The Town and the City: A Novel

by Jack Kerouac

  “I’ll be home after Thanksgiving,” he told his father. “It’s only a few weeks from now, just a couple of weeks—”

  “I know,” said the old man. “Don’t worry about a thing now, just get back to your schoolwork and your duties and football and everything. We’ll be all right here.”

  And he and his father embraced awkwardly, and Peter hurried out of the flat, feeling sheepish and sorrowful. His brother Joe drove him down to the station.

  “Well, that’s that!” Peter found himself thinking on the train.

  As it pulled out, he saw a familiar curly head of hair several seats in front of him. It was Danny on his way to Boston too. He had a quart of whiskey with him in a paper bag.

  “I called you and called you in Galloway!” yelled Peter as they stood in the windy roaring partition between the coaches. “Where were you?”

  “Zagg,” said Danny, with great sincerity, “I been drunk for three weeks. Ask Berlot if that isn’t true!”

  “Why, you maniac?” asked Peter with indescribable delight, tousling Danny’s head from sheer joy.

  “I quit my job in the mills, I finished my course in business school, I’m gonna start working as a typist in Boston next week.”

  “And you get drunk, Mouse? I thought you’d be happy!” Peter was really surprised.

  “So did I, Zagg. I’ve been working so hard and so long to get out of those mills, and that damn town. Now I’m out, now I’m a free man, and I feel miserable, Zagg, I feel miserable. Between the mills and this new job of mine I have three weeks with nothing to do but enjoy life, so I went and got married to a huge beautiful quart of whiskey, Zagg, look at it!” He held it up and looked at it reverently. “Do you understand that remark, Zagg?”

  Suddenly Peter was seized with a tremendous mournfulness of heart as he thought of his father sick at home, of his strange visit to the printing plant, of Joe at the station, of his mother working in a shoeshop, of the lonely woe of his life at college, and now the brooding melancholy Danny. And all these things conspired together, and he and Danny arrived in Boston an hour later roaring drunk.

  Peter had twenty dollars on him, and in the back of his head he planned to take the first train to New York after the bars closed in Boston. But they went to the Imperial Cafe on Scollay Square, a great multiple saloon with two floors and half a dozen sections, a place of stomping and noises and occasional brawls, full of sailors, seamen, and women. They toasted each other ecstatically, vowing they were the greatest friends on earth, and really sincerely believing it, vowing never to part again.

  In the morning, blood-red drunkenness roared in Peter’s head. He woke up in an expensive-looking hotel room. Beside him was a scrawny middle-aged woman snoring horribly. The boy leaped out of bed in blind dismay, paced up and down the room smoting his thighs and swearing and muttering. He stopped every now and then to peer with fascinated disgust at the toothy dame in the bed. He looked at his wallet, which had only eight dollars left in it, and he was sick at heart, completely dumbfounded with himself.

  “My father’s sick, my mother works, gives me a little money. My brother works, my sister works. Everybody believes in me because I’m in college. Danny is my friend. I go out with him and desert him for this thing here I don’t even know. What am I doing? Oh, Christ, what am I doing to everybody!”

  He tiptoed out of the room finally, leaving the woman to her fate, and hurried to a cafeteria where, over a glass of tomato juice that he could not drink, he literally stared into the abyss.

  “I have no honor. I haven’t got the honor of an animal. If I had any honor, I’d never do things like this.” He looked around the cafeteria at other men. They all looked so morning-decent and morning-honorable and morning-purposeful.

  Peter miserably made his way to the train and back to Philadelphia to school. His schooldays were almost over. The way he learned, and what he learned, he knew now could not be learned in any school.

  [7]

  It was Saturday afternoon. The huge crowd filled the stadium and the ocean-roar of their jubilation was carried on radios all over America. The batteries of newsreel cameras clicked mysteriously high atop the pressbox. In the pressboxes men trained fieldglasses on the battered plain below as if they were generals of war. In the closing moments of the final period the piteous songs of the losing side were raised by choirs of faithful alumni, and fifes blew on the field, and muffled drums dolorously beat out the doom of certain hopes and certain destiny.

