The Town and the City: A Novel

by Jack Kerouac

  It grew darker outside and suddenly it began to snow in thin flurries, and the neon lights began to glow. Peter drained his glass of wine, received another portion, drained that, and suddenly grabbed the girl by the arm and pulled her down on the couch with him. “I’ve got to go to the laboratory and measure the pressure of gases,” he said in her ear. “Where’s your aunt?”

  “Out.”

  “Fine. We’ve got just ten minutes.”

  Ten minutes later he was running across the campus to the laboratory and up the long stairs, his coat flying behind him, his hair all wild, his lips stained with kisses and wine, all fever and excitement.

  Soon he was sitting on a stool at a long table, alone, in front of a little stove upon which he was boiling water, and on his lap he made notes in a notebook, meanwhile gazing out the window down on the narrow streets below, which were whitening with snow. He felt very gloomy. He couldn’t understand the experiment and he was doing it all wrong, and in the little office just off the laboratory he could see the physics professor himself seated at his desk correcting papers and puffing on his pipe—a man, there, who understood things and had a sure and earnest interest in the world, science, and the livelihood of man! Peter was appalled.

  What could he do in a world like this? Again he gazed moodily out the window, and suddenly a great nervous exaltation swept through his whole being, he was whipped with a feeling of great joy. Down there it was getting dark, it was snowing more heavily, and the narrow gray streets, the stone canyons with people walking to and fro in them with twinkling feet, were suddenly mysterious and amazing and beautiful. It struck him as wonderful that people were walking back and forth along the street. Just a moment ago he had been running down there himself all ravenous with things to do and get done. It was the world itself, to which, as he hovered there, he was descending for the first time in his life, amazingly as from some unknown previous dreaming existence in dark Galloway. He was seeing it all for the first time with eyes of wonder. He was amazed because of life, because of sheer human presence on the earth.

  After he had strapped on his shoulder pads in the cold gloomy locker rooms at the practice field, he took out a letter from his mother. In her long, calm, folkwise language, she had written telling him that his father had taken sick and was bedridden at home, and could not work for two weeks. It suddenly occurred to him happily that he could go home to Galloway a few days to see his father. He was only a sophomore, working his way up to the first-string backfield, perhaps in time for the Army game in three weeks.

  Then, in the raw attritive dusk of late October, when the skies were like torn and forlorn rags above the floodlights of the scrimmage field, the Penn squads rammed and smashed at each other on the busted turf. Coaches stood around in windbreakers and baseball caps, shouting with small fife-like voices in the wind. It was a long scrimmage session, longer than usual because of the presence of certain visiting coaches and reporters who had come to see the practice for the big Navy game that Saturday.

  These luminaries of the sports world were standing by on the sidelines huddled miserably in winter coats, rubbing their chapped hands, holding the brims of their hats in sudden gusts of cold, and stamping their feet with a kind of impatient sadness. They were the writers for the great Philadelphia papers, and writers from New York and all over the country, “prognosticators” and “experts” and “beloved columnists” from Chicago, from the Coast, from the Big Ten country, writers from the Associated Press and United Press, sad-seeming, shabby-hatted, grim and weatherbeaten men—with the coaches who looked just like them, including two famous coaches of Dartmouth and Brown. Though there was a lot of excitement in the air because of the big impending game, they were all perhaps thinking of their warm cozy offices, after all, of hot coffee in cartons and the mellow briar pipe and talk of the “gridiron,” certainly of anything but this desolation and this plain which was not all really like the columns they wrote (“Pressbox Jottings, by Pop Sampson”), or like the neat plays on blackboards with chalklines showing just how everything works.

  The players meanwhile—Peter among them—were grimy in their red and blue uniforms that were now as dark as winter clay, all of them perspiring in the cold, some of them with their sleeves rolled up, some without stockings so that their bulging calves were smeared with dirt and blood. They sniffled sadly and spat, and gasped to catch their breath, and sighed.

  “Again!” barked the head coach.

