The Town and the City: A Novel

by Jack Kerouac

  He went to the lunchcart a few minutes later and joined him at the counter where, as things always go in lunchcarts, there was a lot of talk and laughter among the men, a radio playing loudly, and people coming in and out in fresh bursts of enthusiasm. So they just sat at the counter watching and listening.

  And the fact that he and his father had yet to mention the thing that was burning in them, the gentle madness of this, the complex delicacy of it, the manly tact and sorrow of it, the unknowable things they were sharing together that afternoon, all this was gripping him and almost breaking down the scornfulness he had planned to use. Peter wished his father would speak of it, say something, argue with him, even get mad at him, shout at him right there in the lunchcart in front of all the men.

  Presently, though, as both of them sat there in profoundest silence, and Peter was about to tell him what he had thought up in the way of plans for the future, the door opened again and a group of men who knew Martin came in.

  “Well, how are you boys?” greeted Martin jovially. “You know my boy Pete here. How’re things going at the plant?”

  They grouped around for a moment, and Peter realized with a burning anger that his father was an object of curiosity to them now, where once they had rallied around him, as he had seen them do as a boy, with a genuine politeness and admiration.

  “Hear you’re working out of town now, George,” one of them said, rather curiously, yet with no intended slyness, though it showed up somehow in all their faces as they listened altogether too quietly to his answer.

  Peter bent over his coffee cup in a tense rage.

  He heard someone ask: “What’s he doing?”

  “Pete, here? Oh,” laughed Martin, “he speaks of freedom.” It was just a little jest, and no one quite understood it. For some reason the youngest man in the group snickered. Peter’s heart pounded like a triphammer, the blood rushed to his face sickeningly yet with curious exaltation, and he turned slowly on his stool, with great deliberation, bringing up an utterly mean look full into the young man’s face, and said angrily:

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Huh?”

  Peter almost instantly blushed, the tears were coming into his eyes from embarrassment, still he continued to stare indignantly into the other’s face, while everyone watched, and for a moment he had a wild fearful impulse to throw his fist into the other’s face with all his might, to break up everything there in front of him in a chaos of fury.

  There was an uncomprehending silence for a moment, and then, as in a dream, the men filed away across the lunchcart to get a booth, and Peter, his eyes blurred, was just stupidly staring into space with his neck muscles bulging and his fist unknotting slowly, his whole being shuddering from within. The oldest of the men was still standing alongside his father, gaping at Peter.

  Suddenly Martin chuckled hoarsely. “By gosh! Little Petey used to be so shy, so shy! Remember him when he was that high, Bill, a shy little kid like my Mickey, never saying anything ’tall. Say, what’s the matter with you there?” he laughed.

  Peter got up and walked out of the lunchcart with a feeling of numb humiliation. His father joined him outside in a moment.

  “That was a funny thing to do,” he said curiously. “You never used to be like that—”

  “The way that guy laughed! Who is that jerk anyway?”

  “What’s the matter with you?” cried the old man angrily. “They didn’t do anything. I know those boys fairly well—”

  “Bunch of wise guys. Didn’t you see the way they were, didn’t you see them—don’t you notice anything?”

  “Yes!” roared the old man. “I notice you’re no longer the same little Petey who was so modest and so cheerful—”

  “To hell with little Petey!”

  “That’s right, that’s right, go ahead and say it!”

  “Say what?”

  They glared at each other with looks of pure hatred.

  “Gee!” cried Peter with a flooding sense of terrified dismay. “Didn’t you notice how they looked at you and talked about you working outside Galloway, in that damn smug way. Pa, that laugh!” he pressed desperately.

  “I didn’t notice anything of the sort. It’s that neurotic way you kids are beginning to have, that’s what it is, I guess.”

  “What do you mean, neurotic!” said Peter through his teeth, with intense loathing suddenly for the mere sound of his father’s voice.

  “That’s what they teach you in college, I guess, that’s what they learn in Harvard and Penn. They certainly turn out smart boys these days.”

  Peter was speechless with rage. “You be careful, Pa, what you say. You can’t say—”

  “What do you mean by that, sonny?” said the father meekly, with soft pain in his eyes yet his lips curled in disgust.

  “You can’t say that!” burst Peter with the foolish realization that he didn’t know what he meant.

  “I don’t understand you any more,” said the father.

  “What!” cried Peter. “How can you be my father if you don’t understand!”

  “No, I don’t understand you,” declared the old man emphatically, his voice trembling. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to understand you again now. Do you realize that, Petey? That’s what a father has to go through in his life? He must lose all his children one by one, because God wants them till they get old, then he’s going to throw them away. But when he throws them away I won’t be around to help any more. That’s the big trouble—”

  “Pa,” began Peter eagerly, “you know I wanted to come home and help out, don’t you? You remember that night last Summer when we were on the porch and I told you how bad I felt leaving home—”

  “No, I don’t remember that.”

  “Didn’t I say it? I went to school and I couldn’t concentrate because of all that. All the trouble at home!” he cried with a great sigh. “Then you got sick. You know, I went down to Green’s that day to see about the linotype job!” He looked at his father triumphantly. “You never knew that, Pa!”

