Desolation Angels: A Novel

by Jack Kerouac

  It was a little sad. Bull would be too tired to go out so Irwin and Simon would call up to me from the garden just like little kids calling at your childhood window, “Jack-Kee!” which would bring tears to my eyes almost and force me to go down and join them. “Why are you so withdrawn all of a sudden!” cried Simon. I couldnt explain it without telling them they bored me as well as everything else, a strange thing to have to say to people you’ve spent years with, all the lacrimae rerum of sweet association across the hopeless world dark, so dont say anything.

  We explored Tangiers together, the funny thing too was that Bull had explicitly written to them in New York never to go into a Mohammedan establishment like a tea shop or anything where you sat down socially, they would not be wanted, but Irwin and Simon had come to Tangiers via Casablanca where they’d already strolled into Mohammedan cafés and smoked pot with the Arabs and bought some even to take away. So now we strolled into a strange hall with benches and tables where teenagers sat either sleeping or playing checkers and drinking green mint tea in glasses. The eldest boy was a young hobo in flowing rags and bandages for a hurt foot, barefooted, the robe’s hood over his head like St. Joseph, bearded, 22 or so, Mohammed Mayé by name, who invited us to his table and produced a bag of marijuana which he thumbed into a long-stemmed pipe and lighted and passed around. Out of his tattered robes he pulled out a worn newspaper picture of his hero, Sultan Mohammed. A radio was blaring the endless yellings of Radio Cairo. Irwin told Mohammed Mayé he was Jewish and that was alright with Mohammed and everyone else in the joint, absolutely cool bunch of hipsters and urchins probably of a new “beat” east—“Beat” in the original true sense of mind-your-own-business—Because we did see gangs of bluejeaned Arab teenagers playing rock n roll records in a crazy jukebox hangout full of pinball machines, just like Albuquerque New Mexico or anywhere, and when we went to the circus a big gang of them cheered and applauded Simon when they heard him laugh at the juggler, all turning around, a dozen of them, “Yay! Yay!” like hepcats at a Bronx dance. (Later Irwin traveled further and saw the same thing in all countries of Europe and heard about it going on in Russia and Korea.) Old mournful Holy Men of the Mohammedan world called “Men Who Pray” (Hombres Que Rison), who walked the streets in white robes and long beards, were said to be the only last remaining individuals who could cause gangs of Arab hipsters to disperse with just one look. Cops made no difference, we saw a riot in the Zoco Grande that flared up over an argument between Spanish cops and Moroccan soldiers. Bull was there with us. All of a sudden a seething yelling mass of cops and soldiers and robed oldsters and bluejeaned hoodlums came piling up the alley from wall to wall, we all turned and ran. I myself ran alone down one particular alley accompanied by two Arab boys of ten who laughed with me as we ran. I ducked into a Spanish wine shop just as the proprietor dragged down the sliding iron door, bang. I ordered a Malaga as the riot boomed on by and down the street. Later I met the gang at café tables. “Riots every day,” said Bull proudly.

  But the “ferment” in the Middle East we could all see was not as simple as our passports indicated, where officials (1957) had forbidden us to visit Israel for instance, which had made Irwin mad and for good reasons judging from the fact that the Arabs didnt care if he was Jewish or whichever as long as he came on cool the way he always does anyway. That “international hepness” I mentioned.

  One look at the officials in the American Consulate where we went for dreary paper routines was enough to make you realize what was wrong with American “diplomacy” throughout the Fellaheen world:—stiff officious squares with contempt even for their own Americans who happened not to wear neckties, as tho a necktie or whatever it stands for meant anything to the hungry Berbers who came into Tangiers every Saturday morning on meek asses, like Christ, carrying baskets of pitiful fruit or dates, and returned at dusk in silhouetted parades along the hill by the railroad track. The railroad track where barefooted prophets still walked and taught the Koran to children along the way. Why didnt the American consul ever walk into the urchin hall where Mohammed Mayé sat smoking? or squat in behind empty buildings with old Arabs who talked with their hands? or any thing? Instead it’s all private limousines, hotel restaurants, parties in the suburbs, an endless phoney rejection in the name of “democracy” of all that’s pith and moment of every land.

  The beggar boys slept with their heads on tables as Mohammed Mayé passed us pipe after pipe of strong kief and hasheesh, explaining his city. He pointed out the window down a parapet: “The sea used to be right here.” Like an old memory of the flood still there at the gates of the flood.

