by Jack Kerouac
As the father turned sternly to his bottles, Wesley had to shake hands with a half dozen grinning barflies.
Mr. Martin ranged glasses all along the bar with the slow flourish of a man who is performing a ritual of deep significance. Bill, Meade, and Eathington took seats beside Wesley. When the glasses had all been filled with Scotch, Mr. Martin poured himself a stiff portion in a water glass and turned slowly to face the entire gathering. A deep silence reigned.
“To the kid,” toasted Mr. Martin, glass aloft.
They all drank without a word, including Wesley. When that was done, the night was on for Wesley and his shipmates, for the first thing the old man did was to refill their glasses.
“Drink up!” he commanded. “Wash the other one down!” They did.
Eathington went to the nickelodeon and played a Beatrice Kay recording.
“My old man was in show business,” he shouted to the room in general; and to prove this he began to shuffle sideways across the barroom floor, cap in one hand and the other palm up in a vaudeville attitude that convulsed Everhart into a fit of laughter; Nick was bored. Wesley, for his part, was content to refill his glass from the quart bottle his father had left standing before them.
Fifteen minutes of this, and Everhart was well on his way to being drunk; every time he would drain his glass, Wesley would refill it gravely. Meade had lapsed into a reverie, but after a long stretch of that, he looked up and spoke to Everhart, stroking his moustache in sensual abstraction: “Wes tells me this is your first trip, Everhart.”
“Yes, it is,” admitted Bill apologetically.
“What were you doing?”
“Teaching at Columbia University, an assistant . . .”
“Columbia!” exclaimed Meade.
“Yes.”
“I was kicked out of Columbia in thirty-five,” laughed Meade. “My freshman year!”
“You?” said Bill. “Thirty-five? I was working for my master’s degree then; that probably explains why I didn’t know you.”
Nick fingered his moustache and pulled at its ends thoughtfully.
“Why were you thrown out?” pursued Bill.
“Oh,” said Nick flippantly, waving his hand, “I only went there with the express purpose of joining the students’ Union. I was kicked out inside of a month.”
“What for?” laughed Bill.
“I believe they said it was because I was a dangerous radical, inciting to riot and so forth.”
Mr. Martin was standing in front of them.
“All set, boys?” he asked solemnly.
“That we are; Mr. Martin,” smiled Bill. Mr. Martin reached a hand over and punched Wesley playfully. Wesley smiled faintly, very much the bashful son.
“Got enough to drink?” growled the father, his bushy white eyebrows drawn together in a sober, serious glare.
“Yup,” answered Wesley with modest satisfaction.
The old man glared fixedly at Wesley for a space of seconds and then turned back to his work with ponderous solemnity.
Everhart had found a new comrade; he turned to Nick Meade enthusiastically and wanted to know all about his expulsion from Columbia.
Nick shrugged nonchalantly: “Not much to tell. I was simply bounced. I got myself a job downtown in a drugstore, down on East Tenth Street. When I found out the other employees weren’t organized, I took a few of them up to a Union a couple of blocks away. When the manager refused to recognize our right of union, we sat down; he hired others so the next morning we picketed up and down. You should have seen him howl!”
“Did he give in?”
“He had to, the old crum.”
“What’d you do after that?”
“Have another drink,” offered Wesley to both of them, filling their glasses. When they went back to their conversation, Mr. Martin returned and began talking softly to Wesley in what seemed to Everhart a disclosure of a confidential nature.
“I hooked up with a couple of the boys,” resumed Nick, lighting up a cigarette. “One night we decided to go to Spain, so off we went. We joined up with the Abe Lincoln International Brigade there. Three months later I was wounded outside of Barcelona, but you’d be surprised where. The nurse . . .”
“You fought for the Loyalists!” burst Everhart incredulously.
“Yeah”—caressing his moustache.
“Let me shake your hand on that, Meade,” said Bill holding out his hand admiringly.
“Thanks,” said Nick laconically.
“I wish I’d have done the same,” raced Bill. “It was a rotten deal for the Spanish people, doublecrossed from every direction . . .”
