The Town and the City: A Novel

by Jack Kerouac

  “You’re crazy,” she said, looking with meek seriousness into his eyes.

  Peter was suddenly appalled. “Why?” he asked. He had a grin on his face but it became foolish and flustered, he realized that he was not making sense. He was suddenly sad and mortified, with shame and a kind of misery, and the flashing sense that he was always lying now, always foolish somehow.

  “Because … just because—well, you’re not a mill worker and I’m not the boss’s daughter.”

  “I know, we’re us,” he said with a sick feeling. He sat down on the chair again, but got up immediately and sat on the window-sill. “I’m going to make up my mind, right now, I’m going to make up my mind—if it’s possible to make up my mind. And for the rest of my life I’ll stick to it. I don’t care what anybody says. Judie, I used to be just like that too, I mean the skating and the big times. Hell, I used to be just like any other kid. Something’s happened to me!” he moaned. “My father knows it too!”

  “Oh, him!” she almost snarled.

  “He’s a great guy, a great man, and I never really knew it till now. My mother too. They’re real people, I ought to be a real son. Why does it always have to be ought? What the hell’s wrong with all of us that it’s always ought? And what happened?” He strode up and down the room nervously.

  “Petey, don’t … don’t cry.”

  “What are you talking about!” he sneered.

  “Well, you talk just like you were crying, Petey. Petey, let’s play the mill worker and the daughter. I never really meant what I said.”

  “No!” he yelled furiously, opening the window and looking out at the rain.

  “But it isn’t nice to talk like this, and make fun of ourselves. That’s what that damn book I was reading does all the time, everybody talks, talks.”

  “We won’t talk,” said Peter, getting up. He came up from behind her and put his arms around her shoulders and hugged her, leaning on her, with his head against hers. “We won’t talk and we’ll just lie still for hours and look at each other,” he grinned triumphantly, and they swayed together, thinking.

  They heard a strange sound an hour later. The apartment was on the top floor, and it sounded as though someone was wandering across the roof in the rain and leaning over the ledges to look down. Down on the street they heard shouts and the running footsteps. Then everything became quiet again.

  Pete and Judie resumed their grave, cozy pleasures. The bed-lamp was on, shining warm and pink in the little room, the radio was playing, and there was a spread of avocado salad and ripe olives and asparagus tips in a big dish, from which they picked absentmindedly, with slow relish, as they went on with their reading and knitting.

  Suddenly a window opened in the front room. They heard the loud splatter of rain, the window closed again, and there was a dead silence.

  “Oh, Petey! what’s that?” whispered Judie in a panic. “They were chasing somebody. Oh, it’s a burglar!” she whispered almost gleefully now. “It’s a burglar! Say something, say something!”

  “Who’s there!” growled Peter in a loud voice. He got up, put on his shoes, and glared into the darkness of the front room. “Of course it’s not a burglar,” he said, turning to Judie. “But there’s somebody there, I can see the shadow. By geezus, I’m not scared”—he went on in a loud voice—“and I’m gonna brain somebody!”

  Judie was staring greedily around the door jamb, utterly frightened.

  Suddenly a little voice, like a four-year-old boy mimicking his little sister, was heard in the darkness: “It’s me, it’s me, it’s only me.”

  Pete and Judie gaped at each other.

  “Do you know that?” he demanded with amazement.

  “No, but it’s—”

  “It’s Kenneth Wood, Kenneth Wood,” piped up the little voice. “Kenneth Wood climbing the fire escape and coming in from the roof. Tee-hee! tee-hee!”

  “Is that you, Ken?” growled Peter.

  “Well now, you can never tell,” piped the little voice, “it might be an impostor playing Kenneth Wood and carrying a knife! Tee-hee! tee-hee!”

  Peter lit a match, leaned into the room, looked at his friend, turned back to the bedroom, and lay down with his book again.

  “You simply must finish that last paragraph!” said the little voice from the other room. “Tee-hee! the last paragraph is the false paragraph.”

  “Well, come in, come in!” cried Peter, grinning despite himself. “I won’t read the last paragraph. What are you up to? What happened?” he demanded.

  Judie went in the other room and turned on the light and looked around. Kenneth Wood was standing in a corner by the window. He was all wet, his clothes were dripping, his hair was down in streaks in his face, and there was blood on his nose. One side of his suede jacket was black with ink, which was dripping on the floor.

