Big Sur

by Jack Kerouac

  “I’m sorry Cody I screwed up your little family party”—“No No” he protests “Man I have to come to these things you know and be a big hubby and father type and you know I’m on parole and I gotta put up appearances but it’s a drag”—To show what a drag it is we go scootin down that road passing six cars easy as pie—“And I’m GLAD this happened because it gave us an excuse, hee hee titter you know to get outa there, I was thinking for an excuse when it happened, that old fart is crazy you know! he’s a millionaire you know! I’ve talked to him, that little beady brain, and you be glad you missed hangin around till that performance, man, and that AUDIENCE, ow, ugh, I almost wish I was back in San Quentin but here we go, son!”

  So of old we’re alone in a car at night bashing down the line to a specific somewhere, nothing nowhere about it whatever, especially this time, in a way—That white line is feeding into our fender like an anxious impatient electronic quiver shuddering in the night and how beautifully sometimes it curves one side or the other as he smoothly swerves for passing or for something else, avoiding a bump or something—And on the big highway Bay Shore how beautifully he just swings in and out of lanes almost effortlessly and completely unnoticeable passing to the right and to the left without a flaw all kinds of cars with anxious eyes turning to us, altho he’s the only one on the road who knows how to drive completely well—It’s blue dusk all up and down the California world—Frisco glitters up ahead—Our radio plays rhythm and blues as we pass the joint back and forth in jutjawed silence both looking ahead with big private thoughts now so vast we cant communicate them any more and if we tried it would take a million years and a billion books—Too late, too late, the history of everything we’ve seen together and separately has become a library in itself—The shelves pile higher—They’re full of misty documents or documents of the Mist—The mind has convoluted in every tuckaway everywhichaway tuckered hole till there’s no more the expressing of our latest thoughts let alone old—Mighty genius of the mind Cody whom I announce as the greatest writer the world will ever know if he ever gets down to writing again like he did earlier—It’s so enormous we both sit here sighing in fact—“No the only writing I done,” he says, “a few letters to Willamine, in fact quite a few, she’s got em all wrapped in ribbons there, I figgered if I tried to write a book or sumptin or prose or sumptin they’d just take it away from me when I left so I wrote her ’bout three letters a week for two years—and the trouble of course and as I say and you’ve heard a million times is the mind flows the mind rises and nobody can by any possible c—oh hell, I dont wanta talk about it”—Besides I can see from glancing at him that becoming a writer holds no interest for him because life is so holy for him there’s no need to do anything but live it, writing’s just an afterthought or a scratch anyway at the surface—But if he could! if he would! there I am riding in California miles away from home where my poor cat’s buried and my mother grieves and that’s what I’m thinking.

  It always makes me proud to love the world somehow—Hate’s so easy compared—But here I go flattering myself helling headbent to the silliest hate I ever had.

  26

  ALTHO CODY’S SAID THESE THINGS I’m very well aware that the real arrangement of the evening is that we’re just going to see Billie together so she can get her kicks meeting me (after hearing about me from him and after reading my books etc.) and in fact Cody has already conferred with Evelyn about how I’m going to be staying at their house in Las Gatos for a month, as of old sleeping in my bag in the backyard not because they dont want me to sleep in the house but it’s my idea, but it’s beautiful anyway to sleep under the stars and anyway I therefore keep out of the way of the family when they get up to go to work and school—At noon they see me shambling in from the big back field yard yawning for coffee—And I’m in line for that, i.e., that’s what I want to do and that’s my plan—But when we run upstairs to Willamine’s apartment and come bursting in to this neat little well arranged pad with goldfish bowl, books, strange doodads, neat kitchen, the whole clean as a pin, and there’s Billie herself a blonde with arched eyebrows exactly like the male Julien blond with arched eyebrows and I yell out “It’s JUlien by God it’s Julien!” (and by now I’m drunk anyway because we’ve as of old picked up an old hitch hiker on Bay Shore who says his name is Joe Ihnat and we bought him a bottle and I bought me one too, never will forget old Joe Ihnat in fact somehow because he said he was a Russian and his was an ancient Russian name and when I wrote out our names he said my name was an ancient Russian name also) (tho it’s Breton) (and also told us he’d just been beaten up by a young Negro for no reason in a public toilet and Cody gasps and says to me “I’ve met those Negroes that beat up old men, they’re called the Strongarms in San Quentin, they’re all put away among themselves away from the other prisoners, they’re all Negroes and it seems all they wanta do is beat up old defenseless men, he’s tellin the absolute truth”—“But why do they do that?”—“Oh man I dont know they just wanta hit up on some old man that cant hit back and just beat him and beat him till he’s dead” and Oh the horror of Cody’s knowledge of the world when all is said and done)—So now we’re sitting with Billie in her pad, outside the window you see the glittering lights of the city again, ah Urbi y Roma, the world again, and she’s got these mad blue eyes, arched eyebrows, intelligent face, just like Julien, I keep saying “Julien goddamit!” and I see even in my drunkenness a little worried flutter in Cody’s eyes—The fact of the matter being, Billie and I go for each other like two tons of bricks right there in front of Cody so that when he rises and announces he’s going back to Los Gatos to get some sleep to go to work it’s already well agreed I’m staying right where I am and not only for tonight but for weeks months years.

