Desolation Angels: A Novel

by Jack Kerouac

  80

  Amazing me as he is, what amazes me even more is Raphael coming back with his manuscript in his hand, from the yard, where he silently studied the trees, and says, “I have a leaf in my pamphlet”—To Cody who deals and disbelieves, hears him say it, but I see the look he gives Raphael—But it’s two different worlds, Urso and Pomeray, both their names mean something that may once have been Casa D’Oro, which would make it no coarser than Corso, but it’s the Italian Sweet Singer vs. the Irish Brabacker—crash—(it’s Keltic, wood cracking in the sea)—Raphael saying “All Jack has to do is write little insensible ditties and be the nowhere Hamlin’s leader”—songs like that from Raphael.

  “Well if that’s what he wants to do check check check,” comes from Cody like a machine without music and singing—

  Raphael sings: “You! my aunts always warned me about you Pomeray—they tole me not to go down the Lower East Side”—

  “Burp”

  That’s the way they fought back and forth—

  Meanwhile sweet and gentle Jesus Father Joseph, Kevin with the Joseph beard, smiles and listens and all round and bent on the floor, sitting up.

  “What are ya thinkin, Kevin?”

  “I’m thinkin what a bad day it’ll be tomorrow if I cant find that goddam driver’s license.”

  Cody digs Kevin, of course, has dug him for months, as a fellow Irish father perhaps as well as fellow cat—Cody has been in and out of their house eating a hundred thousand myriads of times, bringing the True Law.—Cody is now called “The Preacher” by the Namer, Mai, who calls Simon Darlovsky “The Mad Russian” (which he is)—

  “Where’s old Simon these days?”

  “O we’ll pick him up there this afternoon bout five,” says Cody very rapidly matter of factly.

  “Simon Darlovsky!” yells Raphael. “What a mad cat!” And the way he says mad, m-a-h-d, real Eastern—real crazy strange from the Baltic alley cats—real fence-talk … like you hear little kids talking in gas yards around the used tire lots—“He’s insane,” bringing his hands to his head, then knocking off and grinning, sheepishly, a strange little humble absence of pride in Raphael, who’s also sittin on the floor now crosslegged, but as though he’d collapsed like that.

  “Strange strange world,” says Cody marching away a little bit then wheeling and coming back to our group—The Chekhovian Angel of Silence falls over all of us and we’re all dead quiet, and listen to the hmm of the day and the shh of the silence, and finally Cody coughs, just a little, says “Hnf—haf”—indicating, with his big smokes, the Indian mystery—Which Kevin acknowledges with a typical upward tender look toward Cody of amazement and wonder, out of his mind with blue-eyed clear astonishment—Which Cody also sees, eyes slitted now.

  Penny is still sitting there (and has been) in the formal Buddha position for all this half and an hour of talk and thought—Buncha nuts—We all wait for the next thing to happen. It’s happening all over the world only some places they supply prophylactics, and some places they talk business.

  We havent got a leg to stand on.

  81

  It’s only a story of the world and what happened in it—We all go down to Kevin’s main house and his wife Eva (sweet sisterly greeneyed barefooted longhaired beauty) (who lets little Maya wander around naked if she wants, which Maya does, going “Abra abra” in the high grass) a big lunch spread out but I’m not hungry, in fact announce a little sententiously “I dont eat anymore when I’m not hungry, I learned that on the mountain” so of course Cody and Raphael eat, voraciously, yakking at table—While I listen to records—Then after lunch Kevin is kneeling there on his favored straw-weaved rug unfolding a delicate record from its onion-papered delicatenesces in a white album, the most Hindu-perfect little guy in the world, as Raphael directs him, they’re also going to play the Gregorian Chants—It’s a bunch of priests and brothers singing beautifully and formally and strangely together to old music older than stones—Raphael is very fond of music especially Renaissance music—and Wagner, the first time I met him in New York in 1952 he’d yelled “Nothing matters but Wagner, I want to drink wine and trample in your hair!” (to girl’d Josephine)—“Balls on that jazz!”—tho he’s a regular little hepcat and should like jazz and in fact his rhythm comes from jazz tho he doesnt know it—but there’s a little Italian Bird in his makeup has nothing to do with modern cacophonic crashbeats—Judge him for yourself—As for Cody he loves all music and is a great connoisseur, the first time we played him Indian Hindu music he realized right away that the drums (“The most subtle and sophisticated beat in the world!” says Kevin, and Kevin and I even speculated whether Dravidia had contributed anything to Aryan Hindu themes)—Cody’d realized that the soft gourds, the soft drums, the kettle Blonk bottom soft hand-drums, were simply drums with loose skins—We play the Gregorian Chants and also Indian again, every time Kevin’s two little daughters hear it they start chattering happily, they’ve heard it every night all spring (before) at bed time with the big Hi Fi wall speaker (the back of it) opening and blasting right out on their cribs, the snake flutes, the wood charmers, the softskinned gourds, and the sophisticated old Africa-softened-by-Dravidia drumbeat, and above all the old Hindu who has taken a vow of silence and plays the oldworld Harp with showers of impossible heavengoing ideas that had Cody stupefacted and others (like Rainey) (in the big Dharma Bum season we’d had before I left) stoned outa their heads—All up and down the quiet little tar road, you can hear Kevin’s Hi Fi booming soft chants of India and high Gothic priests and lutes and mandolins of Japan, even Chinese incomprehensible records—He’d had those vast parties where big bonfires were built in the yard and several celebrants (Irwin and Simon Darlovsky and Jarry) had stood around it stark naked, among sophisticated women and wives, talking Buddhist philosophy with the head of the Asian Studies himself, Alex Aums, who positively didnt care and sipped his wine only and repeated it to me “Buddhism is getting to know as many people as you can”—

