years old, and Joe was about fourteen then.”

  “I was the curly-headed little Greek kid on the sandbank,” said Panos, smiling mournfully. “I didn’t have a chance to tell you the other day, and I wasn’t sure until I’d seen you again that you were the same kid. But you are. Your eyes are still the same—that was what I remembered: your eyes, when you walked up and asked me if I was all right. Forgive me for saying such silly things,” he grinned sheepishly, “but that’s how I remembered you. It was I—the curly-headed little boy on the sandbank.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned! Wait till I tell Joe!”

  “And where is Joe now?”

  “He’s been gone more than a year, he’s working all over the country. We got a letter from him from South Dakota last month.”

  “You know,” said young Alex sorrowfully, “that’s exactly how I imagined your brother—the one who chased the kids away—that’s how I imagined he would be when he grew up: roaming around the country. I used to think about both of you in strange reveries.…”

  “Oh, he’s a great guy!” cried Peter, grinning.

  “I knew that then,” said Alex sadly. “I knew he was great even then, and I know now he will be a great man. And you too.”

  “All because we chased the kids away!” laughed Peter.

  “It was the way you did it,” Panos said gravely. “Your brother cursing because he was angry at injustice, and you, by the way you looked at me. I shall never forget the sympathetic eyes of that little boy.”

  “And to think—” said Peter, embarrassed, “to think that I couldn’t even remember that time. It was so long ago!”

  “So long ago,” echoed Alexander sorrowfully.

  This was young Panos. He remembered the incident of the sandbank with all his heart and with all the soulful intensity of his nature, more than Peter and Joe could ever dream. In his room in the ramshackle Panos house he wrote poetry on reams of paper and actually splashed them with his tears, and barged around the littered room brooding, and wept again when he heard a violin concerto or songs like “April in Paris” or “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” or a melancholy, anguished Greek song on the victrola, he went into ecstasies reading Byron and Rupert Brooke and William Saroyan, sometimes he opened his window and howled down his hosannahs of joy on startled passers-by.

  Whenever he went downtown to Daley Square, he walked about in his erect mien, sometimes with tears in his eyes because “nobody understood.” People stared at him in smiling amazement, because he was the strangest and most foreign sight to behold in all the town—excepting one Mohammedan woman who lived in the Greek coffee-shop district on Commerce Street and was seen wailing on the streets to Allah each sunset, a woman with whom young Alexander was on the most amiable terms.

  He was eighteen years old—and in high school he had actually risen to a high rank in the school brigade, sporting polished boots, riding crop, visored cap and all, he had been a very dashing Cossack of a youthful officer, and an exceptional scholar as well. He had fallen in love with a girl in school and haunted the poor girl’s house in striding midnight anguishes; he had contemplated the waters of a Galloway canal at three o’clock in the morning because her family didn’t want her to go out with a Greek; finally he had confronted her on the street and professed his love in a broken, voluptuous voice, as people stared, and as the poor girl stood fidgeting and grinning.

&nb
sp; His clothes were always shabby, unkempt, darkish and antiquated—yet always worn with great dignity, as though he were proud and noble in his poverty—his “poverty” being a romantic fancy with no real basis in fact. He haunted the Galloway library, went to all the movies and applauded excitedly by himself whenever something amused him or impressed him, he wrote irate letters to the editor of the Galloway Star protesting various injustices that had come to his ravenous attention. He prowled the riverbank on rainy nights and terrified himself with thoughts of suicide and death, at Greek weddings he went around kissing all the bridesmaids and being boisterously gay, and at Greek funerals he sobbed with grief at the side of his wailing aunts. He was an amazing gleeful figure different from anyone else in the businesslike town, and he flaunted his strangeness and impulsiveness with a nervous joy, sometimes going to great extremes to astound people on the streets, like wearing a garland in his hair or going about with fifteen or seventeen books under his arms and staggering from their weight. He was not of this world.

  And Peter was amazed and delighted with him because he was such a “Marius” of a poet—Peter had read Les Misérables and Marius was his hero, Marius was the soulful and sensitive dreamer American boys are always discovering in European literature—and so that Summer, in the raucous beery atmospheres of Rooney Street saloons and at the moonlit lake dances with the gang, in cool soda fountains and the hamburg-sizzling lunchcarts, at the drowsy pine brook and on bustling Daley Square at noon, in cafeterias and movies and in the sleepy old depot on rainy nights, in all these plain homely places of the Galloway and American world, it was marvelous and gleeful to be with a Marius, a real romantic fiery poet sprung out of the pages of some fantastic story, it was better than a show and crazy with fun.

  Peter and his old chums Danny and Scotcho and Berlot spoke of Alexander: