by Jack Kerouac
Ah Seattle, sad faces of the human bars, and you dont realize you’re upsidedown—Your sad heads, people, hang down in the unlimited void, you go skipplering around the surface of streets and even in rooms, upsidedown, your furniture is upsidedown and held by gravity, the only thing prevents it from all flying off is the laws of the mind of the universe, God—Waiting for God? And because he is not limited he can not exist. Waiting for Lefty? Same, sweet Bronx-singer. Nothing there but mind-matter essence primordial and strange with form and names you have for it just as good—agh, I get up and go out to buy my wine and paper.
A drinking and eating place is still showing the fight but also what attracts me (on the rosy blue neon-coming-on street) is a fellow in a vest carefully chalking out the day’s baseball scores on a huge Scoreboard, like old days—I stand there watching.
In the paper store my God a thousand girlie books showing all the fulsome breasts and thighs in eternity—I realize “America’s going sex-mad, they cant get enough, something’s wrong, somewhere, pretty soon these girlie books’ll be impossibly tight, they’ll show you every crease and fold except the hole and nipple, they’re crazy”—Of course I look too, at the rack, with the other sexfiends.
Finally I buy a St. Louis Sporting News to catch up on the baseball news, and a Time Magazine, to catch up on world news and read all about Eisenhower waving from trains, and a bottle of Italian Swiss Colony port wine, expensive one of the best—I thought—With that I go cutting back down the drag and there’s a burlesque house, “I’ll go to the burlesque tonight!” I giggle (remembering the Old Howard in Boston) (and recently I’d read how Phil Silvers had put on an oldtime burlesque act in some burlesque somewhere and what a delicate art it was)—Yes—and is—
For after an hour and a half in my room sipping that wine (sitting with stockinged feet on the bed, pillow back), reading about Mickey Mantle and the Three-I League and the Southern Association and the West Texas League and the latest trades and stars and kids upcoming and even reading the Little League news to see the names of the 10-year-old prodigy pitchers and glancing at Time Magazine (not so interesting after all when you’re full of juice and the street’s outside), I go out, carefully pouring wine in my polybdinum canteen (used earlier for trail thirsts, with red bandana around my head), stick it in my pocket of jacket, and down into night—
Neons, Chinese restaurants
coming on—
Girls come by shades
Eyes—strange Negro kid who was afraid I would criticize him with my eyes because of the segregation issue down South, I almost do criticize him, for being so square, but I dont want to attract his attention so I look away—Filipino nobodies going by, with hands hanging, their mysterious poolhalls and bars and barrels of ships—A Surrealistic street, with cop at a bar counter stiffens when he sees me walk in, as tho I’d’s about to steal his drink—Alleys—Views of old water between older rooftops—Moon, rising on downtown, coming up to be unnoticed by Grant’s Drug Store lights shining white near Thom McAns, also shining, open, near marquee of Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing movie with pretty girls waiting in line—Curbstones, dark back alleys where hotrodders do the screaming turn—racing the motor on their tires, skeek!—hear it everywhere in America, it’s tireless Joe Champion biding his time—America is so vast—I love it so—And its bestness melts down and does leak into honkytonk areas, or Skid Row, or Times Squarey—the faces the lights the eyes—
I go into seaward backalleys, where’s nobody, and sit on curbs against garbage cans and drink wine, watching the old men in the Old Polsky Club across the way playing pinochle by brown bulb light, with green slick walls and timeclocks—Zooo! goes an oceangoing freighter in the bay, Port of Seattle, the ferry’s nosing her say from Bremerton and plowing into the piles at bottom’s otay, they leave whole pints of vodka on the white painted deck, wrapt in Life Magazine, for me to drink (two months earlier) in the rain, as we nose in—Trees all around, Puget Sound—Tugs hoot in the harbor—I drink my wine, warm night, and mosey on back to the burlesque—
I walk in just in time, to see the first dancer.
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Aw, they’ve got little sis merriday up there, girl from across the bay, she oughtnt be dancing in no burlesque, when she shows her breasts (which are perfect) nobody’s interested because she aint thrown out no otay hip-work—she’s too clean—the audience in the dark theater, upsidedown, want a dirty girl—And dirty girl’s in back getting upsidedown ready before her stagedoor mirror—
The drapes fade back, Essie the dancer goes, I take a sip of wine in the dark theater, and out come the two clowns in a sudden bright light of the stage.
The show is on.
Abe has a hat, long suspenders, keeps pulling at them, a crazy face, you can see he likes girls, and he keeps smacking at his lips and he’s an old Seattle ghost—Slim, his straight man, is handsome curlyhaired pornographic hero type you see in dirty postcards giving it to the girl—
ABE Where the hell you been?
SLIM Back there countin the money.
ABE What the hell d’you mean, money—
SLIM I’ve been down at the graveyard
ABE What were you doin there?
SLIM Burying a stiff
and such jokes—They go through immense routines on the stage before everybody, the curtains are simple, it’s simple theater—Everybody gets engrossed in their troubles—Here comes a girl walking across the stage—Abe’s been drinkin out of the bottle meanwhile, he’s been tricking Slim into emptying the bottle—Everybody, actors and audience, stare at the girl that comes out and strolls—The stroll is a work of art—And her answers better be juicy—
They bring her out, the Spanish dancing girl, Lolita from Spain, long black hair and dark eyes and wild castanets and she starts stripping, casting her garments aside with an “Olé!” and a shake of her head and showing teeth, everybody eats in her cream shoulders and cream legs and she whirls around the castanet and comes down with her fingers slowly to her cinch and undoes the whole skirt, underneath’s a pretty sequined virginity-belt, with spangles, she jams around and dances and stomps and lowers her haid-hair to the floor and the organist (Slim) (who jumps in the pit for the dancers) is wailing tremendous Wild Bill jazz—I’m beating with my feet and hands, it’s jazz and great!—That Lolita goes slumming around then ends up at the side-drape revealing her breast-bras but wont take them off, she vanishes offstage Spanish—She’s my favorite girl so far—I drink her a toast in the dark.
The lights go bright again and out come Abe and Slim again.
“What ya been doin out in the graveyard?” says the Judge, Slim, behind his desk, with gavel, and Abe’s on trial—
“I’ve been out there burying a stiff.”
“You know that’s against the law.”
“Not in Seattle,” says Abe, pointing at Lolita—
And Lolita, with a charming Spanish accent, says “He was the stiff and I was the under-taker” and the way she says that, with a little whip of her ass, it kills everybody and the theater is plunged into dark with everybody laughing, including me and a big Negro man behind me who yells enthusiastically and claps at everything great—
Out comes a middleaged Negro dancer to do us a hotfoot tap dance, hoof, but he’s so old and so puffing he cant finish up and the music tries to ride him (Slim on the Organ) but the big Negro man behind me yells out “Oh ya, Oh ya” (as if to say, “Awright go home”)—But the dancer makes a desperate dancing panting speech and I pray for him to make good, I feel sympathetic here he is just in from Frisco with a new job and he’s gotta make good somehow, I applaud enthusiastically when he goes off—
It’s a great human drama being presented before my all-knowing desolation eyes—upsidedown—
Let the drapes open more—
“And now,” announces Slim at the mike, “presenting Seattle’s own redhead KITTY O’GRADY” and here she comes, Slim leaps to the Organ, and she’s tall and got green eyes and red hair and min
ces around—
(O Everett Massacres, where was I?)
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Pretty miss O’Grady, I can see her bassinets—Have seen them and will see her someday in Baltimore leaning in a redbrick window, by a flowerpot, with mascara and her hair masqueraded in shampoo permanent—I’ll see her, have seen her, the beauty spot on her cheek, my father’s seen the Ziegfeld Beauties come down the line, “Aint you an old Follies girl?” asks W. C. Fields of the big 300-pound waitress in the Thirties Luncheonette—and she says, looking at his nose, “There’s something awfully big about you,” and turns away, and he looks at her behind, says, “Something awfully big about you too”—I’ll have seen her, in the window, by the roses, beauty spot and dust, and old stage diplomas, and backdoors, in the scene that the world was made out to present—Old Playbills, alleys, Shubert’s in the dust, poems about graveyard Corso—Me’n old, Filipino’ll pee in that alley, and Porto Rico New York will fall down, at night—Jesus will appear on July 20 1957 2:30 P.M.—I’ll have seen pretty pert Miss O’Grady mincing dainty on a stage, to ‘amuse the paying customers, as obedient as a kitty. I think “There she is, Slim’s broad—That’s his girl—he brings her flowers to the dressing-room, he serves her”—
No, she tries as hard to be naughty but caint, goes off showing her breasts (that take up a whistle) and then Abe and Slim, in bright light, put on a little play with her.
Abe is the judge, desk, gavel, bang! They’ve arrested Slim for being indecent. They bring him in with Miss O’Grady.
“What’s he done indecent?”
“Aint what he’s done, he is indecent.”
“Why?”
“Show him, Slim”
Slim, in bathrobe, turns his back to the audience and opens his flaps—
Abe stares and leans almost falling from the judge desk—“Great day in the morning, it cant be! Who ever saw a thing like that? Mister, are you sure that’s all yours? It’s not only indecent it aint right!” And so on, guffaws, music, darkness, spotlight, Slim says triumphant:
“And now—the Naughty Girl—SARINA!”
And jumps to the organ, ragdown jazz drag, and here comes naughty Sarina—There’s a furor of excitement throughout the theater—She has slanted cat’s eyes and a wicked face—cute like cat’s mustache—like a little witch—no broom—she comes slinking and bumping out to the beat.
Sarina the fair-haired
bright
Bedawnzing girl
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She immediately gets down on the floor in the coitus position and starts throwing a fit at heaven with her loinsies—She twists in pain, her face is distorted, teeth, hair falls, shoulders squirm and snake—She stays on the floor on her two hands supporting and knocking her works right at the audience of dark men, some of em college boys—Whistles! The organ music is lowdown get-down-there what-you-doin down there blues—How really naughty she is with her eyes, slant blank, and the way she goes to the righthand box and does secret dirty things for the dignitaries and producers in there, showing some little portion of her body and saying “Yes? No?”—and sweeping away and coming around again and now her hand-tip sneaks to her belt and she slowly undoes her skirt with tantalizing fingers that snake and hesitate, then she presents a thigh, a higher thigh, a pelvic corner, a belly corner, she turns and reveals a buttock corner, she lolls her tongue out—she’s sweating juice at every pore—I cant help thinking what Slim does to her in the dressingroom—
By this time I’m drunk, drank too much wine, I’m dizzy and the whole dark theater of the world swirls around, it’s all insane and I remember vaguely from the mountains it’s upsidedown and wow, sneer, sleer, snake, slake of sex, what are people doing in audience seats in this crashing magician’s void hand-clapping and howling to music and a girl?—What are all those curtains and drapes for, and masques? and lights of different intensity playing everywhere from everywhere, rose, pink, heart-sad, boy-blue, girl-green, Spanish-cape black and black-black? Ugh, ow, I dont know what to do, Sarina the Naughty One is now on her back on the stage slowly moving her sweet loins at some imaginary God-man in the sky giving her the eternal works—and pretty soon we’ll have pregnant balloons and castoff rubbers in the alley and sperm in the stars and broken bottles in the stars, and soon walls’ll be built to hold her protect inside some castle Spain Madkinghouse and the walls will be cemented in with broken beer glasses and nobody can climb to her snatch except the Sultan organ who’ll bear witness to her juices then go to his juiceless grave and her grave be juiceless too in time, after the first black juices the worms love so, then dust, atoms of dust, whether as atoms of dust or as great universes of thighs and vaginas and penises what will it matter, it’s all a Heaven Ship—The whole world is roaring right there in that theater and just beyond I see files of sorrowing humanity wailing by candlelight and Jesus on the Cross and Buddha sitting neath the Bo Tree and Mohammed in a cave and the serpent and the sun held high and all Akkadian-Sumerian antiquities and early sea-boats carrying courtesan Helens away to the bash final war and broken glass of tiny infinity till nothing’s there but white snowy light permeating everywhere throughout the darkness and sun—pling, and electromagnetic gravitational ecstasy passing through without a word or sign and not even passing through and not even being—
But O Sarina come with me to my bed of woes, let me love you gently in the night, long time, we got all night, till dawn, till Juliet’s rising sun and Romeo’s vial sink, till I have slaked my thirst of Samsara at your portal rosy petal lips and left saviour juice in your rosy flesh garden to melt and dry and ululate another baby for the void, come sweet Sarina in my naughty arms, be dirty in my clean milk, and I’ll detest the defecate I leave in your milky empowered cyst-and-vulva chamber, your cloacan clara file-hool through which slowly drool the hallgyzm, to castles in your hassel flesh and I’ll protect your trembling thighs against my heart and kiss your lips and cheeks and Lair and love you everywhere and that’ll be that—
At the drape she parts her bra and shows the naughty teats and vanishes inside and show’s over—lights come on—everybody leaves—I sit there sipping my last possible shot, dizzy and crazy.
It dont make no sense, the world is too magical, I better go back to my rock.
In the toilet I yell at a Filipino cook, “Aint those beautiful girls, hey? Aint they?” and he loath to admit it admits it to the yelling bum at the urinal—I go back, upstairs, to sit out the movie for the next show, maybe next time Sarina’ll fly everything off and we’ll see and feel the infinite love—But my God the movies they show! Sawmills, dust, smoke, gray pictures of logs splashing in water, men with tin hats wandering in a gray rainy void and the announcer: “The proud tradition of the Northwest—” then followed by color pictures of water skiers, I cant make it, I leave the show by the side left exit, drunk—
Just as I hit the outside night air of Seattle, on a hill, by redbrick neons of the stagedoor, here come Abe and Slim and the colored tapdancer hurrying and sweating up the street for the next show, even on an ordinary street the tapdancer cant make it without puffing—I realize he has asthma or some serious heart defect, shouldnt be dancing and hustling—Slim looks strange and ordinary on the street and I realize it’s not him’s making it with Sarina, it’s some producer in the box, some sugar candy—Poor Slim—And Abe the Clown of Eternity Drapes, there he is talking as ever and yakking with big interested face in the actual streets of life, and I see all three of them as troupers, vaudevillians, sad, sad—Around the corner for a quick drink or maybe gulp a meal and hurry back for the next show—Making a living—Just like my father, your father, all fathers, working and making a living in the dark sad earth—
I look up, there are the stars, just the same, desolation, and the angels below who dont know they’re angels—
And Sarina will die—
And I will die, and you will die, and we all will die, and even the stars will fade out one after another in time.
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In a Chinese rest
aurant in a booth I order pan fried chow mein and dig the Chinese waitress and the younger beautifuller Filipino waitress and they watch me and I watch them but I lose myself in my chow mein and pay the bill and leave, dizzy—No possible way in the world for me to get a girl tonight, the hotel wouldnt let her in and she wouldnt come anyway, I realize I’m just an old fuck of 34 and nobody wants to go to bed with me anyway, a Skid Row bum with wine on his teeth and jeans and dirty old clothes, who cares? Everywhere up and down the street other characters like me—But as I go in my hotel here comes a neat crippled man with a woman, they go up the elevator, and an hour later after I’ve had my hot bath and rested and got ready to sleep I hear them creak the bed in the next room in real sexual ecstasy—“It must all depend on the way,” I think, and go to sleep girl-less with girls dancing in my dreams—Ah Paradise! bring me a wife!
And already in my life I’ve had two wives and sent one away and ran away from the other, and hundreds of lover-girls everyone of em betrayed or screwed in some way by me, when I was young and open-faced and not ashamed to ask—Now I look at my mirror face scowl and it’s disgusting—We have sex in our loins and wander beneath the stars on hard sidewalks, pavement and broken glass cant receive our gentle thrust, our gentle thrust—Everywhere bleak faces, homeless, loveless, around the world, sordid, alleys of night, masturbation (the old man of 60 I once saw masturbating for two hours straight in his cell in the Mills Hotel in New York)—(Nothing was there but paper—and pain—)
Ah, I think, but somewhere ahead in the night waits a sweet beauty for me, who will come up and take my hand, maybe Tuesday—and I’ll sing to her and be pure again and be like young arrow-slinging Gotama vying for her prize—Too late! All my friends growing old and ugly and fat, and me too, and nothing there but expectations that dont pan out—and the Void’ll Have Its Way.
Praise Lord, if you can’t have fun turn to religion.