  Young Peter sat on the bench, a new sophomore halfback, hooded among the others in the shades of historic day, aching and burning in every bone to run out into the middle of the field which was like the middle of the world’s life, and stand there among these great sanctifications which, for his soul, were like the Tribute of the Angels in the great arcades of Judgment Day.

  In the last minutes of the fourth quarter, his turn came. He removed his hood and ran out among the echoing hums and roars of the game’s sad completion. He did not dare raise his eyes to the multitudes.

  There were dazzling final plays in the gloom, mysterious reverses and sudden rips of speedy backs through the Navy line, sprawlings, convergences of tumbled bodies, flash passes, short gains. Suddenly, in the smoky dusk amid roars, there were two penetrations deep into the Navy backfield by some strange ghostly Peter who was almost impossible to see. He seemed so small and so furiously diffuse in his diving and ducking through tormented bodies—all in the shady dimness as drums boomed mournfully.

  Hundreds of miles away in New England his father sat wild-eyed at a small pitiable radio. There, too, it was dusky and dim at the windows, raw October night was rattling at the panes, and the announcer was shouting remotely:

  “Another long gain by Pete Martin of Penn! Straight through the middle and down the side, and out of bounds on the thirty yard line! First down and ten to go! Peter George Martin from Galloway, Massachusetts, he’s a sophomore, five foot nine, a hundred sixty five pounds. How he GOES! Another one of Penn’s great new backs … O’Connell, Singer, Angelone, Martin … auguring badly, wouldn’t you think, Bill, for Notre Dame next month? And, oh, that Penn line, it’s like a battering ram. Navy have their backs to the wall now!… Shift now to the right, single wing, six-three-two defense for the Middies—and there’s the gun! The game is over! Penn wins! The game is over!”

  And sadly the game is over, there are great movements and departures in the gloom, the last music of brass-bands and drums, the lamentation of alma mater song sung by choristers with whiskey bottles and battered hats, the last echoes of the huge darkened stadium that is slowly emptied of all its eager life. The game is over.

  The lights of Philadelphia burn in oncoming night beyond. Everyone is going off to eat, there will be drinking in bars, and parties, and wild hilarities. And the football players, taking showers or combing their hair or being rubbed down by some consoling trainer, are thinking of the soft sweet girl awaiting them for the dance.

  This was when Peter saw the joys of his college life—always on the Saturday night when the game was over and night spread its rewarding darkness over all.

  The following week Peter got a letter from his father, from a town in Connecticut called Meriden.

  Hello there, Swifty Martin! [it read. The envelope was also addressed to “Swifty Martin,” for the father wanted the football coach and anybody else in the school to know that his son was a great swift halfback.] Six-thirty in de mawnin and de ole weazel is up and around thinkin about home and wishin a lot of empty wishes. Well, to be brief, here I am settled down in a new job. Yup, you guessed it. When I got out of bed and went back to my old job at Green’s it wasn’t there for me any more. I’m not as young as I used to be, and they had a young man there who seemed to be doing pretty well for himself. No need telling you how I feel about Green pulling this kind of thing. Knew him off and on in years past while in Business in stinktown. Well, I could have guessed that he’d turn out to be a stinktown stinker himself.

&n
bsp; My new job here is fine and dandy, got it through the union, good bosses, good boys to work with. It’s not a bad little town to work in, not ’tall. No complaints except lack of heat in the rooming-house and bum food in the diners. I send home most of my pay every week. Doesn’t leave me much. Once in a while I bet 50¢ on a pony, or go to a movie. But I’m worried about you, Pete, because you are so very dear to me, so very dear!

  I know that you’re lonely at school, that there’s something on your mind bothering you. The world’s in such a mess, all you poor kids are mixed up. Keep your chin up and just wait for the best, or the worst, whichever Fate chooses to deal you. But be brave, be gay, be a genuine man whatever you do! That’s the way to live. Don’t worry, don’t repent. Work hard and do your best, it’s the most any of us can do. Your family’s behind you and loves you. Give thanks to the forces of nature that bind us all through life.