“Rotten deal?” echoed Nick with a scoff. “It was worse than that, especially in the light of the way the whole satisfied world took it! There was Spain bleeding and the rest of the world did nothing; I got back to America all in one piece expecting to hear fireworks, and what did I see? I swear, some Americans didn’t even know there’d been a war.”
Everhart maintained a nodding silence.
“Those foul Fascists had all the time in the world to gird up, and who can deny it today? Franco took Spain and nobody raised a finger in protest. And how many of my buddies were killed for nothing? It wasn’t nothing then, we were fighting Fascists and that was all right; but now that it’s all over, and we look back on it, we all feel like a bunch of suckers. We were betrayed by everyone who could have helped us; including Leon Blum. But don’t think for a moment that any of us have thrown up the towel—the more we get skunked, betrayed, and knifed in the back, I tell you, the more we’ll come back fighting, and some day soon, we’re going to do the dishing out . . . and the Spanish Loyalists as well.”
Nick stroked his moustache bitterly: “My buddie’s dishing it out right now,” he said at length. “I wish to hell I were with him . . .”
“Where is he?”
“He’s fighting with the Red Army. After we stole through Franco’s lines we crossed the Pyrenees over to France. We knocked around Paris until they picked us up and deported us. From there we went to Moscow. When I left, he stayed behind; Goddamn it, I should have stayed too!”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I met an American girl up there and shacked up with her; she was selling magazines for the Soviet. We came back to New York and holed up in Greenwich Village, and we’ve been living there since—got married three months ago—I’ve been in the Merchant Marine for three years now.”
Everhart adjusted his glasses: “What’s going to be your next move? Fighting French?”
“This is my next move—the merchant marine. We carry goods to our allies, don’t we? We’re fighting Fascism just as much as the soldier or sailor.”
“True,” agreed Everhart proudly.
“Of course it’s true,” spat Nick savagely.
“What are you going to do after the war?” pursued Bill.
“Après la guerre?” mused Nick sadly. “There’ll still be a hell of a lot to fight for. I’m going back to Europe. France maybe. Watch our smoke . . .”
“Well, not to be personal, but what do you intend to do with your life in general?” asked Bill nervously.
Nick look at him blandly.
“Fight for the rights of man,” he said quickly. “What else can one live for?”
Everhart found himself nodding slowly. Nick’s blue, searching eyes were on him, eyes, Everhart thought, of the accusing masses, eyes that stirred him slowly to speak his mind by virtue of their calm challenge.
“Well,” he began, “I hope you won’t think I’m an old line fool . . . but when I was a kid, seventeen to be exact, I made speeches on Columbus Circle . . . I stood there and spoke to them out of my heart, young and immature and sentimental though it was, and they didn’t hear me! You know that as well as I do. They’re so ignorant, and in their ignorance, they are so pathetic, so helpless! When the Redbaiters hissed, they smiled at my plight . . .”
“The old story,” interrupted Nick. “That sort of thing won’t
get us anywhere, you know that! You were doing more harm than good . . .”
“I know that, of course, but you know how it is when you’re young . . .”
Nick grinned: “They had my picture all over the hometown front page at sixteen, the scandal of the community, the town radical—and guess what?”
“What?”
“My old lady was pleased! She used to be a hellcat herself, suffragette and all that . . .”
They laughed briefly, and Everhart resumed: “Well, at nineteen I gave it all up, disillusioned beyond recall. I went around there for awhile snapping at everyone who spoke to me. And slowly I sank all my being into my English studies; I deliberately avoided social studies. As you can imagine, the years went by—my mother died—and whatever social conscience I had in the beginning left me altogether. Like Rhett Butler, I frankly didn’t give a damn . . . I ate up literature like a hog—especially Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Chaucer, Keats, and the rest—and left a brilliant enough record to win me an assistant professorship in the university. Whatever social protest I came across in my lectures I treated from a purely objective point of view; in the reading and discussion of Dos Passos a few summers ago, I drew from his works simply from a literary standpoint. By George, where I started by deliberately avoiding Socialism I believe I wound up not particularly interested anyway. Insofar as I was in the university, living a gay enough though fruitless life, I didn’t find the need to bother.” Nick was silent.