  The circus was a fantastic North African jumble of phenomenally agile acrobats, mysterious fire eaters from India, white doves walking up silver ladders, crazy comedians we didnt understand, and bicyclists Ed Sullivan never saw and should see. It was like “Mario and the Magician,” a night of torments and applause ending with sinister magicians nobody liked.

  58

  My money came and it was time to go but there’s poor Irwin at midnight calling up to me from the garden “Come on down Jack-Kee, there’s a big bunch of hipsters and chicks from Paris in Bull’s room.” And just like in New York or Frisco or anywhere there they are all hunching around in marijuana smoke, talking, the cool girls with long thin legs in slacks, the men with goatees, all an enormous drag after all and at the time (1957) not even started yet officially with the name of “Beat Generation.” To think that I had so much to do with it, too, in fact at that very moment the manuscript of Road was being linotyped for imminent publication and I was already sick of the whole subject. Nothing can be more dreary than “coolness” (not Irwin’s cool, or Bull’s or Simon’s, which is natural quietness) but postured, actually secretly rigid coolness that covers up the fact that the character is unable to convey anything of force or interest, a kind of sociological coolness soon to become a fad up into the mass of middleclass youth for awhile. There’s even a kind of insultingness, probably unintentional, like when I said to the Paris girl just fresh she said from visiting a Persian Shah for Tiger hunt “Did you actually shoot the tiger yourself?” she gave me a cold look as tho I’d just tried to kiss her at the window of a Drama School. Or tried to trip the Huntress. Or something. But all I could do was sit on the edge of the bed in despair like Lazarus listening to their awful “likes” and “like you know” and “wow crazy” and “a wig, man” “a real gas”—All this was about to sprout out all over America even down to High School level and be attributed in part to my doing! But Irwin paid no attention to all that and just wanted to know what they were thinking anyway.

  Lying on the bed stretched out as tho gone forever was Joe Portman son of a famous travel writer who said to me “I hear you’re going to Europe. How about traveling with me on the Packet? We’ll get tickets this week.”

  “Okay.”

  Meanwhile the Parisian jazz musician was explaining that Charley Parker wasnt disciplined enough, that jazz needed European classical patterns to give it depth, which sent me upstairs whistling “Scrapple,” “Au Privave” and “I Get a Kick.”

  59

  After one long hike along the surf and up into the Berber foothills, where I saw Moghreb itself, I finally packed and got my ticket. Moghreb is the Arab name of the country. The French call it La Marocaine. It was a little shoeshine boy on the beach who pronounced the name for me by spitting it out and giving me a fierce look then trying to sell me dirty pictures then rushing off to play soccer in the beach sand. Some of his older buddies told me they couldnt get me any of the young girls on the beach because they hated “Christians.” But did I want a boy? The shoeshine boy and I watched an American queer angrily tearing up dirty pictures and throwing the pieces to the wind as he hurried from the beach, crying.

  Poor old Hubbard was in bed when I left and actually looked sad when he gripped my hand and said “Take care of yourself, Jack” with that upward lilt on my name which tries to ease the seriousness of goodbye. Irwin and
Simon waved from the dock as the Packet eased off. Both of them wearing glasses finally lost sight of my own waves as the ship turned about and headed for the waters off Gibraltar in a sudden heaving mass of smooth glassy groundswells. “Good, God, Atlantis is still yelling underneath.”

  I saw little of the kid Portman on the trip. We were both miserably gloomy on our backs on burlap covered bunks amidst the French Army. Next to my bunk was a young French soldier who said not a word to me for days and nights, just lay there staring at the bunk springs overhead, never got up with all of us to line up for beans, never did anything, not even sleep. He was coming home from duty in Casablanca or maybe even war in Algeria. I suddenly realized he must’ve gotten a drug habit. He had no interest in anything at all but his own thoughts, even when the three Mohammedan passengers who happened to be bunked up with us French troops suddenly leaped up in the middle of the night and jabbered at gay lunches out of paper bags:—Ramadan. Can’t eat till a certain time. And I realized again how stereotyped is the “world history” given us by newspapers and officials. Here were three miserable skinny Arabs disturbing the sleep of one hundred and sixty-five French troops, armed at that, in the middle of the night, yet not one bucko or first lieutenant yelled out “Tranquille!” They all bore the noise and discomfort in silence that was well nigh respectful for the religion and the personal integrity of these three Arab men. Then what was the war about?