  Now it’s noon and lunch over, a few records, and we cut out back to the city, with my old manuscripts and clothes which I’d left in a wooden box in Kevin’s cellar—I owe him $15 from previous Spring so I sign him two of my Sedro-Woolley traveler’s checks and he mistakenly (in the cellar) (and gently with sad eyes) hands me back a crumpled handful of dollar bills, four, one short, which I cant for the life of me bring up—For Kevin is by now stoned (on wine of lunch and all) and saying “Well when do I see you again Jack?” as we’d gone one night six months earlier and sat in the Waterfront railyards with a bottle of tokay and wallgazed (like Bodhidharma the bringer-of-Buddhism-to-China) a vast Cliff that protrudes from the lower haunches of back Telegraph Hill, at night, and both of us had seen the waves of electromagnetic-gravitational light coming out of that mass of matter, and how glad Kevin was that with me he’d spent a good night of wine and wallgazing and street-prowling instead of the usual beer in The Place—

  We get back in the little coupe and U-run and all wave at Kevin and Eva, and go back across the Bridge to the City—

  “Ah Cody, you’re the craziest cat I’ve ever known,” concedes Raphael now—

  “Listen Raphael, you said you was Raphael Urso the Gambling Poet, come on boy, come on to the racetrack with us tomorrow,” I urge—

  “Dammit we could make it today if it wasnt so late—” says Cody—

  “A deal! I’ll go with you! Cody you show me how to win!”

  “It’s in the bag!”

  “Tomorrow—we’ll pick you up at Sonya’s”

  Sonya is Raphael’s girl but in the earlier year Cody had (naturally) seen her and fallen in love with her (“O man you dont realize how mad Charles Swann was over those girls of his—!” Cody had once told me … “Marcel Proust couldnt possibly have been a queer and written that book!”)—Cody falls in love with every pretty chick around, he’d chased her and brought his chess board to play with her husband, one time he’d brought me and she’d sat there in slacks in the chair with
her legs spread before the chessplayers looking at me and saying “But doesnt your life as a lonely writer get monotonous, Duluoz?”—I’d agreed, seeing the slit in her pants, which Cody naturally while slipping Bishop to Queen’s Pawn Four had also seen—But she finally put Cody down saying “I know what you’re after,” but then left her husband anyway (the chess pawn) (now gone from the scene temporarily) and gone to live with newly-arrived-from-the-east yakking Raphael—“We’ll go pick you up at Sonya’s pad”

  Raphael says “Yeah, and I’m having a fight with her leaving this week, Duluoz you can have her”

  “Me? Give her to Cody, he’s mad—”

  “No, no,” says Cody—he’s got her off his chest—

  “We’ll all go to my pad tonight and drink beer and read poems,” says Raphael, “and I’ll start packing”

  We come back to the coffee place where Irwin is back waiting, and here simultaneously in the door walk in Simon Darlovsky, alone, done with his day’s work as ambulance driver, then Geoffrey Donald and Patrick McLear the two old (old-established) poets of San Fran who hate us all—

  And Gia walks in too.