“But I’ll tell you something, those years taught me one lesson, and that was not to trust a lot of things. I always believed in the working class movement, even though I allowed it to slip my mind, but I know now what I didn’t believe in all those years, with more unconscious rancor that with conscious hate.” Bill peered eagerly.
“What was that?” asked Nick with cold suspicion.
“Politics for one thing, sheer politics. Politicians survive only if they make certain concessions; if they don’t they go out of office. Thus, idealist or not, a politician is always faced with a vexing choice, sooner or later, between justice and survival. This will inevitably serve to mar his ideals, won’t it?”
“That sounds natural; what else?”
“A dependence on group . . . I mistrust that, first because it means bending one’s mind to a dogmatic group-will. When I say this, I refer not to an economic group where, to my mind, sharing and sharing alike is only natural, and inevitable too. I mean a spiritual group . . . there should be no such thing as a spiritual group; each man to his own spirit, Meade, each man to his own soul.”
“What are you telling me this for?” Nick snapped.
“Because the day may come when the materialistic war you fight on the forces of Fascism and reaction will be won by you and yours—and me, by George. And when that day arrives, when the sharing class will rule, when the rights of man become obvious to all mankind, what will you be left with? Your equal share of the necessities of life?”
Nick’s eyes flashed: “You poor dope! Do you mean to tell me a war against Fascism is a purely materializing one, as you say? A war against an ideology that has burned the books, has conceived a false hierarchy of the human races, has confused human kindness with weakness, has stamped upon all the accumulated cultures of Europe and substituted them with a cult of brutality inconceivable beyond . . .”
“Hold on!” laughed Bill, who, though astonished at Meade’s unsuspected erudition, had nonetheless a point to make and would cling to it. “You’re not telling me a thing. I want you to pause and think: erase the factor of Fascism, because it doesn’t figure in our argument. Fascism is a freak, a perversion, a monster if you wish, that must be destroyed, and will be destroyed. But once that is done, our problems won’t be solved; even if we write a satisfactory peace, a peace for the common man, the problem won’t be solved. A world where men live in cooperative security is a world where there is no hunger, no want, no fear, and so forth. Men will share . . . I’m taking a long-range view of the whole thing . . . men will live in a world of economic equality. But the spirit will still be vexed; you seem to think it won’t. Men will still deceive one another, cheat, run away with the other man’s wife, rob, murder, rape . . .”
“Oh,” cried Nick mincingly “you’re one of those so-called students of human nature.” He turned away.
“Wait! I’m not the retrogressive voice sounding from the pages of the Old Testament. I, too, like you, will deny human frailty as long as I live—will try to cure human nature in the tradition of the Progressive movement. But I don’t see a quick and easy way out; I think anti-Fascists live under that delusion. They point to fascism as all of evil, they point to every home grown Fascist by nature as all of evil. They think that by destroying Fascism, they destroy all evil in the world today, where, I believe, they only destroy what may be the last grand concerted evil. When that is done, disorganized individual evil will still be with us . . .”
“Truisms!” spat Nick. “A child would know that!”
“And I more than anyone else, if you will pardon my insufferable vanity . . . but I brought up the subject for one single reason, to point out that being simply anti-Fascist is not enough. You’ve got to go beyond anti-Fascism, you’ve got to be more meticulous in your search for a life’s purpose.”
“It’s purpose enough for anyone in these times,” countered Nick. “You don’t know Fascists like I do, I’m afraid.”
“You say,” persisted Bill swiftly, “you live for the rights of man; aren’t you supposed to live for life itself? Are the rights of man . . . life?”
“They are to me,” was the icy rejoinder.
“And only a part of life to me,” smiled Bill, “—an important part of life, but not all of life.”
