The Unknown Kerouac

by Jack Kerouac

  Well, and where is G.J. tonight? Why live a life which makes us forget so cruelly? I’d be well satisfied to be again in that chair, sleeping, with my funny protector, a poor little greek with hair like a lamb whose father saw the light of day in far-off Crete, than to be here now at this moment that I write in the great dark and dolorous city. The ball of earth is fatal, it hurts us, it does not love us.

  In the morning we returned home in the little jaloppy half dead. We ate hamburgers in a lunchcart in the town where my mother and father were born. It was gray and foggy, it was sad. I was beginning to see pieces of death in scenes like that. I wanted to go home to my beautiful bed. Where is that bed today?

  * * *

  At college in the fall I had my second real job. It was in the NYA program for students. I was a secretary for a French professor. At the same time, I had another job in order to eat in the dining hall at Columbia. I washed the dishes. Later I’d bring a pot of coffee to whoever wanted a refill in the John Jay dining hall. I gave a cup of coffee to many famous and distinguished men. Thomas Mann was one. For all that, I went to class, I studied at night, and spent the afternoon at football. I would never have gone to college if it hadn’t been for football; my father was too poor. In that sense, I worked well enough to earn a living.

  My French professor was a queer and charming man. He didn’t have much work for me, routine business, I typed. I went into his office with a smile. He’d holler at me: “Voilà! the Baron Michel de Bretagne has arrived.” The poor guy had some paralysis sickness in the spine. He was young, too. He worked like any other man: he got up early in the morning, much earlier than me, and he shaved and he dragged himself to college to work in his office. We’d see him cross campus with his poor tormented crutches. He lived in a beautiful house with his parents near Riverside Drive. I had dinner there one evening. There were candles on the table. When I left I said, in French, “I have to go see my little girl,” to make my exit. He said, laughing, “We don’t say little girl, old boy, we say ‘girlfriend.’ There’s a big difference.”

  I said to myself, “Because we say ‘friend’ it takes the girl off the streets? How queer Parisian French is.”

  One night the Professor sent me to deliver a manuscript to a famous French writer (Louis Verneuil). It was in a big swanky apartment. The famous man came to the door wearing a silk robe. He had a little frou-frou dog. The famous actress Nancy Carroll was there. I could see the tall lights of Manhattan outside the big windows. I saw all this through the door in under a minute. I thought myself far from the saloons and the mills of home. I dreamed of being like Mr. Verneuil. I wasn’t far from nothing. The poor young men don’t know that the foul darkness is everywhere and always.

  What will a young man do with this dream? He will fall. The angels of hell await him. Worse than that, he’ll get up one fine morning, he’ll look in the mirror, and he’ll find that his eyes no longer completely open. The earth awaits him too. You have to bow your head to understand our life.

  Around Xmas I worked for extra money for the N.Y.C.R.R. throwing mailbags over the old dirty floor. The bags fell from the big chute, we picked them up, we looked at the name of the city written on them, and we threw them at the part of the floor where the city was written in chalk . . . Buffalo . . . Chicago . . . San Francisco. . . . I was certain of going to all these places some fine day; but I never dreamed of the way I would go. I saw myself going by train with my suitcases in the rack; I wore a nice coat, a hat, I had a watch; I drank in the club car, I slept in the Pullman; I made eyes at the beautiful and interesting women; I disembarked at my destination, I was met by men at the station, and we all went to eat in a nice Rathskeller restaurant. How was I supposed to know that I would go to these places without a hat on my head, with a poor little rag bag, in the behind of a bus, to be met by no one and not eat anywhere because I never had enough money. In my dream I walked with the good men on Main St. after dinner, we smoked cigars. What really happened was I walked all alone, and one time in S.F. I picked cigarette butts in the street to put their tobacco in my pipe.

