The Town and the City: A Novel

by Jack Kerouac

  “It’ll be morning any time now, look how gray it is over by those trees there.”

  “Yeah.”

  And behind the great trees across the street, the light glowed and burned in the windows.…

  “What is that place across the street anyhow?”

  “That’s the Department of State or something like that. Yeah, the State Department I guess Tony said it was”—and Charley looked across the street gravely at the smudged façade of the old building.

  4

  [1]

  The Martins of Galloway, uprooted by war, had moved to New York City. The mother, so excited by this adventure, knew inscrutably as the movers unloaded her furniture from a truck in the streets of Brooklyn that she and her family were not destined to stay in the city.

  “My goodness,” she said to her husband, pointing to the high skyscrapers in downtown Brooklyn, “those buildings are so high they’re going to fall someday. One good earthquake and it will all fall down!”

  She knew a city like this could never last, but she wished somehow it could, because it was all so really delightful and splendid, and it pleased her to see it for the first time in her life. But she smiled secretly, and shrugged, and knew it could never really last.

  It was October when they moved into Brooklyn, and the sun was shining russet-gold in the late afternoon. When the movers had left, George Martin, his wife, and young Mickey went out in the backyard of their new basement apartment and looked around.

  An old wooden fence, or that is, two buttressed old fences, one wedged against the other and bent from behind by the pressure of built-up earth, leaned into their yard from the parking lot, and just above them flashed and glittered the bald tops of a thousand parked cars. Beyond this sea of auto-tops shining in the sun rose a great mournful structure of red brick, seemingly abandoned, with hundreds of dusty, dark windows, and curlicued eaves faded to a mouldy pale-green. One vast part of the red wall, windowless, displayed a huge advertisement, showing a man holding his head in despair. Some indistinct writing beside him, blurred and dirtied by weathers and soot, proclaimed the indispensability of some forgotten medicine. But most amazing of all was the crudeness of the drawing of the face itself and the huge hands, which showed only the faintest knowledge of line and design.

  “Well, by golly, I won’t be able to say that I can’t see nothing outside my window on rainy days, will I, George?” laughed Marguerite, squeezing the old man’s arm with delight. “That’ll be my picture, I won’t have to hang any on the wall.”

  All three of them gazed slack-jawed at this mighty portrait—this indistinct, faded, huge man holding his head in despair, as all around him, in the late afternoon of Brooklyn, there hummed and roared the multiple sounds of a great city.

  “Gee!” cried Mickey, without knowing what strange excitement gripped him now.

  “That big old red building looks like it was once a brewery, Marge, that’s what it looks like. It’s probably just a warehouse now.”

  “Yes, and notice the books in that window in that corner, they look like account books. There must be some old offices in that place.”

  They looked around at the yards of their neighbors, which were just like their yard, and the backs of their houses, which were just like the back of their own house, the wash-lines, the old fences, the black sooty drainpipes, and the dirty red-and-brown-brick look of it all which was somehow so clean and pleasant-looking in the ruddy late afternoon light of the sun. And all above this—the old brewery, the up-jutting office buildings a few blocks downtown, and the smoke curling from rooftops—soared the great golden clouds of October.

  “By God!” cried the old man. “I will say this, it’s certainly—it’s really—big! There’s a lot here a poor devil has never seen before.”

  “The truckdriver said the waterfront was a half a mile down the street!” said Mickey eagerly. “Let’s go see the ships, huh, Pa?”

  “The ships … You want to take a walk down there?” the old man cried.

  “You two go down there now,” said the mother, turning back to the house, “and I’ll go in and unpack the dishes and get some kind of supper together, and when you come back we’ll all have our first dinner in New York.”

  “By gosh, okay! Let’s go, Mickey; we’ll go take a gander at the waterfront and the ships!”

  They went back inside the house, which was so mournfully disarrayed with piles of boxes and haphazard furniture just as the movers had left it, and stood for a while in the kitchen in silence as the mother began to unpack some boxes.