  The old man seemed to be thinking about something else.

  “I’m not telling you everything because—At school I was miserable, I didn’t want any more of it, that or football or anything. For another reason by itself, not home. I went down to Green’s and thought about taking over your job for two weeks. Even then I was thinking of quitting school. Ma was talking about working in the shoe factory. I saw everybody working and just managing to live, how unhappy it was, all of a sudden, for the first time.”

  “What happened at Green’s?”

  “He wouldn’t hire me,” said Peter eagerly, “but I talked to him a long time. See, I tried to help even then!”

  The father shrugged.

  “Ah, there you go,” snarled Peter suddenly. “I guess you’ll never believe what I say. Okay.” And he shot a glance at his father filled with hatred and mistrust and yet also with a furtive crestfallen curiosity, for he suddenly realized that he had simply lied.

  “It’s all the same to me, Petey,” said the old man, brooding. “You know what I wanted you to do. However, it’s your life, not mine.” He stood there, staring gloomily into space. “In my old age I wanted a son doing big things. You don’t know what a kick it gave me telling the boys that you were on a big college football team. You may laugh, but I was damn proud of you.”

  “Now you’re not proud any more!” scoffed Peter.

  “I’m just as proud of you as ever, only now I haven’t got anything to say to those fellows. They’re going to ask me what happened to you, and what will I be able to tell them?”

  “Ah-ha!” persisted Peter with the same mocking indulgent air. “So that’s what you’re so worried about—won’t know what to tell the boys. Tell them all to go to hell for me, won’t you?”

  “Don’t think I wouldn’t, if I felt like it,” said the old man with a bland, preoccupied look. “No, it’s not that at all. It’s you I’m worried about.”

  “T
here’s nothing wrong with me!” the boy fairly shouted. “I’m perfectly all right and I know exactly what I’m doing!”

  “Exactly what you’re doing,” sniffed the old man. “Isn’t that just fine and dandy. Nineteen years old and he knows exactly what he’s doing. Yessir, they make ’em real smart nowadays, mental giants. Here’s a Martin who’s a mental giant—no, wait a minute, there’s two of them, two Martin mental giants. Mister Francis and Mister Peter!”

  “I don’t give a damn what Francis is, but don’t class me—I know what I’m doing, for the first time. Leave me alone!” he suddenly added.

  “Leave you alone?” echoed the father wonderingly. “Why, has anyone in the house ever bothered you or told you what to do, or pushed you around, and tried to run your life? You kids have always had perfect freedom and all the encouragement in the world.”

  “All the encouragement in the world,” said Peter now with a dark gaze. “Remember the Lawton game of 1935?”

  “Well?” said the father. “What’s the Lawton game of 1935 got to do now?”

  “Oh, nothing,” said Peter, waving his hand, brooding, shrugging finally. “It’s no big thing. You just said”—and here Peter began to blush, feeling very foolish. “Well, it’s nothing actually.”

  “What, what?”

  “You said I was too small to make the football team,” he said almost slyly but with an attempt at being casual and matter-of-fact.

  “Did I?”

  “Yes! I remembered that, but you don’t. I went out for the football team and it took me a long time to make it, but I made it, didn’t I? I finally made it in spite of you.”

  “Petey, I don’t remember saying anything like that. I may have said it, okay. Still what difference does it make? You’re a grownup boy now.”

  “Well, I don’t want to play football any more,” burst out Peter in one breath, grinning.

  The father was exasperated. “Good Lord! All this has nothing to do with it at all! What kind of boloney have you been picking up? You were just a wonderful little kid, then, I remember you with your little baseball cap and your glove. Lordy, I remember the look of yearning and shyness on your face, and the things that you seemed to want to do, right in your eyes—”

  “Yes yes yes yes,” sighed Peter irritably.

  “Now—look at what you’ve done. Giving up a scholarship in a fine college, and all the friends and connections you were making there, the career you could have built out of it—Giving all that up for what? In this world of hard times! For a job like this, in this stinktown of stinktowns. I tell you I’m just baffled, that’s the only word I can think of!”

  Peter was no longer angry and resentful; he was smiling gently while his father spoke.

  “If I want to go back to Penn, I’ll just go back, that’s all. Right now it doesn’t interest me.”

  “You’ll never go back there, not after what you’ve done!” Martin almost shouted.

  “If you only knew what you’ve done, Petey! It’s a hard world! All the poor people in the world, the poor struggling masses, fighting and scampering after a bit of bread, and you, just a boy with no knowledge of life, no years of harsh experience, no understanding of what hard times actually are—you do this thing with a song in your heart!”

  “A song?” said Peter, pleased.

  “Oh, it’s hard, Petey, to make a living!”

  “Who wants a living? I want life—”

  “You’re just playing with words, sonny, words you learned in books.”

  “Do you know there’s a war coming!” continued Peter, ranting. “Even if I had stayed in college I’d be yanked out, and soon! Nobody’s going to college in the very near future. Do you know that Mel Barnes left the team the same time I did, to go and join the Air Force? You didn’t know that, did you? That doesn’t interest you because it doesn’t fit in with what you want to think.”