  On the other side of the street from the N.Y.C.R.R. there was an old N.Y. saloon where I ate and drank beers. Time to time I wrote notes on the menu. I wanted to be a great writer all the time. My thoughts were making my stomach excited. I had discovered Tom Wolfe that month before Xmas; since then I have not read anyone so grand, so poetic, so serious in America. He and Melville, Thoreau, Whitman, Twain, we never say that their greatest works were novels proper; with the exception of Huck Finn their best inspirations were in the form of unknown and fathomless books—look at Moby Dick, Walden, Leaves of Grass, Life on the Miss., and Of Time and the River. I wanted to write in a large form which was free and magnificent like that, a form which would give me the chance to go out the window and not stay in the room all the time with old ladies like Henry James and his European sisters. I had not yet read Henry James but I had glanced at his manner.

  My trip home that Xmas was the most beautiful trip of my life. I write it almost with tears. The bus reached home from the western part of Massachusetts, Springfield, Athol, Fitchburg. There was snow, pines, birches—I had already started calling those “grief stricken birch”—but more than that it was the beautiful starry evenings in winter, the sad little lights in the woods, the old cars of farmers with wood cords in the back seat, and hearing again people speak Canadian and that En­glish where we say “cah in the yahd” instead of “car in the yard.” I took out my old earmuff hat and stood outside the lunchcarts when the bus stopped. I smelled the air. My heart was as big as the world. Ah it’s glorious to live some times; I do believe it’s worth the labor. My father said it; and the Good Lord said it.

  At home at Xmas I worked for the Post Office delivering mail with a big bag over my shoulder. They sent me in a part of town where my high school girl lived. It gave me a tiny nostalgia. I didn’t see her. There was lots of snow. There were icicles coming down from the roofs of the old wooden houses of New England, something you never see in N.Y. It sounded like bells all around. It was joyous to bring Christmas cards to people’s homes. The mothers waved their hands at me. The children helped me deliver, they ran all over the street in front of me with the envelopes. I was the angel that came before Santa Claus. When my feet were cold I went into the saloons to sit near the old wood burning stoves. The old Irishmen spent the whole afternoon with their beers and their pipes and looked at me with their big red eyes.

  I always liked sitting in front of the Xmas tree at Christmas with a glass of porto wine, and looking at the little blue and red lights & spend my Xmas with calm thoughts. On the evening of that Christmas, me and G.J. sat ourselves in front of the tree with the wine. At midnight G.J. was drunk. My whole family was in bed. G.J. went to the door of my father’s room and he started to make a speech. “Mr. Bretagne,” he said, “vous ne rappele pas mais l’autre matin—(but he said it in English)—Mr. Bretagne you don’t remember but the other morning when I said hello to you while you were walking along the wall of Blazon’s store you coughed, and I was walking along the wall of the Social Club and I was caught in the echo between the two walls, and Mr. Bretagne you don’t have to believe it but I was knocked down in the snow by the shock. I swear to Christ himself I never heard a man cough so loud.” I thought my father was going to be angry, but he laughed. Those were days of grace; the people in my life were laughing. Today they all chase an indefinable health and they’re all afraid of communist atoms. I walked G.J. home around the corner, as always. His mother was waiting for him with a little light and her Greek bible. “Thalatta, Thalatta,” that means the sea, the sea! She was a woman who had lost her husband in her youth and dressed in black for the rest of her life. She worked in the mills. Poor G.J. too had begun working in the mills. He lived on top of a wooden house; you could see the whole town from their window. G.J. would rock himself in the rocker on nasty days, he’d look outside at the town and the river, and he’d say “Why did the Good Lord m
ake us to walk in the mud.” His mother read the bible; she didn’t understand English. When we got to the house after midnight she lifted her oil lamp in the window and said “Georva? Spiti Georva?” (Lil-George, you are home Lil-George?) “Yes, yes, yes,” he said. He walked around the yard with his hands on his head. “Oh God, why does she wait up for me every night? Why didn’t my old man live? Why did I have to come into this damned black world?” I never knew a man as sad and as great as G.J. He was like a true descendant of Oedipus the King who took out his eyes; me I’m but a cousin to such things.