  “What happened to you?” Judie cried, startled. “There’s blood on your face!”

  Wood looked around him furtively, fearfully, in a mad imitation of fear, then suddenly made a long grave face, almost like the mask of a sad clown. He took off his suede coat, strode limping into the room, threw the coat on the floor, picked up a towel and began drying his head, and finally sat down on the floor lighting a cigarette with sudden profound gravity. He was a tall gangling youngster of about twenty, with a shock of black hair, great powerful nervous hands, and quick, peering eyes that looked up out of a screwed-up, sardonic, gravely astounded face. And he looked awful in his dirty inky rags.

  They waited nervously for him to say something but he just stared at the floor moodily.

  “Did you get in a fight?” inquired Peter finally.

  “Yiss!” he piped up again in the small child’s voice, but suddenly began speaking in his normal voice, rapidly. “Every time I go in a bar someone wants to buy me a drink and then fight. Jeanne was there, of course, flirting with a bunch on the other side, and this other bunch was buying me drinks and then they invited me outside for a fight.”

  “What did you say to them?”

  “Nothing—that’s the way it is, always. I boffed someone real hard and then they boffed me, about three of them, and I boffed someone else and started running like hell. I lost them downstairs, I went over the fence in the alley and came up the fire escape. Did you hear them bellowing down there?”

  “Yeah …”

  “That was the chorus and the end of the play … I should imagine.”

  At this Peter got up and began walking around the small bedroom nervously. Though he had little room to pace about because Kenneth was sitting on the floor and Judie was standing, he nevertheless brushed past them, walking around. “Dammit!” he kept muttering.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Judie laughed.

  “Well, don’t worry about it,” said Kenny, jumping up and rummaging suddenly in the closet. “By the way, Martin, you look more woebegone than ever. What’s the matter now? Don’t you know what’s so utterly sad about the past? It has no future. The things that came afterwards have all been discredited.”

  “Who’s talking about that?” frowned Peter. He picked up his leather jacket and put it on and sat huddled on the bed, as though chilled. He gazed at Judie and Kenny as though he had never seen them before. “I’ll tell you what I think,” he said, “I think it’s a lousy rotten world when three guys gang up on one guy like that—”

  “Oh, let’s have more of those splendid Galloway mill worker remarks!” grinned Kenny gleefully, coming from behind the closet door with an old pair of shoes and some shoe polish. He sat down on the floor and began polishing the shoes industriously. Judie sat down near him on the little hassock and watched what he was doing with happy pride.

  “Ah!” she said. “Kenny always finds something to do, he’s just like me.”

  “And I’m just a jerk, I know,” said Peter. “But, hell, I do worry when things like that happen, I don’t exactly worry so much as I get sore. I can’t make out why guys are always starting fights, and with you, al
most every time you go in a bar. Like that time we came back from Greenland—remember that fight in Boston?”

  “Oh, that was a splendid fight,” grinned Kenny, rubbing the shoes busily. “Polish soldiers, or I guess they were fliers, starting a fight with two Venezuelan seamen, and there’s little Kenny and little Petey in the middle of it. And that Turkish seaman, remember that tremendous Turkish seaman who looked like he was all coal and oil from the top of his little red fez down to the bottom of his little curly toes?”

  “Huh?”

  “Remember how he broke it up and began making a speech about the compañeros and travalleros of the world, a Turkish Communist making a speech in Spanish. Oh, a splendid potpourri that was!”

  “But it wasn’t funny!” cried Peter, and gazed at Ken with amazement and curiosity, almost angrily.

  Ken looked at him. “You are the most woebegone of all God’s little pieces of shark feed!”

  “Huh?”

  “Shark feed! shark feed! Come on now, let’s have the divine gossip, the little facts one by one about your woebegone state this evening. Let’s get down to the bottom of it, quick!—or you shan’t have your spinach!” Judie hugged herself with delight, devouring him with shining eyes, leaning gleefully towards him in the hassock. She was mad about Kenny.

  “Both of you are bats,” muttered Peter, not however displeased.

  “Go down and buy a bottle, Martin, here’s my share. You’re in one of your Third Avenue moods, and Judie and I shall listen attentively to all you have to say.” But as he said that, Kenneth, with the serious, slightly astounded look he always wore, glanced up at Peter sadly.