  One-two-three, rackety-bang, slam, whap! The poor fullback for the fortieth time was flattened like an omelet at the line of scrimmage by a phalanx of 220-pound guards and tackles whose names were Bjowrski and Mierczacowicz and “Big Moose” Marino of Scranton.

  “Again!” shouted the coach.

  There happened to be a certain flaw in the fullback’s spin that evening and this had to be ironed out at all costs. “We’re going to get that damn thing right if we have to stay here till midnight!” shouted the coach, pointing up furiously at the floodlights, whereupon all the visiting writers guffawed on the sidelines and the visiting coaches smiled grimly.

  Peter was smack in the middle of these great head-on detonations. He and another boy, an end, were going through the same blocking assignment in each of these repetitions of the play, with the absentminded sorrow of two men trying to ram down a heavy door and failing forever because the door was unbendable. The door in this case happened to be a gigantic tackle named Makofskik who was so unbelievable that several weeks before, just for laughs, he had reached out and raised Peter to the ceiling in the locker rooms. Peter’s job was to “hit him low” while the other boy “hit him high” so as to make some attempt to take the monster out of the play. However, at each sad repetition of the play, though they managed to rebound again after initially hitting him and thereby somewhat holding him back, he always reached out over their heads and caught the lunging fullback with one meaty hand and brought him to a dead stop. Were it not for the fact that this gave ample time for several other ferocious players to smash the poor fellow underneath and out of sight, he would just simply plunk him down on his back, turn around and walk away.

  Once, however, Peter and the boy hit the big Pole so astutely that he fell down and the harried fullback gained five yards. On the next play Makofskik was like a mad bull. Peter was coming in to “hit him low” when the great hamhock hand presented itself to his countenance and he was brushed aside with the distinct consciousness that his neck was snapping somewhere, after which someone ran up his back with the cleats digging in. This, it turned out, was the triumphant fullback who had managed somehow to elude the great hand and gained about a yard—a hardwon yard on Peter’s behind.

  And then, disentangling themselves from sorrowful heaps, the players rose again with doleful eyes, hands on hips, and waited for orders, and sniffled and spat.

  Finally, however, the coach had drawn aside a moment and was talking to the famous men on the sidelines. It seemed to the players that the scrimmage session was over at last. They began talking a little and laughing happily. “Hey, Moose, what happened that time?”

  “Whaddayamean?”

  “How’d my shoe taste?”

  “I’ll shoe you—ya Dago.”

  Someone said something dirty in whispers; they all laughed. (The players were forbidden to swear.) They all kneeled there on the ragged clods of dirt, spitting mud and wiping their mouths of blood, great massive tackles with their hands hanging like beefs, long rangy ends with melancholy eyes looking down, chubby Armenian guards with thighs like posts, and compact halfbacks with gaunt scarred-up faces looking up at the sky absentmindedly. They all swore under their breath, and groaned, and sighed. They were all waiting for the coach to send them into the showers. They thought of this with such sore joy and consolation, of the warm locker rooms, the steamy showers, great good rubdowns with liniment, then a big meal at the training table and some sleep in their comfortable dormitory rooms. They all looked longingly down the field at the warm golden
lights in the raw dark, they waited and prayed.

  But on the sidelines one of the visiting reporters was rubbing the side of his nose quizzically. “Well now, coach, what’s this I hear about all these speedboys you got under wraps for the Navy? Is that just a rumor, a lot of hopeful optimism among alumni or is it the real McCoy?”

  “Yeah, coach, what’s the story the cognoscenti has been airing abroad?”

  “How about a little show, off the record?”

  So in answer the coach only grinned faintly and walked back to the field blowing his whistle.

  The reporters nudged each other gleefully. “Here we go!” “Now we’re going to see some of that backfield speed he’s supposed to have!” “This is what the Middies are going to see on Saturday afternoon!”

