by Jack Kerouac
He began to adopt his father’s habit of looking up with stunned wonder when someone spoke to him, yet with a slight difference, screwing up his face in angry earnestness, flicking face-muscles impatiently and with profound deference to the speaker. This came to such a pass one week that he did nothing but flick his face-muscles in front of everybody. Alone, he even practiced it, gravely, in the mirror, and glared at himself.
He was reading all the great books and moving around in the world wrapped in the gloomy cloak of himself at nineteen. Moreover, he was certain that his life was over, that he was going to die a young death, and that his last days were going to be spent in striding, silent, scowling enigmatical greatness. Still, at that time, he was as handsome and sturdy as any other man in Galloway, and when some girl happened to catch him by surprise with a happy morning greeting, he would suddenly blush and smile with fumbling uncomprehending sweetness. Then, his heart hammering away, he would hurry off to think by himself.
One night the melancholy young Greek, Alexander Panos, met him outside the Galloway library. Outside, because he had specific orders not to interrupt Young Faust’s “study of everything.” Peter came out at closing time, nine o’clock, lighting a cigarette, scowling and muscle-flicking over the flare of the match, stuffing his books grimly in his pockets and ready to go on up the street. Out of the dark alcove came Alexander, smiling sadly.
“What’s that you’re carrying?” barked Peter, almost annoyed, as though he had sensed his presence in the darkness nearby and wasn’t in the least surprised.
“Some things I want to show you,” replied the young poet. “Wait until we sit down some place. How are you tonight, Pete?”
“All right, all right!” barked Peter. “Same as any other night. Let’s go!”
They walked across the canal near the Y.M.C.A. and Peter glared at the young Greek athletes lounging against the rail twirling key-chains. They did not however notice Peter, whom they would ordinarily have noticed because of his reputation as an athlete.
He spat casually into the canal, saying, “Where shall we go?”
“We can go to the cafeteria on Daley Square and have coffee, or—”
“Yeah, we’ll do that. Say, what was that you were saying about Gothic art on that canal bridge Monday night?”
Alexander collected his memory and pointed towards the library. “You mean the bridge over by the Greek church. I was saying that on each side of the canal you have the Gothic soaring St. Matthews cathedral and then the Greek Byzantine with its inward dome.”
Peter nodded absorbedly.
“Gothic immensity, don’t you see, placed next to Byzantine sensitivity. But, of course, I’m prejudiced,” he smiled. “Did you ever stop to realize what an unusual city Galloway is!” continued Alexander eagerly.
Peter laughed sarcastically.
“I understand, but still, even in this city, only a canal separates two schools of architecture. And the view from the Rooney Street bridge is very beautiful. People park their cars on the bridge on Sunday afternoons, people from New Hampshire and Connecticut and Maine, just to watch the river and the horizon!”
“Hmm,” said Peter, preoccupied with something else now.
“I’ve got so many things to tell you tonight,” began Alexander, inhaling eagerly on a fresh cigarette. “I haven’t seen you for two days. Where did you go last night?”
Peter spat again into the canal. “I went out with Berlot and the boys. We met Scotcho and Danny and some of the other guys and made the rounds of the joints. Gartside had his car and we picked up Grimy Gertie in the Yellow Moon.”
“That horrible gangbang? Pete, not her, really not her!”
“Yeah, sure,” said Peter casually.
“Don’t enumerate the details, please! I know all about it,” said young Alexander with a princely melancholy.
Peter was slapping his knees and laughing with high pleasure. “Oh, Al, you poor miserable maniac, are you horrified?”
“Really, Pete,” Alexander stammered earnestly, “I don’t object at all—but a sensitive person like you … What of your soul?”
“My soul isn’t sensitive,” cackled Peter, “it’s in the gutter where it belongs.” But instantly he brooded again.