  “Why don’t you have Judie fix your face?” said Peter. “And I’ll bring back a bottle.”

  “Yiss! yiss!”

  Peter went down to the street in the dark misty rain to a liquor store, bought a fifth of whiskey, and wandered around the streets for a while, deep in thought. It wasn’t raining any more, some stars were already appearing in one part of the sky over Fifth Avenue on the other side of Central Park.

  He walked along the park. In Galloway there was no Central Park, no miles of traffic lights glistening on the pavement, no yellow cabs speeding by with the secrecy and dark luxurious mystery of New York at night. He began thinking with peculiar delight of a magazine he used to read as a little boy, the Shadow Magazine. In the Shadow Magazine, he remembered now, it was always raining mistily in New York, it was always night, and the Shadow, elegantly disguised as Lamont Cranston the man-about-town, millionaire esthete and amateur criminologist, was always speeding around Manhattan in a yellow cab and going somewhere swiftly, craftily, to cope with the “forces of crime.” In the Shadow Magazine Lamont Cranston always stepped out of the cab as the Shadow himself, mysteriously leaving his fare money on top of the meter and vanishing in a mystery of cloaks. The cabby was always amazed and always rubbed his jaw in wonder. Peter used to read these stories and then go walking around the streets of Galloway, and curse his life because it was not New York and there were no yellow cabs and the rainy mysteries of penthouses at night. He was all of fourteen years old, still reading about the Shadow when even little Mickey began to peruse those pages. He remembered the long earnest discussions they had had about the Shadow, he and Mickey, fourteen years old and seven years old, in the old house long ago.

  What would he have thought, at fourteen, if he could have looked forward to this night? “I wouldn’t have believed it!” he muttered out loud. “Wearing dirty khaki pants and an old leather jacket and walking around with a bottle of whiskey on Central Park West.” He looked around him angrily. He remembered that Judie and Ken were waiting for him, he suddenly remembered them. Could he have foreseen them? Could there be an element of dark rainy adventure in living with a childlike gleeful girl or in having a friend who came in by the roof and called him “woebegone”?

  He wondered at that moment why he had really gone back to Galloway, and in the same instant he was riven with awful misty grief as he thought of his mother and father living in Brooklyn just across the dark of the sky—and Mickey there too, little Mickey.

  Again he thought of Judie and Ken, and he thought of them with sudden tender feeling. It was true that he was Judie’s lover, but she was like a child, a happy crazy child, and it seemed to him that she was his sister, after all—it was sad that she was his sister. And Ken was a boy he had met in the merchant marine, who stayed in New York now working for an advertising agency, his uncle’s business, and was supposed to live with his family, his father and great-grandmother, in the East River apartment, but was hardly ever home, and got drunk every night and climbed fire-escapes and got in fights, and had been doing this ever since he was fifteen, and always ran around with blondes like Jeanne. It seemed that he was his brother after all, just like his brother, and that was sad too.

  “And everything’s like that,” he thought, “I never did grow up since I was fourteen, none of us ever do. And all of us are crazy, I’m sure of that, not only me but all of us.” He chuckled thinking of it. “Oh, everything’ll be all right, I can feel it now. And one more thing!” he cried out, holding up his finger, alone on the sidewalk—“I’m going to make up my mind like I told Judie, although she doesn’t know what I mean. I’m going to make a big decision and stick to it, some day soon.” He hurried back to the apartment.

  Jeanne, Kenny’s girl, had come back from the bar where the fight started. She was a beautiful blonde girl, lazy, sensual, always murmuring vaguely, always smiling dreamily—a hapless unconcerned kind of girl who yielded to Kenny’s demonic wildness but more often drifted away, almost floating dreamily, to flirt with other boys. She was a professional model, her family lived in Long Island somewhere, she had been to Vassar.

  Kenny had taken a shower and put on one of Peter’s clean white shirts. He was lying on the couch, holding up a book at arm’s length and reading to the girls. He threw the book down when he saw Peter, grabbed up the bottle, unscrewed it, and took one long preliminary drink. “Martin, I put on your clean shirt. I have responsibilities, responsibilities! I have to go to work in the morning!”

  “It’s all right with me.”

  “You can have my dirty shirt—it’s very expensive. Well, well, well, you still look like the angel of sadness. Have a drink, quick, and tell us all about it!”

  “All about what?” scoffed Peter.