  Weary Peter was on one knee thinking soft and tender thoughts of Judie and of the sophomore dance in rosy lights with plaintive moan of saxophones and of his warm room in lamplight, and books, and all such joyous college-boy thoughts that come in the hungry Fall. Suddenly he realized that the scrimmage on the wintry plain was not over in the least, and that they had called the play where he himself had to come around and take the ball on a reverse. He hardly had time to compose himself before he was off with the ball and snickering. “Holy cow! Holy cow!” he kept thinking, and it was all so absurd. They charged at him and he just circled around further back, laughing and thinking about it, and strangely, suddenly infuriated at the sheer foolish indignity of what he had to do in the world. At one point it was almost as if he might suddenly throw the ball up in the air—and walk away, or go into a sudden sheepish foolish dance and make faces at the coach, thumb his nose at everybody, and run lickity-split down to the furthest glooms beyond the floodlights and disappear into the night over the fence, and just keep going down the streets of Philadelphia, football uniform and all, out to the furthest ends of the Autumn night somewhere.

  Instead he heaved and strained with all the tremendous discomfort of his furious calling, he circled back, yelled crazily at everybody that tried to tackle him, zig-zagged his way through, somehow eluded everything (no one particularly wanted to bother catching him), hurdled and hop-skipped and whirled, and in a moment was all alone down by the goalposts pulling up to a stop and suddenly standing there motionless in thought, staring at the warm light in the windows of the locker rooms down at the end of the field, as if meditating something, and holding the football out in the palm of his hand, like one who studies the acorn.

  But the coach was piping him back with the whistle. “Come on back here, you won’t get away with it twice!” The reporters were slapping their knees for joy on the sidelines, and the weary players were sniffling and spitting and waiting with their hands on their hips, and sighing.

  Finally, in the locker room, he remembered his mother’s letter and his desire to see his father.

  He remembered what he felt in the laboratory and in Jake Fitzpatrick’s room, he recalled also the excitement of trains and travel and the going and coming in the world itself. He could leave all this, if only for a few days, and rush off to things again. And a pang of loneliness hit him as he thought of his father sick in bed and the thoughts and anxieties that old man would feel now that he could not keep up with his job in the Galloway printing plant.

  After he had dressed, Peter went to the office and talked to the coach.

  “You’d better go home, then, for a couple of days at least and see how things are,” growled the coach. “Try to be back for Thursday—this is no picnic party here.”

  So Peter rushed back to the college dormitories with mounting excitement and happiness. In a matter of minutes he was packed and ready to go home. He left, cigarette in mouth, hat pushed back, lugging his bag, hurrying along jubilantly, yet scowling, preoccupied with voyages, prowling about in the world he had just discovered with all his secret and disordered moods.

  When he arrived home, he found his father mournful and pale in his sick bed.

  “Well, Petey,” said the old man with a bitter smile—“it’s just another one of those things. We get nothing but bad luck.”

  The doctor had ordered Martin to stay put in bed for at least two weeks. He had pleurisy and trouble with his liver, he was feverish, irritated, gloomy, and harried with worries.

  “I can’t work—I guess your mother told you that. I guess God is punishing me for giving up the shop. But I’ll be back on the job in two weeks, it’s no great tragedy.” And with this the father returned his gaze to the window, vacantly, yet in another moment he was looking eagerly at Peter, almost bashfully too.

  “I notice,” said Martin presently, “you seem dissatisfied. Anything wrong at college, hmm?”

  Peter made a wry face.

  “Something’s on your mind. You know when I went to visit you there last month you were in bed in the middle of the day.”

  “Why not?” said Peter arrogantly. “I stay up all night studying.”

  “Then how can you go to classes?”

  With languid weariness Peter sighed, “Somedays I don’t have any.”

  The father sat up in the bed and fixed Peter with an earnest stare. “I’ll bet my bottom dollar there’s something in that little blockhead of yours but you don’t even know what it is yourself. Well, go ahead, go ahead, I don’t care. I haven’t got time to worry about all of you, sick as I am and out of luck as I am. Do what you like. But you know how I feel about what you do, Petey, you know how I pray for you.”