  Poor Cody—Yet you see I’ve already explained why actually subconsciously this is what he really wants to happen but he wont admit it ever and always invents reasons around this to get mad at me and call me a bastard—But aside from Cody I find Billie to be a very companionable strange kid in this lonesome night and I actually NEED to stay with her awhile—In fact both Billie and I explain to Cody why—But there’s nothing evil, man-against-man or sinister about any of it, it’s just a strange innocence, a spontaneous burst of love in fact and Cody understands that bettern anybody else anyway so he leaves at midnight saying he’ll be back tomorrow night and all of a sudden I’m alone with a charming woman and we’re talking a blue streak sitting crosslegged facing each other on the floor in a litter of books and bottles.

  It gives me a pang of pain and remorse really now to recall that on this first night her apartment was so neat and clean and charming—The chair by the goldfish bowl which I quickly appropriated as my old man chair, where I sat constantly sipping port for a whole week, the kitchen with its intelligent arrangements of spices and eggs in the icebox, and for that matter too the poor little son of Billie sleeping in a well arranged back room (her son from her deceased husband who was also a railroad man)—Elliott the child’s name and I didnt get to see him till later that night—And with the huge packet of Cody’s San Quentin letters in her hand she launches forth on her theories about Cody and eternity but all I can keep saying as I swig from my bottle is “Julien, you’re talking too much! Julien, Julien, my God who’d ever dream I’d run into a woman who looks like Julien . . . you look like Julien but you’re not Julien and on top of that you’re a woman, how goddam strange”—In fact she had to pack me off to bed drunk—But not before our first lovely undertaking of love and everything Cody said about her being absolutely true—But the main thing being that tho she looked like Julien etc. and had Cody’s big sad abstract letters about Karma in a ribbon and actually went out in the morning and earned a hundred a week in fashion modeling she had the most musical beautiful and sad voice I’ve ever heard in my life—The things she’s saying are really rather inane because after all her education is based on really Californian hysterias like the earlier mistress of Cody Rosemarie
who also was thin and pale haired and crazy and kept talking abstract—(Like she’s saying “I thought I could do something to ease the contradiction between immanent and universal ethics which I thought was my problem and was what I hoped to gain thru therapy, like, any evolution presupposes an involution and all that kind of thinking” as I sigh, but she does say something interesting once in a while like “While Cody was in prison my main occupation was praying for him, I had an all day going, there was also a bit we did together every evening from 9:00 to 9:09 but he’s out now and something else is happening I’m not sure what . . . but I’m sure we aid the storm when we transcend time in one respect and cant even keep up with it in others. . .”)—But also all kinds of to-me-unimportant and uninteresting crap about channels about people being either closed or open channels and Cody is a big open channel pouring out all his holy gysm on Heaven, I really cant remember, or the destinies, the sighs, the rooftops of all that, the stars are shining down on their poor heads as they draw breath to explain inanities really—Like the letters to her (I glance at them) are all about how they’ve met and their souls have collided in this dimension because of some unfulfilled Karma on another planet and in another plane that is, and now they have to gird themselves to assume this big responsibility to meet some measure of this and that, I dont even wanta go into it—Because also the fact of the matter being, when Willamine talks to me I’m utterly bored, I’m only interested in the sad music of her voice and in the strange circumstance (I guess Karmalike too) that she looks like poor Julien.