  “Go ahead, go ahead,” she cried, seeing them standing there, “I know where everything is and you’ll only be in the way. Go down and see the boats and be sure and be back in a half an hour. And stop and buy some ice cream, why don’t you, for dessert. And you can get yourself some beer, George.”

  “Well, okay, come on, Mick, let’s go.” Father and son went out and started down the street with awe.

  The name of their street was State Street. As they walked along towards the waterfront, the redbrick and brownbrick houses became fewer in number until there was nothing but warehouses and old garages which had once stabled horses. When they turned into another street and turned again, they were lost momentarily, and suddenly found themselves on a height overlooking a lot of freight cars, rails, wharf sheds, and shining water by piers, and finally, the intricate topsides, stacks, and masts of great gray ships. Then they walked along a little further and came to a place where they looked up from the smoky waterfront scene, and—unbelievably—saw Manhattan itself towering across the river in the great red light of the world’s afternoon.

  It was too much to believe, and so huge, intricate, unfathomable and beautiful in its distant, smoking, window-flashing, canyon-shadowed realness there, and the pink light glowing on its highest crests as bottomless shadows hung draped in mighty abysms, and little things moving in millions as the eye strained to see, and the great myriads of smoke rising and puffing everywhere, everywhere, from down the shining raveled watersides on up the great flanks of city to the uppermost places—while, miraculously, way far away uptown, great October cloud-nations proceeded above the pinpoint of the Empire State Building.

  Then, as by a natural impulse, and with great greed, their eyes followed the mighty swoop of Brooklyn Bridge and of Manhattan Bridge just beyond, the swoop across the river shimmering like pennies, over tiny smoking tugboats and the wakes and traceries of a hundred scows and boats and wind-ripples, to Brooklyn, to the teeming, ship-complicated, weaving, incomprehensibly ruffled water’s-end and very ledge of Brooklyn.

  “Aw! Well now!” cried the old man, adjusting his spectacles and staring proudly at this mighty scene, with his mouth twisted in a pathetic crooked smile—“it was almost worth it, almost worth it, to come and live out here without a cent to our name and not a friend in the world, just to see this!”

  “Yeah,” breathed Mickey, “gee, I guess this is the greatest city in the world.”

  “It’s the greatest city in the world,” said the old man, “but what it’s like to live in it, I don’t know. But when you see it like this”—and he waved his hand stiffly—“there isn’t much you can say. Just think of all the people who’ve lived and died here … I guess maybe they might know. I myself certainly don’t. No, I don’t think I could say.”

  “Look!” cried the boy, pointing at Manhattan. “There’s some lights starting to come on—see over there?”

  And it was so: the sun was setting, leaving a huge swollen light like dark wine, and long sash-clouds the hues of velvet purple formed in apparitions above. Everything was changing, the river changing in a teeming of low colors to darkness, the abysses of the streets to darkness and a ghost-glow of lights, the pyramid structures from hard purplish stone with serried carvings of windows to a fabulous thousand-starred glitter in black steep cliffs.

  “I guess we’d better go home,” said the old man with a sigh.

  “Let’s stay and watch! It
’s all lighting up. Gee, what lights!”

  “Yass, Mickey, lights! They’ve got lights in New York but they’re not for people like you and me.”

  “Why not? Ma says we’ll go to a show tomorrow night and see Broadway and all the places and eat in a restaurant.”

  “Yes, we can do that all right, with what little money we have we can do a few little things like that, but it’ll never really be for us.”

  “Aw, Pa, you worry too much,” laughed Mickey. He was fourteen years old now, gaunt and awkward and bashfully eager. “Ma says you worried too much about coming to New York. Look how nice it is! See?” he cried triumphantly, seeing his father’s grin. “Even you know it. We can have fun here and lots to do. Boy!—the guys in Galloway wouldn’t believe me when I told ’em we was moving to New York, now they know, all right!” And he thought about his chums in Galloway and what they were doing now at dusk under the trees.

  “All right, Mickey, have it your way, maybe I’m just a scared old fool, maybe that’s what it is.”

