by Jack Kerouac
Raphael wants to win money, never mind the poems—
We end up just sitting in benches in the upper grandstand and cant see the starting gate even tho it’s right down there, I wanta go on the fence and explain racing to Raphael—“See the starter in his box—he’ll press a button that rings the bell and bats open the bat cages and out they lunge—Watch those jockeys, every one of em’s got hand a steel—”
Johnny Longden is among the great jockeys today, and Ishmael Valenzuela, and the very good Mexican called Pulido who seems to be so observant watching the crowd from his horse, actually interested, while the other jockeys brood and bite—“Cody had a dream last year that Pulido was riding a railroad train around the track the wrong way and when he came around the final clubhouse turn the whole train exploded and all’s left is Pulido in the little horse-engine, winning alone—I said ‘Wow, Pulido won’—so Cody gives me an extra $40 to play on him on every race and he doesn’t hit once!”—I tell this to Raphael, who bites his fingernails—
“I think I’ll go back to Number Nine”
“Folly the system, man!” pleads Cody—“I told you about Lazy Willy how they found him dead with $45,000 worth of uncashed win-tickets—”
“Listen Raphael,” I put in, “Lazy Willy just sat around sipping coffee between races, with a pince nez probably, and came out at last minute odds and saw the score and went and made his bet and went and took a piss while that race was on—It’s all in the numbers—The second choice’s the consensus of the multitude reduced to a second degree which has been mathematically figured to come in so many percent times so if you keep jivin your bets according to the losses you’ve suffered you’re bound to win, unless a tragic streak of losses—”
“That’s right, tragic, now listen Raphael and you’ll make some money—”
“Okay okay!”—“I’ll try it!”—
Suddenly the crowd oohs as a horse rears in the starting gate and gets all tangled up and throws his man, Raphael gasps with astonished horror—“Look, the poor horse is caught!”
The grooms rush up and straddle and work and get the horse out, which is immediately scratched from the race, all bets off—“They can get hurt!” yells Raphael painfully—This doesn’t concern Cody so much for some reason, maybe because he was a cowboy in Colorado and takes horses for granted, as once we’d seen a horse spill and thrash in the backstretch and nobody cared, everybody yelled for the oncoming far turn, there’s the horse with broken leg (doomed to be shot) and the inert jockey a little white spot on the track, maybe dead, certainly injured, but all eyes are on the race, how these mad angels do race to their Karma disbenefaction—“What about the horse?” I’d yelled as the roar surged up down the homestretch and as penance I’d kept my eye on the scene of the accident, completely ignoring the outcome of the race, which Cody won—The horse was destroyed, the jockey ambulanced to the hospital—and not by Simon—The world’s too big—It’s only money, it is only life, the crowds roar, the numbers flash, the numbers are forgotten, the earth is forgotten—memory is forgotten—the diamond of silence seems to go on without going on—
The horses break and whang out by the rail, you hear the riding crops of the jocks planking the flanks, you hear boots and whistles, “Yah!” and off they mill around the first turn and everybody turns eyes back to the form sheets to see the numbers representing the symbol of what’s happening around the Nirvana track—Cody’s and Raphael’s horse is well in front—
“I think he’ll stay in front,” I say, from experience, a good 2½ lengths lead and loping and preserved by the rider’s restraining hand—Around the far turn and in they come, you see that pathetic flash of spindly thoroughbred legs so breakable, then the dust cloud as they strightaway home, the jocks are wild—Our horse stays right in front and holds out from a contender and wins—
“Ah! Aye!” they rush to collect a pittance—
“See? Just stick with your old buddy Cody and you cant lose!”
Meanwhile we take trips around to the men’s room, the beer counter, the coffee counter, hotdogs, and finally when the last race is coming up the skies have grown late-afternoon gold and long lines of bettors sweat for the buzzer—the characters of the track who looked so confident and fresh in the first race are all now disheveled-looking, heads down, crazed, some of them scour the floor for lost tickets or odd programs or dropped dollars—And it’s also the time for Cody to begin to notice the girls, we have to trail several around the track and stand around peeking at them. Raphael says “Ah never mind the women, who’s the horse now? Pomeray you’re a sex fiend!”
“Look Cody you’d a won the first race that we missed,” I say pointing at the big blackboard—
“Ah”—
We get sorta sick of one another and take separate leaks at urinals but we’re all in it together—The final race is run—“Ah let’s go back to the sweet city,” I think, which is showing across the bay, full of promise that never takes place except in the mind—I keep getting the feeling too, as Cody wins he really loses, as he loses he really wins, it’s all ephemeral and cant be grabbed by the hand—the money, yes, but the facts of patience and eternity, no—Eternity! Meaning more than all time and beyond all that little crap and on forever! “Cody you cant win, you cant lose, all’s ephemeral, all is hurt,” are my feelings—But while I am a sly non-gambler who wont even gamble on heaven, he is the earnest Christ whose imitation of Christ is in the flesh before you sweating to believe that all does really good-and-bad matter—All shining and shaking to believe it—a priest of life.