“I have no objections to Bacchus and Venus, but, Pete, the things you do when you go out with that gang! Don’t you see that we must learn to discriminate? There are greater and finer things than dallying around with mad strumpets! The world is opening with new hopes and greater ideals and you want to fulfill minor and cheap sensations! Isn’t that silly? Pete, I hate like hell to talk like this—it would be so much easier to praise you than disagree with you—but just think, a full-scale war against Fascism is on! And think of Tommy Campbell, Tommy with whom we saw the sunrise last summer, and now he’s in Manila and the Japs have taken Manila! Have I hurt you talking like this?”
“No, go on. But there’s no definite news about Tommy yet. He may have escaped in the jungle.”
“That’s all I have to say. Please don’t misunderstand me!”
“I haven’t,” laughed Peter. “What say, shall we stroll toward Daley Square?”
“All right.”
A moment later, after dark consideration, Peter was saying: “Al, about that Grimy Gertie business, don’t go thinking for a minute that horseplay like that influences me. You know how much I’ve been studying since I left school, you’ll never know how much. All I do is study,” he concluded fiercely.
“Yes, of course,” said Alexander. “I know it well, I never get to see you any more. But I want you to keep it up. Someday we’ll both be great men.”
Right on Daley Square among the crowds of the town, Alexander began again: “Oh, Pete, the war has come and it has wrought sad changes. I’m lost now more than I’ve ever been before, and I know you feel the same way too, I can tell.”
Peter was scowling because Alexander talked too loudly among the crowds.
“Don’t you remember, Pete, the first time I met you, on the sandbank when we were children, you and your brother Joe?”
“I know, I know.”
“And when I introduced you to my mother for the first time, how she knew!”
“She knew what?”
“That you were like a brother, that I looked upon you as my brother. She knew that instantly from me, though I never had to tell her. And then, Peter, recall how it was when we went to New York and met your brother Francis and that man Engels. And then, one of the greatest moments of my life, when I finally met your brother Joe last year. How I almost cried when I saw him! Don’t you realize that I can’t forget that day on the sandbank years ago? My whole existence and faith is almost based on that one day! Not completely, of course, for I have loved—loved Julia Browning so much, even when she laughed at me on the street that day. Pete, I was only sixteen.”
“You always were an amazing maniac,” chuckled Peter.
“Of course, a maniac of sensitivity. And now, tonight even, what a strange love I feel for poor Alice—”
“That’s the poetess in Boston?”
“Yes, you’ll meet her and see what a great woman she is. Most of all, though, I love poor Maria. If you could only see Maria,” he said sadly, “if you could only see her eyes.”
Maria was a girl from New Hampshire whom Alexander had met somewhere in Boston through his friends, and it was said that she only had another year to live. However, Peter was dubious about this. His total knowledge of the girl had come from Alexander’s own lips, and he knew that Alexander was capable of fabricating stupendous romances and literally believing in them.
“A year to live, and the sadness of her eyes, Peter. I want to marry her but she refuses. She refuses angrily and sends me away, and I go and weep by the Charles River—”
“How could you marry? You haven’t got any money and you’re still going to school.”
“In that one year we could concentrate all of existence!” sang Alexander joyfully, as people turned to
look and Peter scowled at his shoes. “But more than that, I ask myself now: where are my former joys? Where? Like that morning as a little child when I looked carefully at my first flower, or when I read Homer for the first time in Junior High. And the time my favorite aunt died and I learned the lesson of tears at twelve. Where is that morning you and I and Tommy Campbell went to Pine Brook at dawn to see the sunrise and sing? Remember how I buried the little flower in the earth? Was it for Tommy that I buried that flower?”
“No one knows how Tommy made out,” persisted Peter.
“But I knew then, I knew! Don’t you see, Pete, life can’t hide anything from me!”
“Well—”
“And now, Pete, everything seems gone! I know I will die young, before I’m twenty-three. What blackness is closing in on me! It almost seems to me as though you were the last of the human beings on earth for me.”
Peter looked away, not knowing what to say.
“Peter, always remember that I have never been hard or insincere, I have always expressed my feelings in spite of what people might think.”