  So they walked back home along the dark bleak warehouses and by lonely arc-lights, realizing something else about New York City, and Brooklyn, the hollow streets at night, and came back to the mother in her basement apartment.

  This woman had turned on the lights, swept the floor in the kitchen, rolled a bright linoleum on it, set the table with a clean white tablecloth, brewed some coffee, put out the plates, opened some cans and heated a supper. She put on a new flowery apron to celebrate, turned on the little radio, peered rapidly through her fortune-telling cards to see about the immediate future and now, as they came in lonely and dark and bewildered, she sat them down, kissed them with delighted understanding, brought the food steaming to them and bade them live, love, and abide in the earth, right there in, Brooklyn.

  Martin was a working man in his deepest soul. He had a new job, a nighttime job, so that on this first night of their arrival in Brooklyn, without sleep and really without more than a few coins in his pocket for coffee and sandwiches, he set out to work, to his printing job in Manhattan, with a deep and powerful joy that only working men know. Nothing in the world, no war, no city, no confusion, could alter the fact that he had a job and that he was going to it right off, into the vast complex of Manhattan streets and avenues, of which he had so little knowledge and just a vague hunch as to how to get to the printing plant that had hired him a week before. But they had hired him, he was supposed to start working that night, and he was going to work that night.

  The printing plant was on Canal Street, eastward near the old abandoned city jail, in the dark, somber, ancient part of the city, near cobblestoned streets, near dark warehouses and old shoe factories, just above Chinatown and the Bowery. He had no real idea how to find his way, but he took the subway in Brooklyn. When he asked directions, men got up and peered at the subway maps, others came over to argue and shout and wave their hands as the train roared and plummeted in its black tunnel, others got disgusted with the argument and sauntered away, only to come back with a new way of putting it. They clustered around the bewildered old man, and they finally came to some sort of agreement and told him what to do.

  He worked that night, and came back to Brooklyn in the dirty dawn, and saw all the scab of streets in the sickly light before sunup, the vast ruin of rooftops, the gray miles of beaten dust on sidewalks, the terrifying far-disappearing avenues reaching off towards more grayness, more alleys, more barrels and sidewalks, more bulking cities within the city, more debris and hugeness up-piled and sprawled in brick and girder, a shambles, a mournful cracked junkyard leaned non-ending in the gray world. If it were not for the fact that his wife and son were with him in this place he knew he would be like a dead man.

  “Let me tell you,” he told Marguerite and the boy after a few days, “not far from where I work there’s the old city jail that’s been abandoned, just an old broken down building, it must have been a fort or an armory once, but now it’s just a big pile of stone and busted windows. But it had windows.… And you know what they’ve done, these New Yorkers? Right across the street they built a tremendous skyscraper for the police department and the district attorney’s office and all that, but for the prisoners they built an underground jail, right under the street under this big beautiful new building, and it has no windows down there. They call it the Tombs.”

  “Why did they do that?”

  And old Martin walked around on Sunday afternoons and looked at New York. On a raw November afternoon when the cold ruddy light of the sun was falling on dusty windows and streaming through El girders black with soot, he saw three old men, old Bowery bums, lying on the pavement against a wall trying to sleep, on newspapers. He stopped on the sidewalk to look at them. They looked dead, but then they stirred and groaned and turned over, just like men do in bed, and they were not dead, they were men. He thought of what must have happened to them that they slept on the pavements of November, and that their only belongings in the world were the filthy clothes that covered them. It also flashed through his mind that they were old men as well, rheumy-eyed, sorrowful, sixty or so, shaking with palsy, fixed against the weathers and miseries as though driven through with a spike, sprawled there for good. He had to walk away, he cried.…

  On Hester Street he stopped with amazement as sixteen bearded Rabbis filed forth from a squalid tenement: he stopped, right in front of them, staring incredulously right into their faces: he stood there and breathed: “Good Lord-amighty!”: and they filed past him deep in bearded thought, their hands clasped behind them, their heads cocked mournfully to one side, they stepped absentmindedly around smoking rubbish-fires on the sidewalk. There were sixteen of them, he counted them and could not believe it.