  Peter was seething with indignation. He felt like stomping out of the room and out of the house. He pictured himself doing this, slamming the door, proud with rage, noble with absurdity.

  His father was talking in a new tone of voice, he could hear it, but he was thinking about something else in a tense reverie; it wasn’t for a full minute before he began listening again to his father’s words.

  “You remember when you used to run that old linotype in the shop—?”

  “The linotype?”

  “Yes. By God,” laughed Martin hoarsely, “and you were good at it too! I was just thinking, if you had a chance you could fill in for me at the shop, for a couple of weeks. Of course, it’s just a crazy thought. If it wasn’t in the middle of the football season you could do it, you see? I mean take a couple of weeks off from school.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “The way you study, I mean!” And with this Martin guffawed with his savage sheepish glee, and then fell to scratching his chin judiciously. “That’s absolutely out, of course, just a notion. Ah!” he suddenly sighed disgustedly—“and yet who knows? If that boss feels like it he can give that job to someone else, just because I miss a couple of weeks. That’s the way they are in this town.” He looked at Peter with his frank blue eyes wide open.

  Peter disagreed. “He won’t do that. Your boss Green? It’s not your fault you’re sick, and you’re a good worker. He won’t want to lose you.”

  “I’m not so young as some of them.”

  “He’d have to be a regular bastard to fire you.”

  “I don’t know the man,” said the father simply, “he may do anything he pleases. But I’d just better get well as quick as I can.”

  They looked at each other mutely. And although nothing further was said, Peter was greatly disturbed.

  Peter wandered out of the house, took a bus downtown and strolled curiously back and forth in front of the printing shop where his father worked. He went in finally and came face to face with the boss.

  “Hello, Mr. Green,” said Peter, grinning foolishly, half expecting the man to know that he was George Martin’s son. But the printer only stared.

  “I’m George Martin’s son, Pete—”

  “Oh, yes. How’s George now? Any better?”

  “Yes. He’ll be in bed another two weeks though.”

  “I know,” said the printer.

  “Well,” began Peter, and then he could think of nothing further to say, and the printer, someone having called him from the other side of t
he plant, hurried off with a gesture telling Peter to wait a minute.

  Everybody was working and self-absorbed in the busy plant, and Peter felt foolish standing around, more so because he did not really know why he had come here.

  “I don’t like that man,” he thought, watching Mr. Green. “I don’t want to work for him,” and in another moment Peter would have left the place, but he changed his mind and waited nervously.

  The printer came right back, and Peter declared: “I see you’ve got someone working in my father’s place.”

  “No,” said the printer with his perpetual harassed frown, “no, I’m trying to get someone down at the union though. I might get a man in the morning.”

  “I used to run the linotype in my father’s shop,” blurted Peter. “He had a shop, you know. I guess you know that.”

  Mr. Green made absolutely no comment, either by word or expression, but kept staring at him.

  “I was pretty good,” Peter went on, affecting now a casual air, and walking over to one of the two linotypes. A man was working at the other one and he too stared at Peter.

  “Well, this man here’s doing twice the work,” said the printer with his worried air. “We’re way behind on our orders. Did you run this kind of machine?”

  “Yes, this kind here.”

  “Well—do you want to fill in for your father?” Green was peering closely at Peter.

  “But you’re getting a man in the morning, aren’t you?” returned Peter, peering back insolently at him. “I don’t know if I’d be as good as a union man,” he added haughtily. “But I’d be pretty good.”

  Still the boss was not sure what Peter meant, and suddenly, smiling, Peter strolled out.

  He went home to supper without telling anyone where he had been, what he had done, or what he had thought of doing. The next night he dropped around again at the printing plant to see if Mr. Green had found a substitute operator, and learned with a strange, grave feeling of relief and reassurance that a new man had been hired for the two weeks. Then he packed up and got ready to go back to Penn and studies and football. He was angry, confused, utterly baffled. Just before he left he kept looking at his father in his sick bed, trying to think of something to say.