  Her voice is the main point—She talks with a broken heart—Her voice lutes brokenly like a heart lost, musically too, like in a lost grove, it’s almost too much to bear sometimes like some fantastic futuristic Jerry Southern singer in a night club who steps up to the mike in the spotlight in Las Vegas but doesnt even have to sing, just talk, to make men sigh and women wonder I guess (if women ever wonder)—So that as she’s trying to explain all that nonsense to me (all that philosophy of hers and Cody’s and Cody’s new buddy Perry, coming up the next day) I just sit and marvel and stare at her mouth wondering where all the beauty is coming from and why—And we end up making love sweetly too—A little blonde well experienced in all the facets of lovemaking and sweet with compassion and just too much so that b’dawn we’re already going to get married and fly away to Mexico in a week—In fact I can see it now, a great big four way marriage with Cody and Evelyn.

  For she is the great enemy of Evelyn—She’s not satisfied just to be Cody’s lover and soul heart she wants to go right over there and lay Evelyn down on the line and take Cody away with her forever and to do this she’ll even have a deadend heaven deep love affair with old Jack (same pattern of old)—There’s not much difference between her and Evelyn when you listen to their talk about Cody except in Evelyn’s case I’m always fascinatedly interested—Billie actually bores me tho of course I cant tell her that—Evelyn is still the champ and I wonder about Cody.

  O the ups and downs and juggling of women, blondes at that, all in the great magical City of the Gandharvas of San Francisco and here I am alone on a magic carpet with one of em, whee, at first of course it’s a great ball, a great new eye-shattering explosion of experience—Not dreaming, I, what’s to come—For with sad musical Billie in my arms and my name Billie too now, Billie and Billie arm in arm, oh beautiful, and Cody has given his consent in a way, we go roaming the Genghiz Khan clouds of soft love and hope and anybody who’s never done this is crazy—Because a new love affair always gives hope, the irrational mortal loneliness is always crowned, that thing I saw (that horror of snake emptiness) when I took the deep iodine deathbreath on the Big Sur beach is now justified and hosannah’d and raised up like a sacred urn to Heaven in the mere fact of the taking off of clothes and clashing wits and bodies in the inexpressibly nervously sad delight of love—Dont let no old fogies tell you otherwise, and on top of that nobody in the world even ever dares to write the true story of love, it’s awful, we’re stuck with a 50% incomplete literature and drama—Lying mouth to mouth, kiss to kiss in the pillow dark, loin to loin in unbelievable surrendering sweetness so distant from all our mental fearful abstractions it makes you wonder why men have termed God antisexual somehow—The secret underground truth of mad desire hiding under fenders under buried junkyards throughout the world, never mentioned in newspapers, written about haltingly and like corn by authors and painted tongue in cheek by artists, agh, just listen to Tristan und Isolde by Wagner and think of him in a Bavarian field with his beloved naked beauty under the fall leaves.

  How strange in all, and making everything that’s happened in the past weeks, the backs and forths and pains of me in City and Sur, all piled up now rationally like a big construction whereon could be built a divingboard which would enable me clumsily to dive into Billie’s soul and therefore why complain?

  In the middle of the night she fetches the little 4 year old boy to show me the spiritual beauty of her son—He is one of the weirdest persons I’ve ever met—He has large liquid brown eyes very beautiful and he hates anybody who comes near his mother and keeps asking her questions constantly like “Why do you stay with him? why is he here, who is he?” or “Why is it dark outside?” or “Why does the sun shine yesterday?” or anything, he’ll just ask questions about everything and she answers every one of them with extreme delight and patience till I say “Doesnt he bother you with all these questions? why dont you let him croon and goof like a little child, he’s tugging at your knee asking EVERYTHING man why dont you just let him singsong?”—She answers “I answer him because I may be missing his next question, everything he asks me and says to me represents something important about the absolute I may be missing”—“What do you mean the absolute?”—“You yourself said everything is the absolute” but of course she’s right and I realize that in my dirty old soul I’m already jealous of Elliott.