  I returned to college after the new year. It seemed like the people in N.Y. weren’t as strong and profound, they’re interested in gay things like some crazy young girls.

  I continued with my pot of coffee in the dining hall until the month of May. On Sundays when I didn’t work and I wasn’t supposed to eat I went into the basement where they kept the food and I would scrape together some pieces of beef and cold roasted potatoes and eat that hidden in a corner like a rat. After that I went into my room, lit up a cigar, and wrote one of my daily plays on the rented typewriter. My plays were drolleries with directions to the stage manager to drive a car around the stage to bring “The sound of time” to the audience. The guys on my floor would read them and found them funny. I took long walks around N.Y. in the night. I stopped studying; I knew what I wanted to know.

  I returned to New England in the beautiful month of June hitchhiking with a Saroyan hat on my head. I didn’t work until July. I spent the month of June reading Whitman in the fields.

  * * *

  TRAVAIL IN THE MIST

  A friend told me there was work in a cookie factory. I decided to try it; it paid over $20. He picked me up one fine morning at 6:15 A.M. I waited for him 5 minutes in the mist sitting on the porch of my tenement with closed eyes. The sun hadn’t yet climbed up the hill, on the other side of the river. The big mills sounded everywhere. On the other side of the street I saw a man come out with his lunchpail. He spat out and then hurried to climb the hill to go to work. “Every single morning?” I told myself. The guy showed up and we went to the mill. They put a paper hat on my head, they gave me a shovel, they threw a big cart full of fudge at me, and they said: “Throw that on the belt with your shovel and level it with your hands. It rolls around the rollers over there, it gets flat, automatic blades cut out little circles, it rolls into the oven, comes out cooked the other side, and the girls over there put it in the box. Understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “You can’t stop. If you stop one minute the whole factory stops. Understand?”

  “Sure.” I thought myself strong; I had a whole factory depending on my hands. I started. It was 7 in the morning.

  For a half hour I whacked into that thing with all my strength. I’d make big squares of fudge with the shovel and took them out with my hands. After that I’d tear them in two, in fours, I’d break them up with my fingertips, then I’d stamp them level all around.

  TRAVAIL IN THE MURK

  At 8 I started to think that it was probably 9 o’clock. Not only wasn’t it 8 o’clock, it was ten to 8. At five to 8 I started to sweat. I bent down to take out a chunk and my sweat fell into the thing—I just didn’t have the time to wipe myself, the boss said that I was going too slow. After 9 o’clock I didn’t even try to wipe my forehead. My eyes were too wet to see anything farther than five feet, I only saw my work and my work wasn’t clear. Well, I was stuck in a mill. I cursed and I cursed like I’ve never cursed in my life, I was surprised to see how well I was able to curse. I invented some. I laughed, I cried, no one heard me among the thunder. It was hotter than being out in the July sun. The sweet odor made me sick. I was pretty angry at the other guys in there only because they worked here for years and years that I was sure that each one was crazier than the next. Yet every time a guy passed by and said “How’s it going?” I’d always laugh and say “Okay.” It wasn’t them; it was the people who owned the mill and made it run so fast like this, and the women who were too lazy to make the other cookies. That’s what I think, and that’s what it is. I promised myself to never let myself be eaten up like this again. I started to feel pain in my arm in a manner queer and weak. I stopped for 10 minutes at ten o’clock with all the others to sit in the lockers. My right arm began to stretch on its own; I couldn’t bring it down, I had to massage it as fast as possible before a knot could form. I had no strength left.

  All of a sudden I thought of the women who make cookies in their little kitchens and I loved them. I thought of their pretty cheeks, their checkered dresses, their little plates, and how in the afternoon the children came from school to try some.

