The Unknown Kerouac

by Jack Kerouac

  That day my sister was late coming from school and my mother said we’d have to eat and couldnt wait. As usual first I went to the ice box where our four Kremel puddings were poured out to chill in four little separate little kittymilk saucers and I’d take my own two Kremels (my sister had the other two) and suck a little bit off the edge of the saucer and put them back. Then I sat down to my boiled stringbeans tied together like faggot sticks with string, boiled potatoes, turnips and carrots, with huge gobs of butter on my thick crusty French bread (from a Franco American bakery) and two huge glasses of cold milk, a healthy dinner and what I ate practically every day of the week.

  “Where’d that durn Ti Nin go” said my mother looking at the green electric clock which kept turning and turning and was so high in the wall it could hardly be reached so that sometimes you’d see it turning through dusts of time and cobwebs of clocks and you’d see the little cobwebs follow the second-hand awhile then fall off. “That little flimflam it’s already twelve thirty.” Twelve thirty was the awfulest time for me because it signified I only had 25 more minutes at home and had to start the hot disgustingly drowsy (bellyful) walk back across the park and down Riverside Street and over across the White Bridge again and then up that steep horrible Wannalancit hill to silly classes again where we all sat around chewing the erasers on our pencils till the whole room smelt of chewed soft wet erasers, a sickening memory, and of bananas in desks where kids who didnt go home for lunch left their lunches together with (afterlunch) balled up greasy wax papers and apple cores and pieces of stale bread with stale butter left over from an October lunch by some kid long left his desk empty to move to Lawrence or Fall River. But twelve thirty had its compensations in the fact that it was usually the time I’d mopped up all my gravy with the bread and butter, drank all the milk, and the great moment of going to the ice box and removing my two nibblesucked Kremels out and putting them before me on the table and taking several preliminary sucks all around the edges until the middle part of the pudding sagged all alone and then carefully working with the spoon edge to peel back the harder layer of the top and eating it (pure caramel cover) and then sinking down into the main pudding, which was paler than the cover, but creamier, tho less caramelly and eating that. And still Nin hadnt come and I had licked both my saucers dry. My mother went out to look up Sarah Avenue so like a rat, like on many other occasions, and mindless of the reprimand I’d get, I sneaked to the ice box and took both of Ti Nin’s Kremels and sucked the little suck on the edge and put them back slyly and went to the bathroom and swooshed water all over the place like my father did after meals and I was done.

  Now I began to figure out how to act sick so as not to go to school that afternoon and suddenly the clouds passed over the sun, the whole kitchen darkened, the green clock looked different, a cool breeze came in the window, and I realized it was going to rain or snow or something and then here came Ti Nin in her boyish bob with her big healthy fullgirl 16 year old face bouncing into the kitchen and sitting down to her boiled dinner and my mother saying: “How come you’re always late now.”

  “We got a ride but the fellows went all over town and took their time.”

  “You poopsie, eat your dinner and forget the fellers. Who was it, Tommy Cudworth again?”

  “No, Michel Lemaire.”

  “You’ll have to step on it, it’s already quarter of one.”

  “Yeh—hey Ma bring my Kremel.” At this I ran upstairs and went to my room and lay down to look sick. Suddenly I heard my sister yell “Eh twé, voleur! (O you, you crook!) Ma, Ti Jean took bites outa my Kremel again!”

  “Yes yes I know.”

  “Why does he do that all the time?”

  “Well he doesnt take much.”

  “Yeah, look at the big bites he took this time, the little crook! Crook!” she yelled upstairs and would have done better or more accurately calling me “mouse,” the mouse that nibbleth, or better, rat, but I hid and trembled and was beginning to work myself up to the woesome look of the sick boy. And suddenly the rain began to shatter on the shed roof right outside my window and I got up and looked out, the bare apple trees were soaking with that clean rain-on-the-treetrunk look, dark and fragrant, and maybe there wouldnt be any school after all. I wanted to go downstairs and listen to the radio to see but I had to play it safe and be sick. Ti Nin dashed upstairs to change and took one quick look in my room to say “Tannant d’voleur, if I catch you again in my Kremel I’ll fix you good.” I answered nothing. We went on fighting over Kremels for years. We were always fighting, it’s amazing how a younger boy feels that he is being devoured by his older sister and always wants to fight back by nibbling away at her rights. In my dreams I see us pulling each other by the hair over Kremels and later over money.

  Ti Nin’s girlfriend around the corner, Millicent Devlin, had a return ride from the same boys, I could hear the horn blowing in the rain outside, she ran out and went to school and now I lay there sad and my mother called from the foot of the stairs, “Time to get going, Ti Jean.”