  27

  THE MAT OF NIGHT admits the groaning glory godlike love I guess but at the same time it’s also boring in a way and we both laugh to discuss that—We stay awake that first night till dawn discussing everything in the books from Cody in every detail down to me in every detail to her in every detail to Evelyn to books and philosophies and religions and the absolute and I end up whispering her poems—Poor kid has to get up in the morning and go to work and I’m left there snoring drunk—But she makes her neat breakfast and takes Elliott off to the daily babysitter lady and I wake up at one in the afternoon alone and take a swig of wine and get in the hot bath to read a book—The phone keeps ringing, everybody from Monsanto to Fagan to McLear to the Moon Man has somehow found out where I am and what the number is, tho none of them have previously even met Billie let alone seen her—I shudder to realize Cody will get mad for making his secret life so public.

  But here comes Perry—Like me Perry has that strange brotherly relationship with Cody whereby he gets to be confidant and sometimes lover of all Cody’s gals—And I can see why—He looks just like me only he’s young and looks like I did when first Cody met me but the point is not that so much, he is a tempestuous lost tossed soul just out of Soledad State Prison for attempted robbery with a boyish face and black hair falling over it but powerful thick muscular arms that I realize he could break a man in half with—His name is strange too, Perry Yturbide, I immediately say: “I know what you are, Basque”—“Basque? is that it? I never found out! let’s call my mother longdistance in Utah and tell her that!”—And he rings up his mother way over there, on Billie’s phone bill, and here I am bottle of port wine in one hand and butt in mouth talking to a Basque ex con’s mother in Utah telling her in fact reassuring her “Yes I believe it’s a Basque name”—She’s saying “Hey, what you say? who are you?” and there’s Perry smiling all glad—A very strange kid—It’s been a long time in fact in my literary sort of life that I’ve met a real tough hombre like that out of jails and with those arms of steel and that fevered concern that scares governments and make
s officials pale, that’s why he’s always put away in prison this type of man—Yes yet the type of man the country always needs when there’s a little old war started by an aging governor—A real dangerous character, in fact, Perry, because tho I appreciate his poetic soul and everything I realize looking at him he’s capable of exploding and killing somebody for an idea maybe or for love.

  Some of his own friends ring Billie’s doorbell, everybody seems to know I’m there, they come up, they are strange anarchistic Negroes and ex cons, it seems to be some sort of gang, I begin to wonder—Like a ring of fevered sages, the Negroes are intense and crazy and intellectual but they’ve all got those strong muscular arms again and all have jail records yet they all talk as tho the end of the world depended on their words—Hard to explain (but will do).

  Billie and her gang in fact, with all that fancy rigamarole about spiritual matters I wonder if it isnt just a big secret hustler outfit tho I also realize that I’ve noticed it before in San Francisco a kind of ephemeral hysteria that hides in the air over the rooftops among certain circles there leading always to suicide and maim—Me just an innocent lost hearted meditator and Goop among strange intense criminal agitators of the heart—It reminds me in fact of a nightmare I had just before coming out to the Coast, in the dream I’m back in San Francisco but there’s something funny going on: there’s dead silence throughout the entire city: men like printers and office executives and housepainters are all standing silently in second floor windows looking down on the empty streets of San Francisco: once in a while some beatniks walk by below, also silent: they’re being watched but not only by the authorities but by everybody: the beatniks seem to have the whole street system to themselves: but nobody’s saying anything: and in this intense silence I take a ride on a self propelled platform right downtown and out to the farms where a woman running a chicken farm invites me to join her and live with her—The little platform rolling quietly as the people are watching from windows in groups of profile like the profiles in old Van Dyck paintings, intense, suspicious, momentous—This Billie business reminding me of that but because to me the only thing that matters is the conceptions in my own mind, there has to be no reality anyway to what I suppose is going on—But this also an indication of the coming madness in Big Sur.