  “Do you think you can do what you like all your life?”

  “Yes! Why not?”

  Martin laughed hoarsely. “Poor kid, poor kid! You don’t even know what you’re up against.” He laughed again and shook his head sadly. “The trouble with us Martins is that we can’t get along in the world, some things in it are so ratty, and we have to turn away, we always turn away.”

  “Oh, forget it, will you, Pa? I’m not worried.”

  “Well, you have your little job here,” said the father, indicating the gas station across the street. “I guess there’s work for you to do there this afternoon. I won’t bother you any more.”

  “You’re not bothering me.”

  “I’ll go home and shut up. You’ll be home for supper, then?”

  “Of course,” continued Peter. Feeling suddenly ashamed, he added: “I’ll be home for supper, Pa, and I’ll see you there.” But the old man was walking off, and Peter watched him go with a sudden rush of regret.

  He went back to work in the lubrication pit with a feeling of gloomy disgust. At six o’clock, when he was through work, he was overcome with depression, and walked home in the tremendous windy November darkness, as great boughs cracked overhead, as the last leaves flew across arc-lamps.

  And suddenly that night his father, clapping his hands together and holding them there in sorrowful reverence, cried out of the dark of the parlor: “The things, my son, the things!”

  [8]

  Joe Martin happened to be spending the Sunday afternoon in a bar when news of Pearl Harbor was announced over the radio. He was drinking with Paul Hathaway, who was back in Galloway for the first time since the truck trip. The first thing they did, in company with several others, was to put down their drinks and tear off in a body to the recruiting station at the Post Office to enlist on the spot. Somebody wanted to call up his girl first, but they shouted: “Come on, Romeo, this can’t wait!” They soon learned that the enlisting machinery was going to take its own slow time, and they all had to go home for supper.

  George Martin, on this day, was alone in his rooming-house in the Connecticut town where he worked, when the news came over his little radio. He was shaving and he stared at himself in the mirror with exasperation.

  “Now they’ve done it, they’ve done it again! We’ll hear all about it before it’s through, and after it’s through! Now they’ll start passing out the buttons, and then when it gets good and bloody they’ll start passing out the medals. Now all the idiots in the country are going to rise to the top. It’s their time.”

  He didn’t care who heard him in the adjoining rooms.

  “This is the time for the fools to swing into action. And this is the time for the good youngsters, the brave ones, to get themselves killed and to kill other brave ones. I’ve seen it all before, here we go again! And my three boys—four boys with little Charley, fifteen years old and who knows? My boys! my boys!” he cried with dawning anger and disgust, and he slammed around the room.

  Martin remembered that he had really felt the same way in 1917 even as a young man, and it was all coming to pass again, the same stupid and violently unreality of things gone mad. It seemed more unnecessary and obsolete and insane than ever before. He wrote to his wife that night:

  “The poor American people! All the fools in the world take us for millionaires living in mansions. They attack us because we’re supposed to have so much money and to be so arrogant because of it. And what is it they’re attacking? Some poor devil who works his heart out because his parents and his grandparents had to work so hard and taught him the life of work too. And he is such a peaceable man, the American, the first really peaceable man! All he wants is to live, raise a family, work, and make his life more enjoyable and kind-hearted. Is it any more than that, after all? And I’m not referring to the middle class or whatever they call themselves with their fancy houses and fancy lawns like they have up on Wildwood Drive in Galloway and their fancy jobs in banks and Chambers of Commerce. I’m referring to the people of this country, the poor devils who have to work hard for a living and believe in their families
and in a Godly good life.

  “Well, Marge, here it is again. The Great Boobs are on the warpath, and someone, somewhere, is turning out the garbage that’s going to blind everybody to the real facts of the world, American or otherwise. Kiss my dear children for me. There’s a long road ahead and all we can do is wait, we helpless ones.”

  In Galloway, the little kids ran out in the fields at dusk and yelled and screamed because they thought the Jap planes were going to come over any hour. Mickey was with them and they all went “Ra-ta-ta-ta-ta!” like machine guns, and wrestled each other furiously.

  Peter, at this gloomy and obsessed time of his own life, went walking around Galloway late at night when everyone else was asleep and virtually listened to the silence. The river continued its slow thundering hush through the town, the cold white moonlight shone on the frozen canals and made its midnight glow between windswept desolate tenements on Rooney Street.

  Peter was a year too young to be eligible for the Selective Service draft, but he had heard about the merchant marine and he pondered this as the first great step of his new life. Curiously, however, he never thought of this in terms of war, but in terms of the great gray sea that was going to become the stage of his soul.

  And after his midnight striding meditations he would always come back to the house, haunting his family’s sleep in the kitchen with a cup of tea, his cigarettes, and a long moody penetration of great books. In the morning, bleary-eyed and satiated, he went off to work in oily coveralls and brooded in the lubrication pit all day, thinking thoughts of Unknown Seas, and Circles Drawn at Midnight, and the Great Snow White Albatross.

  Mighty world events meant virtually nothing to him, they were not real enough, and he was certain that his wonderful joyous visions of super-spiritual existence and great poetry were “realer than all.”