  Your lonesome old Pop.

  P.S. And I thought I’d write you a cheery letter! Well, I’ll send this off anyway. Heard you last Saturday on my radio—so proud, so dearly proud of you!

  This letter stunned Peter. He had taken it out of the mailbox and read it walking slowly upstairs to his room. Now, in his room, he sat with the letter open on the desk, with the radio playing Beethoven. He stared blankly out the window.

  “Well, that’s that!” he thought immediately.

  And gazing out the window at the campus, he suddenly felt a great loathing rise in him. “And now I’m supposed to go to football practice!” he cried out in the room and, jumping up, he pulled the shade down and plunged the room in dreary half darkness. He sat down again at the desk, peering in the gloom at his father’s letter.

  He sat there a long time without seeming to think anything. Through it all, he began to feel a tremendous thrill in his veins, like a pulsing, and something that was like an aching restlessness in his muscles and nerves and very bones.

  “It’s human life I want—the thing itself—not this,” he said to himself with happy surprise.

  He got up, so violently as to knock the chair back, punching his fist into his hand, burning with energy and wild feelings. With a jubilant and determined movement, he tore his coat out of the closet, and went out, closing the door. He hardly knew what he was doing.

  He had decided to quit the football team, he was not going to play any more football.

  “So simple, so simple!” he kept thinking.

  He plunged along in the wind, coming to a bar. There was Jake Fitzpatrick drinking beer and talking to the bartender. He had probably never come to this particular bar before in his life, but there he was inside. Peter snickered gleefully and went in.

  “Martin!” called Jake happily. “Say! why you looking so pleased with yourself?” he demanded.

  “I decided to quit football, stick to my studies, stick to the human things!” rattled Peter. “Look! my hands are shaking. I’m all excited. That’s what I’m going to do.”

  “When?”

  “Starting now. I’m a free man, a human man. I’m going to stay right here all afternoon.”

  “What’s that letter you got in your hand? Ah—I know, it’s your draft board. And that surer’n hell explains it all.” And Jake chuckled.

  Peter jammed his father’s letter in his pocket. He had been walking down the street with the letter in his hand. “That letter made me decide to quit football!” he suddenly blurted.

  “Who’s it from?”

  “It’s just a letter,” said Peter with a distant air. “Well, it didn’t make up my mind, actually, but it helped. It’s just a letter—”

  “Well, drink up! Say—” Fitz cried now, “why don’t you go over to Judie’s and bring her down here? I get a kick out of that girl. Really interesting—in a crazy way.”

  “Yeah, that’s it!” agreed Peter.

  He hurried out into the cold night to fetch Judie, bounding along nervously but with a strange reeling swagger. He was back on the campus in a moment, looking around rather angrily and with a foolish lonesomeness. He had come to a full stop and stood slumped and meditative right by the library entrance. He was taking his time going to Judie’s house across the campus. His heart was pounding and pounding harder.

  “What I’m going to do,” he thought with great difficulty, framing the words in his mind, “is think very slow. God!”

  He strolled around the campus looking at it with great curiosity, as though he were a visitor, stopping now and then to peer at some monument or landmark with that curiosity visitors have. Yet he was thinking about something entirely different.

  He was wondering how he could possibly bring his radio with him on the train, perhaps carry it under his arm, get a seat to himself, and lay it there beside him and take care that it wouldn’t fall off when the train started and stopped. A hundred such details crossed his mind. When he lit a cigarette his hand was trembling violently.

  “That’s what I want to do. That’s what I know I want to do!”

  A half hour later Peter Martin was walking across the campus with a heavy radio under one arm and a big suitcase gripped in the other hand. He was moving in the shadows, staying close to walls and taking absurd long-cuts where it was darkest. He was actually leaving college altogether.

  When he got on the trolley and arranged all his belongings around him on the seat, he sighed vigorously: “Well, that’s that!”