  Out on deck in the daytime the troops sang on the deck eating beans out of their ration pots. The Balearic Islands passed by. It seemed for a moment the troops were actually looking forward to something gay and exciting and home, in France, in Paris especially, girls, thrills, homecomings, delights and new futures, or perfect happy love, or something, or maybe just the Arc de Triomphe. Whatever visions an American has of France or Paris who’s never been there, I had for them:—even of Jean Gabin sitting smoking on a wrecked fender in a dump with that Gallic heroic lip-pressing “Ça me navre” which had made me trill as a teenager to think of all that smoky France of realistic honesty, or even just the baggy pants of Louis Jouvet going up the stairs of a cheap hotel, or the obvious dream of long night streets of Paris full of gay troubles good enough for a movie, or the sudden great beauty in a wet overcoat and beret, all such nonsense and all of it completely evaporating away when the next morning I saw the awful white chalk cliffs of Marseilles in the fog and a gloomy cathedral on a cliff making me bite my lip as if I’d forgotten my own stupid memory. Even the soldiers were glum filing off the ship down into sheds of customs guards after we’d negotiated several dull canals to our slip. Sunday morning in Marseilles, now where? One to a lace livingroom, one to a pool hall, one to an upstairs apartment in a suburban cottage on the highway? One to a third floor tenement. One to a pastry shop. One to a woodyard (as dismal as the woodyards on rue Papineau in Montreal). (That suburban cottage has a dentist living downstairs.) One even to a long hot wall in mid-Bourgogne leading to aunts in black in the parlor glaring? One to Paris? One to sell flowers in Les Halles on howling winter mornings? One to be blacksmith off rue St. Denis and its black coated whores? One to lounge with nothing to do before the afternoon movie marquees of rue Clignancourt? One to be big sneering telephoner from Pigalle nightclub, as it sleets outside? One to be porter in the dark cellars of rue Rochechouart? Actually I dont know.

  I went off by myself, with my big rucksack, towards America, my home, my own bleak France.

  60

  In Paris I sat at the outdoor chairs of café bonaparte talking to young artists and girls, in the sun, drunk, only four hours in town, and here comes Raphael swinging across Place St. Germain seeing me from a mile away and yelling “Jack! There you are! Millions of girls surround you! What are you gloomy about? I will show you Paris! There’s love everywhere! I’ve just written a new poem called Peru!” (Pewu!) “I have a girl for you!” But even he knew he was kidding but the sun was warm and we felt good drinking together again. The “girls” were snippy students from England and Holland looking for a chance to make me feel bad by calling me a jerk as soon as I gave no indication I would court them a whole season with flowered notes and writhings of agony. I just wanted them to spread their legs in a human bed and forget it. My God you cant do that since Sartre in romantic existential Paris! Later these very girls would be sitting around in other world capitals saying wearily to their escort of Latins, “I’m just waiting for Godot, man.” There are some really ravishing beauties going up and down the streets but they’re all going somewhere else—to where a really fine young Frenchman with burning hopes awaits them, however. It took a long time for Baudelaire’s ennui to come back waving from America, but it did, starting in the Twenties. Jaded Raphael and I rush off to buy a big bottle of cognac and drag a redhaired Irishman and two girls to Bois de Boulogne to drink and yak in the sun. Through muzzled drunk eyes, tho, I do see the gentle park and the women and children, like in Proust, all gay as flowers in their town. I notice how the Paris policemen hang around in groups admiring women: any trouble comes up they have a gang there and of course their famous capes with built in crowbars. Actually I feel like digging Paris life that way, by myself, personal noticings, but I’m doomed to several days of exactly what you would find in Greenwich Village. For Raphael later takes me to meet disagreeable American beatniks in apartments and bars and all that “cool” comes on again, only it’s Easter and the fantastic candy stores of Paris have chocolate fishes in their windows three feet long. But it’s all a big ambulation around St. Michel, St. Germain, around and around till Raphael and I end up in streets of night like in New York looking around for where to go. “Couldnt we find Celine someplace micturating in the Seine or blow up a few rabbit hutches?”