  “Very well then, I shall tell us all about it, I shall tell us a parable!” he said in the little boy’s voice again.

  “Do you know what Kenneth did tonight?” spoke up the languid Jeanne. “Just before the fight—you know, Kenny, they started the fight because you looked so awful.”

  “Oh, yiss, oh, yiss.”

  “Why did he look awful?” cried Judie.

  “He took a bath in a puddle in pouring rain, right on the corner. He had a bottle of ink in his pocket and sat down in the puddle and began washing himself, all his clothes and everything with an old piece of Lifebuoy soap he found in the gutter. The bottle broke, all the ink spilled on him, and then he went in the bar like that.” Jeanne recited all this with amusement, reclining on the couch with her dreamy smile.

  “No wonder!” cried Peter, waving his hand at Kenny. “You’re mad, man, you’re mad—when you get drunk.”

  “But the parable!” cried Kenny, jumping up and pointing at all of them, and dancing around in a little jig. “See? first there’s God, and God bemuses himself and says ‘Well, now let’s see, I must make a perfect world, that’s what I must.’ So he makes men and women and looks at them with that judicious air of a carpenter getting his boards and nails together. ‘Hmm,’ God says, and he walks away with his hands clasped in back of him, deep in thought, and all the little human beings jump up and down yelling ‘When do we start? Yiss! Yiss! when do we start?’ God strides down to the world and watches what happens.”

  Peter, sitting on the small table in the middle of the room, listening with a grin; Judie, hugging herself and jumping up and do
wn on her chair; Jeanne, reclined, listening with a crazy smile—were all amazed, they were always amazed by Kenneth.

  “God sits down on a fire hydrant and watches how everybody disports themselves in the world. That’s when all the trouble starts, everything, all the things they cry about in books and newspapers, wars, crime, violence, adultery, deceit, and whatnot parlous. God says to himself, ‘Now I will see just exactly how to make a perfect world. Hmm. There’s a mistake here, it won’t do! Poof! peef! He plucks up a little derring-do human being of a nobleman’s son and throws him in the pot. Then he sees a little girl there and she’s not doing right and poof! peef! to the pot with her!”

  “What’s the pot for?” yelled Judie excitedly.

  “Wait! wait!” cried Ken, holding up his little finger. “This one won’t do, poof-peef, in the pot! and this one won’t do—same thing! In the pot!” He picked at the air with his little finger. “This one will do, this one is nice, a Pilgrim or something, John Bunyan, great man, and a Jude the Obscure sort of guy walking around down there in the field and deliberately not stepping on the worms. Nice! nice!—but, there’s the but you see, there’s always the but, because a perfect world is in the making and no one is perfect. God’s trying anyway. This is not the finished copy. In the pot with John Bunyan, in the pot with the Jude the Obscure man, in the pot with the whole lot! Yiss! Now God is a cook.”

  “A cook?”

  “A chef! In the pot he’s making a stew, out of that stew he’s going to make a broth, out of that broth he’s going to make one drop of perfect essence, and that’s what he’s going to start his real heart’s-desire world with, that drop from the broth of the stew in the pot. See?”

  “But then what?” mumbled Peter sourly.

  “Twang in the pot they go. Poof! peef!”—and Kenny plucked at the air daintily and finally ran around the room gathering things and throwing them on the couch—“God’s real busy, sometimes he gets tired, his heart’s overworked, he’s pooped, his endodermis protrudes painfully. But he’s got a goal, a goal! And look down there,” he added with sudden gravity and absentmindedness, pointing at the floor, “the little human beings who haven’t been plucked yet are looking around and wondering, and they’re laughing and jumping up and down, no, they’re crying, now they’re scratching their heads, they don’t know what to make of it all, now they have a look of positive gratitude on their faces, they’re beholden to what they see down there and to what they think they see upstairs. Oh, nice! nice! they keep saying it’s nice, they write poetry about the trees and bees. Suddenly,” he jumped up, “poof! peef! they’ve been snatched up and thrown in the pot. And finally the time has come. The world is over, it’s the end of the world and God rests. He goes over his notes. He boils up the contents of his pot and takes a million years extracting the juice and elixir that he wants just right, he smacks his lips, tasting it like a French chef, and says—‘Ah sacre-bleu! c’est ça!’ He’s got just what he wants, now he knows how to beat the devil.”