  I wanted to leave. My friend told me I’d get used to it. I looked at him and made a face. “How long you been here?”

  “Me? Three years November, why?”

  “What’d you do before that?”

  “I worked in the mills, what you think?”

  I returned to my shovel, my fudge that had changed to vanilla, and I started up again. I no longer cursed, I no longer laughed, I no longer cried, I only waited until noon and I went home. It took all day to get to noon, all day and a whole little life in hell. I came out with my hair and my eyes covered in flour melted into my sweat, my pants, my boots, my hands covered with sugary filth, my little white shirt brown like cow shit in the front. I walked home like that, I looked at people in the street with surprise that there were things like this in life and that nobody cared at all.

  I saw G.J. in front of a saloon. I told him all about it. G.J. jumped on my back—he was taller than me but I was bigger—and I walked into a bar like that. I put my foot down on the brass rail, leaned on the bar (G.J. clinging to my neck), and we ordered two beers. It was a big fat drollery. The oldtimers it made no difference to them. After that G.J. and I we went into a silk mill; we entered the hiring office; the man was there with his papers and his quills. We entered with our arms stretched out in front of us like the Zombies we’d seen in a picture the other day; we made our feet go slow and automatic like the ghost of death. We asked the man for a job. The poor idiot said: “I don’t think you boys will do.”

  We got out of there running and laughing at the top of our lungs, same as if we’d broken a window.

  In the pretty golden afternoon I went to my swimminghole in the woods where we swam bare. I sat on a rock surrounded by water, only my head and my hands stuck out above and I held a book in front of my face, and I read the “Thanatopsis” of Wm. C. Bryant. I wanted to wash myself of the filth in all sorts of ways.

  A funny thing happened; an old friar who used to be my teacher at the parochial school passed by on the bucolic bank with his big black robes with some students. I never saw anyone like that there before or since that one time. It’s far in the woods, only the young come. I said “Good day, Father.” He looked at me; he didn’t remember me, it had been nine years.

  “Good day. How are you making out?” He said this as if he had prepared me for life long ago. I didn’t tell him about the cookie factory, I didn’t say anything. He turned around a little farther down to look back at the strange boy who was reading a book in the water. The little students were giggling. I was giggling too. I promised myself to make my own life in my own way; I was certain of everything. I only have to go there this afternoon, go into the water, and sit on the rock with a book, and I will be as certain as I was on that day. But it’s ever so far to go play.

  * * *

  One evening that summer I worked for about fifty minutes in the circus. Discouraged, me and G.J. went to see the circus that had arrived that morning at the end of town, at the end of night. It was a circus not so famous as the big ones like Ringling Bros. & Cole Bros., it was poorer, dirtier, more interesting, we thought. The company was from Alabama. We could hear the lions inside. The men who worked were black with dust, they looked mean, they looked like they came from far away. The big tent was old and dirty. It was a circus like the one W. C. Fields ran
in one of his latest pictures. We didn’t have enough money to go see the show; we watched the girls, we ate popcorn, we walked in the sawdust. There is nothing sadder than bobbyhorses at night with little kids riding, their little faces all serious above the painted horse faces, little hands clutching the bar that doesn’t go up or down while the horse goes up & down. Also sad is the ferris wheel, but only when looked at from afar. The greatest sadness is bobbyhorses in the afternoon on the seaside in autumn, like I saw 2 months later . . . G.J. and I spent some time between the ropes behind the tents with gangs of fifteen year old girls and those boys who came to the circus on their motorcycles. We looked at the girls with a desire that is like the desire of senile old men in their second youth, a mortified desire full of death. Their little round flanks wrapped in thin little slacks the color of roses; their cheeks effervescent with beautiful hair, their eyes that glanced sharply like a knife, their ravishing mouths, the scent of the night and the carnival, the pale stars. It seemed as though a big knife in the darkness was tearing out my heart. “She was fourteen and I nineteen, there at the village fair.” I wrote that that night.