And Peter grinned, rubbing his jaw.
“However, I am more reserved nowadays, much more aloof than I have ever been,” continued Alexander, walking erectly and with a stately air. “The glories of youth may have vanished, but always the Prince of Crete maintains his dignity. ‘Weep not for the poets, for they carry the tears of six thousand years.’ Isn’t that a good line? I wrote it last night, in the midst of a paper on George Bernard Shaw.”
Walking around the downtown streets, they ran into a football man from one of the Boston colleges that had bid for Peter’s enrollment a few years back. He was an assistant coach on the team and lived in Galloway. He nodded to Peter and stopped.
“Whattayasay, Martin, how’re you making out?” the burly coach inquired, a former player himself, standing before Peter with the serious frowning demeanor football men have when confronting one another.
“Okay,” replied Peter, frowning. Alexander stood apart, waiting disinterestedly. “How are the things at the college?” inquired Peter casually.
“Fine. We ought to have a good team next Fall, though I don’t know how many men we’ll lose to the service. I heard you left Penn,” he added with curiosity.
Peter shrugged, rousing up the old defenses he had been using for months against a question repeatedly asked of him around Galloway. “Oh, yes, I guess I outgrew the urge for football. Anyway, the war’s breaking up everything in the colleges,” he added lightly, and frowned again.
“Well,” the man smiled, “not yet, not quite yet anyway. What’s the matter, college football too much for you? You were doing damn well from what they tell me. How was the team down there?” he asked professionally, after a moment of Peter’s silence.
“Pretty good,” said Peter casually, pleased because the team “down there” was far more famous around the country than the man’s own team.
“Well,” said the coach, glancing at his watch, “I hope I’ll see you around, and—good luck,” and he walked off briskly, Peter staring after him with a false smile that changed into a scowl of displeasure.
“That’s all, brother,” he muttered indistinctly to himself.
“What?” demanded Alexander with curiosity.
“There’s the guy who once called me up every night for a whole week trying to get me to go to his school. Now he gives me a brushoff, a nice slick one. Did you notice his smile?”
“Oh, what do you care, Pete?”
“I don’t.”
But Alexander looked mournfully at Peter. “Dear friend,” he said, “there are things more important than athletics in this world, in spite of what your father tries to tell you. I understand how he feels about it, I can read the great disappointment in his eyes. You see, Peter, even though Mr. Martin doesn’t like me, I can understand him—”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“And it was your own decision to quit football. After all, look what’s going on in the world now, a great new struggle for freedom and liberty. It’s your own mind that decided what you should do now, your own conscience. I think your decision to go to sea in the merchant marine this spring is a great and noble decision. You don’t have to do it, and there’s so much danger now, with the submarines and everything.”
“I just want to go to sea,” mumbled Peter, full of gloom.
“I’ll never forget that letter you sent me!” Alexander cried with a sudden piteous, broken smile. He had acquired the smile from Paul Henreid, the movie actor.
“What letter?”
“The one from New York, where you went after you quit college and before you came home. Remember? ‘I am driven and weary,’ you wrote, ‘and I don’t know where to go. In one stroke I’ve changed my life, given up its first crude direction. But I’m still young, and therefore I believe there’s still love in my heart.’ Don’t you remember writing that from New York? I’ve memorized those lines, they’re great! Pete, you will never know how I felt when I received that crumpled little letter, you will never know the pain that I felt!” Alexander had stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and was squeezing his fist with the other hand. “I went upstairs to my room and pounded the walls and wept bitterly!”
Suddenly the tears were trickling down his face as he stood there, and Peter, completely abashed, looked away furiously and glowered darkly upon the whole thing. How strange his life had become! Yet there was an overwhelming warm joy in his heart because his friend had understood so well. He wanted to take Alex’s hand in both his hands, and press it warmly, thanking him and blessing him somehow, but he realized he could never do that, and he wondered mournfully why.