  A student sitting across, whom he knew vaguely, was glancing at him curiously. Peter, roused out of good-natured lonesomeness, glared back with such angry flashing hatred that the poor fellow buried his nose in a book all the way to the railroad station and never looked up again.

  In the phone booth Peter again felt awful twinges of foolishness when he heard Judie’s voice over the phone protesting: “But, Petey, don’t leave college! Don’t give up your football! You don’t mean to tell me you’re going back to that awful hometown of yours! You’re crazy if you do that!”

  “What do you mean I’m crazy!” he shouted.

  “Oh, never mind. All you think about is yourself—what about me? What are you going to do about me?”

  “I’ll write and I’ll save money and come down and see you all the time, that’s all.”

  “Sure,” she murmured sadly.

  “All right, all right!” he shouted, hitting the wall of the booth. Finally they said good night and Judie was almost crying at the end.

  After hiding away from the family for one moody week, wandering in New York till his money ran out, Peter proudly came home like a veritable hero under cover of the sensational worry he had caused everyone.

  The moment he arrived, he got a job in Galloway. With the job, in a big gas station in downtown Galloway, and the beginning of his contributions to the family budget, he knew that he was “making up” for his rash decision. These things done, he was absolutely ready and waiting for his father and the objections the old man would raise about his quitting school. He was actually waiting for this with a resentful air, ready with a hundred deliberate scornful replies.

  Sure enough, without a moment’s hesitation, within the first hour of his arrival in Galloway that Saturday, Martin hunted down his son, and strolled casually up to him at the place where he worked. Peter was bending over a motor in the yard of the station, all dressed up in a new suit of coveralls, his hair slicked back smoothly, his hands just a little dirty from the work.

  “Hello there, son!” greeted Martin with a forlorn show of cheerfulness.

  Peter did not seem surprised. “Well, well! Pa! How did you know I worked here?” And it was almost as though he knew his father would come that very moment.

  “Oh, Joe told me,” replied the old man casually. “What are you doing there? I didn’t know you were a mechanic … I thought Joe and Charley were the only mechanics in the family.”

  “I’m not a mechanic,” replied Peter almost petulantly. “I’m just lubricating this car in all these little oil cups here. This chart shows where they are on a Nash. Then we pum
p some grease in the transmission, all over, from below in the pit there. Good job, huh?”

  “Good pay, I’m told,” said the old man, looking around curiously at the clean, spacious, well-organized station. “These people seem to know their onions. I used to bring my old Plymouth around here in the old days, but it wasn’t the same kind of a place then—”

  So then, while Peter bent there to his task, and his father stood watching him, there was a moment of terrible silence. Everything that they had to say to each other was frozen in them.

  “I just thought I’d come down to see how you were getting along—”

  And once more they were silent. At that moment they heard the radio inside the station and they could hear the announcer’s excited voice, and the roar of crowds, and band music, the distant triumphant fanfares of a great Saturday afternoon game somewhere in America. Peter had grown numb with embarrassment and closed his eyes secretly over the motor, shuddering at the thought of his father standing there beside him.

  “I wonder what game that is?” the old man spoke up with a kind of abject curiosity.

  He looked blandly at his father: “Michigan-Iowa, I think. I’m not sure.”

  “Well,” said the old man in a distant voice, looking away, lingering there, standing with his hands in his coat pockets, “what time do you come off work?”

  “About six.”

  “Be home for supper?”

  “Certainly,” said Peter very deliberately.

  “There’s a lunchcart across the street,” the old man said suddenly, “I think I’ll go in for a hamburger or something like that. Feel a little hungry.”

  Peter looked at him for the first time. “I’ll be finished with this in a minute. Go ahead and I’ll be there—in a minute. I could stand a cup of coffee myself.”

  “Okay, Petey,” said the father as though they had finally come to a great sorrowful agreement. “I’ll be sitting in there.” And he went off across the street, Peter standing and staring after him with the most mortified feeling that he had somehow slashed this man across his crestfallen eyes, in some vicious and thoughtless way.