  82

  By now I’ve slipped out and stuck a poorboy of california rotgut wine in my belt and started to belt at it so everything is blurry and exciting—Gia comes in with her hands in her skirt as ever and says in her low voice “Well it’s all over town already, Mademoiselle Magazine is going to take all your pictures Friday night—”

  “Who?”

  “Irwin, Raphael, Duluoz—Then it’ll be Life Magazine next month.”

  “Where did you hear this?”

  “Count me out,” says Cody just as Irwin is grabbing his hand and telling him to come, “Friday I’ll be on duty Friday night”

  “But Simon will have his picture taken with us!” calls Irwin triumphantly, grabbing Darlovsky by the arm, and Darlovsky nods simply—

  “Can we have a sex orgy after?” says Simon.

  “Count me out,” says Gia—

  “Well I’d may not be around for that either,” says Cody, and everyone is pouring coffee themselves at the urn and sitting at three different tables and other Bohemians and Subterraneans are coming in and out—

  “But we’ll all make it together!” yells Irwin. “We’ll all be famous—Donald and McLear you come with us!”

  Donald is 32, plump, fair-faced, sad-eyed, elegant, looks quietly away, and McLear, 20’s, young, crew cut, looks blankly at Irwin: “O we’re having our pictures taken separately tonight”

  “And we’re not in it!?” yells Irwin—then he realizes there are plots and intrigues and his eyes darken in thought, there are alliances and rifts and separations in the holy gold—

  Simon Darlovsky says to me “Jack I’ve been looking for you for two days! Where you been? What you doin? Dyav any dreams lately? Anything great? Dany girls loosen your belt? Jack! Look at me! Jack!” He makes me look at him, his intense wild face with that soft hawk nose and his blond hair crew cut now (before a wild shock) and his thick serious lips (like Irwin’s) but tall and lean and really only just outa high school—“I’ve got a million things to tell you! All about love! I’ve discovered the secret of beauty! It’s love! Everybody love! Everywhere! I’ll explain it all to you—” And in fact at the forthcoming poetry reading of Raphael (his first introduction to the avid poetry fans of 50’s Frisco) he was scheduled (by arrangement and consent of Irwin and Raphael who giggled and didnt care) to stand up after their poems and deliver a big long spontaneous speech about love—

  “What will you say?”

  “I’ll tell them everything—I wont leave nothing out—I’ll make them cry—Beautiful brother Jack listen! Here’s my hand to you in the world! Take it! Shake! Do you know what happened to me the other day?” he suddenly cries in a perfect reproduction of Irwin, elsetimes he imitates Cody, he’s just 20—“Four P.M. go into library with a rasperry pill—what do you know?—”

  “Rasperry?”

  “Dextidrene—in my stomach”—patting it—“See?—high in my stomach I came upon Dostoevsky’s Dream of a Queer Fellow—I saw the possibility—”

  “Dream of a Ridiculous Man, you mean?”

  “—the possibility of love within the clasel halls of my heart but not outside my heart in real life, see, I got a glimpse of the love life Dostoevsky had in his deep light dungeon, it stirred my tears to move in my heart to swell all over blissful, see, then Dostoevsky has the dream, see he puts in the drawer the gun after he wakes up, was gonna shot himself, BANG!” socks his hands, “he felt a even extra keen desire to love and to preach—yes to Preach—that’s what he said—‘To Live and Preach that Bundle of Truth I know so Well’—so that when the time comes for me to give that speech when Irwin and Raphael read their poems, I’m going to embarrass the group and my self with ideas and words about love, and why people dont love each other as much as they could—I’ll even cry in front of them to get my feelings across—Cody! Cody! Hey you crazy youngster!” and he runs over and pummels and pulls Cody, who goes “Ah hem ha ya” and keeps glancing at his old railroad watch, ready to go, as we all mill—“Irwin and I have been long l-o-n-g talks, I want our relationship to build like a Bach fugue see where the all the sources move in between each other see—” Simon stutters, brushes back his’ hair, really very nervous and crazy, “And we’ve been taking our clothes off at parties me and Irwin and having big orgies, the other night before you came we had that girl Slivovitz knew and took her in the bed and Irwin made her, the one you broke her mirror, such a night, it took me a half minute to come the first time—I’ve been having no dreams, in fact a week and a half ago I had a wet dream without remembering the dream, how lonely …”

  Then he grabs me “Jack sleep read write talk walk fuck and see and sleep again”—He’s sincerely advising me and looking me over with worried eyes, “Jack you gotta get laid more, we must get you laid tonight!”