“Do you know what you are?” posed Nick, a good deal annoyed. “you’re one of these befuddled, semi-aristocratic ‘intellectuals’ who will rave at discussion tables while men starve outside . . .”
“I would not, and incidentally we were assuming regimented injustice had ceased.”
At that, Nick stared squarely into Bill’s eyes.
“All right Professor, let’s say it has,” Nick proposed.
“What are you left with besides economic . . .”
“I’m left with a world,” interrupted Nick, “where all your blasted theories of this and that can at least be put into action without suppression!”
“Didn’t I say Fascism was our more immediate problem?” pressed Bill.
“You did. So what?”
“Then, this later problem, can it be solved with a sword of righteousness or by the spirit itself?”
“This later problem, as you call it, is not important at this particular moment,” Nick rejoined. “Your profound theories don’t arrest me in the least . . .”
“Which makes you an iconoclast!” smiled Bill.
“All right, and which makes you a new type of reactionary . . . and a slacker; here, let’s drink up the Scotch and argue some other time.” Nick was disgusted.
Bill raised his glass to him: “Well, at least you’ll have someone to argue with on this trip. Let’s you and I drink to Socialism!”
Nick turned a weary, lidded eye on Bill: “Please don’t be a fool . . . I hate Socialists more than I do Capitalists.”
Bill smiled craftily and started to sing: “Arise ye prisoners of starvation, a better world’s in birth, for justice thunders . . .”
“That’s enough!” interrupted Nick impatiently.
“What’s the matter?”
“Let’s drink our toasts; but I don’t want to sing the International in a tavern—it’s a drunken insult.”
Bill touched Nick’s glass. “Sorry—here’s to.”
During this lengthy argument, Wesley had been drinking steadily; almost, it would seem, with a deliberate desire to become intoxicated. Eathington, in the meantime, had found himself someone to talk to in a back booth.
While Everhart and Meade talked on, Mr. Martin returned to Wesley and again s
poke to him privately in a low tone.
“She just got in—she says she’s comin’ right over,” said the old man, gazing anxiously at his son. Both father and son stared fixedly at one another, with the same immobile intensity Everhart had first noticed in Wesley when they had exchanged a long glance in the Broadway bar.
They held their gaze and said nothing for many seconds. Then Wesley shrugged.
“None o’ my doin’, son,” growled Mr. Martin. “She located me an’ told me if you ever came to call her up. She’s been in that hotel for two months waitin’ for you to pop up. None o’ my doin’.”
Wesley refilled his glass: “I know it ain’t.”
The old man glared heavily at his son, wiping the bar briefly with a towel. It was not ten thirty; the room had filled up considerably, keeping the waitress busy serving drinks from the bar to the booths.
“Well, it won’t do no harm,” added Mr. Martin. “I got some work to do.” He went back to his work solemnly. By this time, a young assistant bartender had arrived, and he now dashed furiously from bottle to mixer, glass to tap as the orders mounted. Mr. Martin, though he moved slowly, succeeded in mixing more drinks and pouring more beers, all of which set swifter pace for the harassed young helper. Music from the nickelodeon played incessantly while the screen door slammed time and again as patrons arrived or left. The air was close and sticky, though the ceiling fans succeeded in blowing a beery breeze about.
Wesley filled Bill’s and Nick’s glasses with a morose silence while they launched enthusiastically into a discussion of Russian and French films. He turned to his own drink and threw it down quickly; the Scotch had burned his throat, settled in his stomach, diffusing warmly its potent mystery.
She was coming! He was going to see her again after all these years . . . Edna. His little wife . . .
Wesley lit up a cigarette and inhaled the smoke deeply, bitterly: he could feel the mellow wound in his lungs, the tang in his nostrils as the smoke slipped out in thin double spurts. He blanked the cigarette viciously.
What the hell did she want? Hadn’t she fouled up everything enough? A little fool, she was, a crazy one if there ever was . . . and he had married her ten years ago at seventeen, the worse simpleton in town, marrying one of those silly summer tourist’s daughters, eloping in a blind drunk.