He ends up with a highly successful day, every horse came in the money, “Jack you sonumbitch if you’d a squeezed two little measly dollars outa those jeans each race and done what I said, you’d have a nice forty-dollar bill tonight,” which is true but I aint sorry—except for the money—Meanwhile Raphael has come out just about even and still has his thirty dollars—Cody wins forty and pockets it all proud in neat little arrangements with the small bills on the outside—
It’s one of his happy days—
We come walking out of the racetrack and past the parking lot to where the little coupe is free-parked by a railroad spur track, and I say, “There’s your parking place, you just park there every day,” because now he’s won you wont stop him from coming every day—
“Yes, m’boy, and besides what you’re seeing there will be a Mercedes-Benz in six months—or at first at least a Nash Rambler Stationwagon”
89
Ah lake a dreams, everything is changed—We get in the little car and go back and as I see the little reddened city on that white Pacific, I remember the sight of Jack Mountain in high mountain dusks how the redness hoared the topmost peak-wall till the sun all went down, and still a little was left from the height and the curve of the earth, and there’s a little dog being led by a leash across super-traffics and I say “The little pups of Mexico are so happy—”
“—as I live and breathe and I didnt keep it up didnt stay with didnt nothing, I just let my system run away from me and played other horses and not enough and lost five thousand dollars last year—dont you see what I’m in for this?”
“Solid!” yells Raphael. “We’ll make it together! You and me! You make it back and I make it on!” and Raphael gives me one of his rare halfhearted grins. “But I see you now, I know you now, Pomeray, you’re sincere—you really wanta win—I believe you—I know you’re Jesus Christ’s contemporary frightening brother, I just dont want to be hun-gup on the wrong bets, it’s like being hun-gup on the wrong poetry, the wrong people, the wrong side!”
“Everything’s right side,” I say.
“Maybe but I dont want crash—I dont wanta be no Fallen Angel man,” he says, piercingly sorrowful and serious. “You! Duluoz! I see you your ideas goin down Skid Row drink with the bums, agh, I’ve never even thought of doing such a thing, why bring misery on yourself? Let the dog lie.—I wanta make money, I dont wanta say Oh Ah Ogh I’ve lost my way, Oh Ah Gold Hone
y I’ve lost my way, I havent lost my way yet—I’m going to ask the Archangel to let me win. Hark!—the Bright Herald hears me! I hear his trumpet! Hey Cody it’s ta ta tara tara the cat with the long trombone at the start of every race. Do you dig that?”
He and Cody are completely in agreement on everything, I suddenly realize I’ve succeeded in my wait to see them patch up and be friends—It’s happened—There is very little vestige of doubt in either one, now—As for me, I’m in an excited state because I’ve been in an airy dungeon for two months and everything pleases and penetrates me, my snowy view of light-particles that permeate throughout the essence of things, passes right on through—I feel the Wall of the Emptiness—Naturally it’s perfectly within my interests to see Cody and Raphael glad of each other, it has all to do with the nothing that is all, I have no reason to quibble with the absence of judgment placed in Things by the Absent Judge who builded the world without building it.
Without building it.
Cody lets us off in Chinatown all gleaming to go home and tell his wife he’s won, and Raphael and I go walking down Grant Street in the dusk, bound for different destinations as soon as we see a monster movie on Market Street. “I dig what you meant Jack about Cody at the races. It was real funny, we’ll go again Friday. Listen! I’m writing a real great new poem—” then suddenly he sees chickens in crates in the inside dark Chinese store, “look, look, they’re all gonna die!” He stops in the street. “How can God make a world like that?”
“And look inside,” I say, at back boxes full of white, “the thrashing doves—all the little doves’ll die.”
“I dont want a world like that from God.”
“I dont blame you.”
“That’s what I mean, I dont want it—What a way to die!” indicating the animals.
(“All creatures tremble from fear of punishment,” said Buddha.)
“They cut their necks over barrel,” I say, omitting the “s” in a typical frequent French way of slipping s’ses, which Simon also does as a Russian, both of us stutter a bit—Raphael never stutters—
He just opes his mouth and blasts “It’s all the little doves’ll die my eye would have opened a long time ago. I dont like it anyway. I dont care—Oh Jack,” suddenly he really grimaces to see the birds, standing in the dark street store sidewalk, I dont know if it ever happened before that somebody almost cried in front of Chinatown poultry storewindows, who else coulda done it but some silent saint like David D’Angeli (coming up)—And Raphael’s grimace meaks me a leak-tear right quick, I see it, I suffer, we all suffer, people die in your arms, it’s too much to bear yet you’ve got to go on as though nothing was happening, right? right, readers?