  “We’ll go see my girl Nanette! I’ll give her to you.” But when I see her I know he’ll never give her to me, she’s an absolute trembling beauty and loves Raphael to death. We all go off gaily to shishkabob and bop. I spend the entire night translating her French to him, how much she loves him, then have to translate his English to her, how he knows that but.

  “Raphael dit qu’il t’aime mais il veux vraiment faire l’amour avec les étoiles! C’est ça qu’il dit. Il fait l’amour avec toi dans sa manière drôle.” (“Raphael says he loves you but he really wants to make love to the stars, that’s what he says, he makes love to you in his funny way.”)

  Pretty Nanette says in my ear in the noisy Arab cocktail lounge: “Dit lui que ma soeur vas m’donner d’l’argent demain.” (“Tell him my sister’ll give me money tomorrow.”)

  “Raphael why dont you just give her to me! She has no money!”

  “What’d she say just then?” Raphael has made a girl fall in love with him without even being able to talk to her. It all ends up a man is tapping me on the shoulder as I wake up with my head on a bar where they’re playing cool jazz. “Five thousand francs, please.” That’s five of my eight, my Paris money’s all gone, three thousand francs left comes to $7.50 (then)—just enough to go to London and get my English publisher money and sail home. I’m mad as hell at Raphael for making me spend all that money and there he is yelling at me again how greedy and nowhere I am. Not only that as I lay there on his floor he makes love to Nanette all night, as she whimpers. In the morning I sneak out with the excuse a girl is waiting for me at a café, and never come back. I just walk all over Paris with the bag on my back looking so strange even the whores of St. Denis dont look at me. I buy my ticket to London and eventually go.

  But I did see finally the Parisian woman of my dreams in an empty bar where I sipped coffee. There was only one man on duty, a nice looking guy, and in walks a pretty Parisienne with that slow tantalizing nowhere-to-go walk, hands in pockets, saying, simply “ça va? La vie?” Apparently ex-lovers.

  “Oui. Comme ci comme ça.” And she flashes him that languid smile worth more than her whole naked body, a really philosophic smile, lazy and amorous and ready for anything, even rainy afternoons, or bonnets on the Quai, a Renoir woman with nothing to
do but come revisit her old lover and taunt him with questions about life. Like you can see even in Oshkosh though, or Forest Hills, but what a walk, what a lazy grace as tho her lover was chasing her on a bicycle from the railyards and she didnt care. Edith Piaf’s songs express that type of Parisian woman, whole afternoons of fondling hair, actually boredom, ending in sudden disputes over coat money which run out the window so loud even the sad old Sûreté will come in eventually to shrug at tragedy and at beauty, knowing all the time it’s neither tragic nor beautiful just boredom in Paris and love for nothing else to do, really—Paris lovers wipe the sweat off and crack long loaves of bread a million miles from Gotterdammerung across the Marne (I guess) (never having met Marlene Dietrich in a Berlin Street)—

  I arrive in London in the evening, Victoria Station, and go at once to a bar called “Shakespeare.” But I might as well’ve walked into Schrafft’s:—white table cloths, quiet clinking bartenders, oak paneling among Stout ads, waiters in tuxedos, ugh, I walk out of there as fast as I can and go roaming the nighttime streets of London with that pack still on my back as bobbies watch me pass with that strange still grin I remember so well, and which says: “There ’e is, clear as your nose, it’s Jack the Ripper come back to the scene of ’is crimes. Keep an eye on ’im whilst I call the Hinspector.”

  61

  Maybe you could hardly blame them either because as I walked thru the fogs of Chelsea looking for fish n chips a bobby walked in front of me half a block, just vaguely I could see his back and the tall bobby hat, and the shuddering poem occurred to me: “Who will strangle the bobby in the fog?” (for some reason I dont know, just because it was foggy and his back was turned to me and my shoes were silent soft soled desert boots like the shoes of footpads)—And at the border, that is at the customs of the English Channel (Newhaven) they’d all given me strange looks as tho they knew me and since I only had fifteen shillings in my pocket ($2) they’d almost barred me from entering England altogether, only relenting when I showed proof I was an American writer. Even then, though, the Bobbies were standing watching me with that faint evil halfsmile, rubbing their jaws wisely, even nodding, as tho to say “We seen the likes a im before” although if I’d been with John Banks I’d be in the gaol house now.