  “We’re going to Sonya’s,” interjects Irwin who’s been listening with glee—

  “We’ll all take our clothes off and do it—Come you Jack do it!”

  “What’s he talkin about!” shouts Raphael coming over—“Crazy Simon!”

  And Raphael pushes Simon kindly and Simon just stands there like a little boy brushing back his crew cut and blinking at us, innocently, “It’s the truth!”

  Simon wants to be “as perfect as Cody,” he says, as a driver, a “talker,”—he adores Cody—You can see why Mal the Namer called him the Mad Russian—but always doing innocent dangerous things, too, like suddenly running up to a perfect stranger (surly Irwin Minko) and kissing him on the cheek out of exuberance, “Hi there,” and Minko’d said “You don’t know how close you just came to death.”

  And Simon, beset on all sides by prophets, couldnt understand—luckily we were all there to protect him, and Minko’s kind—Simon a true Russian, wants the whole world to love, a descendant indeed of some of those insane sweet Ippolits and Kirilovs of Dostoevsky’s 19th Century Czarist Russia—And looks it too, as the time we’d all eaten peyotl (the musicians and I) and there we are banging out a big jam session at 5 P.M. in a basement apartment with trombone, two drums, Speed on piano and Simon sitting under the all-day-lit red lamp with ancient tassels, his rocky face all gaunt in the unnatural redness, suddenly then I saw: “Simon Darlovsky, the greatest man in San Francisco” and later that night for Irwin’s and my amusement as we tromped the streets with my rucksack (yelling “The Great Truth Cloud!” at gangs of Chinese men coming out of card rooms) Simon’d put on a little original pantomime à la Charley Chaplin but peculiar to his own also Russian style which consisted of his running dancing up to a foyer filled with people in easy chairs watching TV and putting on an elaborate mime (astonishments, hands of horror to mouth, looking around, woops, tipping, humbling, sneaking off, as you might expect some of Jean Genêt’s boys goofing in Paris streets drunk) (elaborate masques with intelligence)—The Mad Russian, Simon Darlovsky, who always reminds me of my Cous
in Noël, as I keep telling him, my cousin of long ago in Massachusetts who had the same face and eyes and used to glide phantomly around the table in dim rooms and go “Muee hee hee ha, I am the Phantom of the Opera” (in French saying it, je suis le phantome de l’opera-a-a-a)—And strange too, that Simon’s jobs have always been Whitman-like, nursing, he’d shaved old psychopaths in hospitals, nursed the sick and dying, and now as an ambulance driver for a small hospital he was batting around San Fran all day picking up the insulted and injured in stretchers (horrible places where they were found, little back rooms), the blood and the sorrow, Simon not really the Mad Russian but Simon the Nurse—Never could harm a hair of anybody’s head if he tried—

  “Ah yes, aw well,” says Cody finally, and goes off, to work on the railroad, with instructions to me in the street, “We go to the racetrack tomorrow, you wait for me at Simon’s”—(Simon’s where we all sleep) …

  “Okay”

  Then the poets Donald and McLear offer to drive the rest of us home two miles down Third Street to the Negro Housing Project where even right now Simon’s 15½ year old kidbrother Lazarus is frying potatoes in the kitchen and brushing his hair and wondering about the moon-men.

  83

  That’s just what he’s doing as we walk in, frying potatoes, tall goodlooking Lazarus who stands up in high school freshman class and says to the teacher “We all want to be free to talk”—and always says “Dyav any dreams?” and wants to know what you dreamed and when you tell him he nods—Wants us to get him a girl too—He has a perfect profile like John Barrymore, will really be a handsome man, but here he’s living alone with his brother, the mother and other crazy brothers are back east, it’s too much for Simon to take care of him—So he’s being sent back to New York but he doesnt want to go, in fact he wants to go to the moon—He eats up all the food Simon buys for the house, at 3 A.M. he’ll get up and fry all the lamb chops, all eight of them, and eat em without bread—He spends all his time worrying about his long blond hair, finally I let him use my brush, he even hides it, I have to recover it—Then he puts on the radio fullblast to Jumpin George Jazz from Oakland—then he just simply wanders out of the house and walks in the sun and asks the weirdest questions: “Dyou think the sun’ll fall down?”—“Is there monsters where you said you were?”—“Are they goyna have another world?”—“When this one’s done?”—“Are you blindfolded?”—“I mean really blindfolded like with a hanky round your eyes?”—“Are you twenty years old?”