Poor Raphael, who’s seen his father die in images of the rope-line, the buzz of his old home, “We had red peppers drying in the cellar on strings, my mother leaned against the furnace, my sister made crazy” (he describes it himself)—The moon shining on his youth and here’s this Death of Doves looking him in the face, as you and me, but sweet Raphael it’s too much—He is just a little child, I see the way he falls off and sleeps in our midst, leave the baby alone, I’m the old guard of a tender gang—Raphael will sleep in the fleece of the angels and all that black death instead of being a thing of the past I prophesy will be a blank—No sighs, Raphael, no cries?—the poet’s got to cry—“Them little animals will have their necks chopped off by birds,” says he—
“Birds with long sharp knives that shine in the afternoon sun.”
“Yeah”
“And old Zing Twing Tong he lives up there in that pad and smokes opium of the world—opiums of Persia—all he’s got is a mattress on the floor, a Travler portable radio, and his works are under the mattress—It’s described as wretched mean hovels in the San Francisco Chronicle”
“Ah Duluoz, you’re mad”
(Earlier in the day Raphael had said, after that outburst of hands-in-the-air speech, “Jack you’re a giant,” meaning a giant of literature, tho earlier in the day I’d told Irwin I felt like a cloud, from watching them all summer of Desolation, I’d become a cloud.)
“Just I—”
“I’m not gonna think about it, I’m goin home and sleep, I dont wanta dream about wilted pigs and dead chickens in a barrel—”
“You’re right”
We fall to striding straight for Market. There we hike to the Monster movie and first dig the pictures on the wall. “It’s a nowhere picture, we cant go see it,” says Raphael. “There’s no monsters, all it is is a moonman with a suit on, I wanta see monstrous dinosaurs and mammals of the other worlds. Who wants to pay fifty cents to see guys with machines and panels—and a girl in a monstrous lifebelt skirt. Ah, let’s cut out. I’m going home.” We wait for his bus and he takes it. Tomorrow night we’ll meet at that dinner party.
I go happy down Third Street, dont know why—It’s been a great day. It’s an even greater night but I dont know why. The sidewalk is soft as I unroll out of under me. I pass old juke joints where I used to go in and play Lester on the box and drink beers and talk with the cats, “Hey! Whatcha doin down here?” “In from New York,” pronouncing it New Yahk, “The Apple!” “Precisely the Apple” “Down City” “Bebop City” “Bebop City” “Yeah!”—and Lester is playing “In a Little Spanish Town,” lazy afternoons I’d spent on Third Street sittin in sunny alleys drinkin wine—sometimes talking—all the same old most eccentric bo’s in America come cuttin by, in long white beards and broken coats, carrying little pittance paperbags of lemons—I walk past my old hotel, the Cameo, where Skid Row drunks moan all night, you hear them in dark carpeted halls—it’s creaky—it’s the end of world where nobody cares—I wrote big poems on the wall saying:—
The Holy Light is all there is to see,
The Holy Silence is all there is to hear,
The Holy Odor is all there is to smell,
The Holy Emptiness is all there is to touch,
The Holy Honey is all there is to taste,
The Holy Ecstasy is all there is to think …
it’s silly—I dont understand the night—I’m afraid of people—I walk along happy—Nothing else to do—If I were pacing in my mountain yard I’d be just as bad off as I am walking down the city street—Or as well off—What’s the difference?
And there’s the old clock and the neons of the printing equipment building that remind me of my father and I say “Poor Pa” really feeling him and remembering him right there, as tho he could appear, to influence—Tho the influence one way or the other makes no difference, it’s only history.
In the house Simon is out but Irwin is in the bed brooding, also talking quietly to Lazarus who sits on the edge of the other bed. I come in and open the window wide to the starry night and get my sleepingbag ready to sleep for the night.
“What the hell’s you sad about, Irwin?” I ask.
“I’m just thinking Donald and McLear hate us. And Raphael hates me. And he doesnt like Simon.”
“Sure he does—dont try to—” and he interrupts me with a big moan and arms to the ceiling from his disheveled bed:—
“Oh it’s all this beast!—”
Brutish division was taking place in his idea-friends, some who were close and some not, but something beyond my non-political intelligence was percolating in Irwin’s brain. His eyes are dark and smoldery with suspicion, and fears, and silent wrath. His eyes bulge to show it, his mouth is set in a determined Path. He’s going to make it at great cost to his gentle heart.
“I dont want all this fighting!” he shouts.
“Right”
“I just want classical angels”—he’d often said that, his vision of everybody hand in hand in paradise and no bullshit. “Hand in hand it’s got to be!”
Sullen compromises were sullying his air, his Heaven—He had seen the God of Moloch and all the other gods including Bel-Marduk—Irwin had begun in Africa, in the center of it, pouting with sullen lips, and walked on past to Egypt and Babylon and Elam and founded
empire, the original Black Semite who cannot be separated from the White Hamite by words or deductions. He’d seen Moloch’s face of Hate in the Babylonian night. In Yucatan he’d seen the Rain Gods, glooming by a kerosene lamp in the jungle rocks. He broods off into space.