He only said, “Well, Al—that was wonderful of you—but, hell, don’t cry about it or anything like that. Don’t—”
“Don’t what, Pete?” smiled the young Greek. “You mean on the street? Look, there’s no one around, the street’s deserted—this is Commerce Street, there’s the police station, and I wept, that’s all. I won’t embarrass you any more. Remember always that I’m Latin, warm-blooded, I’m half-Russian, I’m Slavic, and I have these emotions, and I express them. You’re a Martin and I’m a Panos, that’s all. Let’s go have a cup of coffee in the cafeteria. I’ll show you the letter I got from Alice, another beautiful letter, and a quotation from Barbellion, another from Saroyan. I have a million things to tell you. After a few months, we’ll probably never see each other again for the duration of eternity. Many of us here in Galloway, your brothers and my brothers, and the kids we know, will get killed in this war, many of us. Tommy Campbell is only the first to go, don’t you see? ‘So we’ll go no more a-roving,’ Pierre.”
“Is it as bad as that?” grinned Peter.
“You mark my words: these may be the last months of our friendship in this life.”
Thus they were, young Panos and young Peter, both of them nineteen years old.
[9]
Early in the Spring Joe Martin enlisted in the Air Force. Just before he was called to active duty he suddenly felt a strange powerful whim to go and see the girl he had known long ago in his first truck-driving days, Patricia Franklin. She was not working in the lunchcart on highway No. 1 any more, but he promptly found her at home, and with her fiance moreover, a grocery clerk named Walter. But Joe only laughed at this and came to Pat’s window late that night and threw pebbles and made her come down and talk.
She came down wrapped in a coat, and in the darkness where they argued, she told him emphatically and sadly that she was serious about Walter. She even laughed at the incredulous, red-faced Joe when he stalked with crazy determination straight towards the woods as if he was going to spend the night there.
He had rented a room in a small hotel in town. He came back afresh in the morning with an air of giving Patricia his final ultimatum, and, of course, she laughed again. He stormed out once more, though with the sudden stricken feeling that she was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen, especially now that
she laughed at him that way. She was now so beautiful and unapproachable that his heart was bursting with all kinds of strange new griefs and the one grievous joy of humiliation he had never known before.
“All I do is die! Why, she’s the most knocked-out broad I’ve ever seen in all my life! And she was my girl! What was the matter with me two years ago? Why do they do this?”
He strode around the little town thinking of her beautiful dark eyes, her long brown hair, her soft white skin, her sweet and luscious mouth, her very flesh, and the loveliness of her when she put on her little threadbare coat and came tripping down the stairs to talk to him. The whole day was suddenly enchanted with her presence in the earth thereabouts. He stared at trees wonderingly. What was he doing here? It seemed that everyone in the village existed only because she was nearby, dwelling and abiding. Was she with Walter? His heart dropped like a rock in his belly and for a moment he bent in a sudden swoon of horrible disbelief.
He spent the afternoon in his hotel room with the newspapers and a pint of whiskey. Ah! he was going off in the Air Force, and she was just another girl, there were millions of them everywhere, and she was no prettier than the others.
He barged around the room beginning to feel the wild triumphant effects of the liquor he was drinking straight out of the bottle. “I wish Hathaway was here, I’d get him drunk. Or some of those guys—those mavericks from the ranch, like Red, or Boone Waller. What a character that Boone was! I think I’ll write him a letter, right now!”
And Joe sat down at the writing table and began to write a letter to the ranch-hand in Wyoming, but a minute later he crumpled up the paper furiously and hurled it against the mirror, and grinned. He paced up and down the room musing feverishly. “Dammit, those women get beautiful when they turn you down. They get that glow in their eyes and suddenly they’re built like Mae West. They get soft and beautiful when you can’t get them any more, they’re like a million dollars—and just like a wife ought to look. Oh, a wife!”
It grew dark when he had finished the bottle, and he got up and flung himself on the bed and soon fell asleep. Around nine o’clock he woke up as he heard his floor crack loudly, and someone gasping almost inaudibly.