  In front of an ornate old brownstone house on Fifth Avenue, in the late slopes of the sun, he saw a long sleek limousine pull up, and the chauffeur step out, wheeling briskly to open the door, as a butler ran out from the house wearing a derby hat. After vague incomprehensible fumblings within the funereal drapes of the back seat, he saw an old woman tottering on the edges of the runningboard, her tiny gray face lost in the folds and bulk of an enormous black chinchilla coat. He saw the two men reach out to support her, her gloved hand fluttering and failing. The two men led her into the house at an incredibly solicitous snail’s-pace, as pedestrians rushed by unnoticing. He saw them labor the few steps together, someone opened the door from inside, they tottered over the threshold, and the door of the house was closed upon the red slopes of the sun.

  In a cafeteria on uptown Broadway at dinnertime he entered pensively through the revolving doors. He had seen the cafeteria from outside, and people eating at tables, and he wanted to go in because it was cold outside and the street seemed suddenly deserted. Now he was shot around from behind and literally sent staggering into the place as a horde of poker-faced men and women streamed in from the street that had been empty and elbowed him as they passed. He just stood there gaping, as another fresh horde revolved in, streamed around him, jostled him, and rushed to the slot-windows and counters. Finally he ate a piece of pie sitting at a table with three other men. No one looked up or said a word, their eyes hidden beneath dark hat brims. When they had eaten they walked away, and new ones sat down silently as before.

  Coming home on the subway train he sat on the hard, narrow, shelf-like seat and looked at the people with a modest, abashed, naked curiosity. They gazed through him idly, chewing gum, musing, waiting for something, for their station-stop or for someone to throw away a newspaper. He sat directly opposite a whole shelf-full of human beings and tried like them to gaze straight into space and through their faces and figures, but he could not do it.

  He remembered a Negro youngster he had overheard talking in a men’s room in Chicago, he suddenly thought of it now for the first time since it had happened. This boy, drunk, had been sitting on the floor in a smash of bottles, lolling and rolling his head and bleeding from some awful fight, saying: “I’m goin’ to New Yawk! I been all over an
d I been beat aroun’ and I been busted ’n’ beat ’n’ hauled-ass off to jail for nawthin’, I been everywheah, I been all aroun’—but I ain’t nevah been to New Yawk! And I’m goin’ to New Yawk. Thass wheah I’m goin’—New Yawk! Yeah! NEW YAWK! Thass the place for me, thass wheah I’M goin’!”

  He remembered how everyone had always talked about New York. “I hear there’s plenty work down there, George, all kinds of jobs, no trouble at all!” “New York? Say now, there’s one place where you can have a good time! My uncle Jerry was down there once on a weekend and you oughta hear about the hot numbers he hooked up with!” “I’d like to get out of this damn town and go someplace, New York maybe, do things in a big way. The Great White Way! Times Square! They say some of those Wall Street financiers down there started off as errand boys!” The movies about New York: Scene—Iowa City. Hero—“Darling, I know it’s going to be hard for us being apart but I must go to New York and at least find out if I’ve got the stuff in me, just give me the chance to find out!” Heroine—“And if you fail, Jim, it won’t make any difference to me, I’ll wait for you here, always” (the waiting is always sad in Iowa). New York—the one place in all the roundaway world where everything is different from anywhere else, simply because it happens in New York.

  One night, early in December, Martin stood huddled in his coat on Union Square and stared astoundedly as a man in a dirty tattered robe made a speech to a handful of shivering men. It was incredible. This poor demented man actually did look like a saint, he really wore the hairshirt of the wilderness. There he stood, a mournful ramshackle wreck of a being, bearded, rheumyeyed, blue with cold, his mouth flapping and simpering with rubbery lips—the whole sickly ecstasy of him there on the Square beneath the sparkling towers of the city at night.