  “I’m sick.”

  “You’re sick, what you got?”

  “J’ai mal au coeur (I got a stomach ache).” She came up and touched me on the brow:

  “How come you’ve got a stomach ache.”

  “I ate candy this morning in school . . . Joe had candy. Him too he’s sick I think.”

  “Well you aint gonna have any more of your durn Bostons from now on! You’re alright go to school.”

  “No I feel like throwing up.” She sighed and heard the rain drum harder and said:

  “Aw well, the vacation’s beginning anyway and it’s raining” (and here, and the reason I was so fortunate in this life) she suddenly became tender, she put her hand on my brow, not caring whether I was putting on sickness or not, knowing I simply wanted to stay home and play in my room, “stay home then . . . stay in bed Little Angel and after that I’ll make some nice hot chocolate, Little Bug, Little Kootie, maybe you’ll be okay tonight.”

  “Oui.”

  “Awright, well Mama’s been up now since seven in the morning and I did a big wash and my ironing and now I’m tired and I’m gonna sleep in my room, I’m gonna take a little nap.”

  “Oui.”

  “Sleep my angel” and with that inexpressible tenderness, or rather that tenderness which is incommunicable to anyone who never had a commiserating and compassionate mother, she kissed me and went out of the room like a tiptoeing Archangel and closed my lovely door against the harshnesses of the world and I heard her tiptoeing around her bedroom and I knew that I was saved.

  All I had to do was lie there about a half hour, watching the gray rain in my windowpane, and then when I’d hear her snore in the quiet delightful rained-on house, get up and play my great gray games of childhood. And so lying there I fell into a trance and stared at the ceiling, and saw Heaven in the ceiling, or stared at my little green desk, which had been my dead brother Gerard’s desk, green as an earlysummer apple and remember his sweet compassionate face and the way he and I would spend whole rainy days together playing in the house with his Erector set, or I’d stare at the little dusts in the linoleum of my bedroom floor or listen to the eaves dropping down waterdrops, the little klookloo talks of the rain (that conceptionless rain that doesnt think while all we do is think) and then I fell asleep a little and woke up refreshed and ready for my games. It’s paradise to be a boy, to be home on a rainy day and not have to go to school, and have long hours of solitude and childly thought.

  IV

  THERE WAS SOMETHING ATLANTEAN IN MY PREOCCUPATION WITH GRAYNESS, with gray skies whipping over things, being blown from the Northeast Atlantic, and with my preoccupation with dusty records something surely Faustian, or Gothic, or knightly. It all had to be gray, dim pale blues, distant hills in the Mohawk country, something strange and still westward surging. Yet it all came rising out of nothing but a boxful of odd assorted sized marbles, which were my horses. In these poor sometimes-chipped marbles I saw
the lonely forlorn heads of great Ladysman racehorse champions, I saw the mud of the tracks on rainy days in the Western Massachusetts (Mohican Springs) racetrack of my imagination where they ran . . . and in the names of the jockeys, names I’ve since forgotten except for a few like Art Cooper or better, C. W. Swain, I saw the rain blurred mists materialize, that I wanted. My mother snoring in her afternoon nap I got up and took out my marbles and took out my ledgers with all the records of each marble (horse) and the records of their owners and jockeys and began to set up a day of racing. First I’d assemble the horses for the first race according to the proximity of their talents: smaller marbles had lower talents and sometimes larger but chipped marbles would race with them and lose, or else win by fantastic margins if they didnt happen to roll on their chips . . .

  But to explain: at the head of the race, on the far side of the room, was the runway, an old Parcheesi board held up by two thick old books (the family medical book) (and some old bible I guess) and I’d just line the marbles up on the incline, even to even, nose to nose, with a ruler, simply lift the ruler and out they raced beneath the uplifted ruler, down the incline, across the smooth linoleum (which I always mopped carefully with a dry mop for specks of dust and stuff) and come thundering down the “stretch” which was where the linoleum left off and the bare floor made the marbles rumble deeply and they’d bash into the wall. And I had a terrific photographic eye and could tell how they finished 1-2-3-4-5 but not up to 7 and more. I’d quickly out of photography eye memory write down the finish in pencil. Boocap first by a nose (that being where the marble called Boocap happened to hit the finish line wall just a split of an inch ahead of the next marble) then Caw Caw second by 3 lengths, 3 lengths being simply the length of three marbles, and so on down to fifth place, then I’d run the also-rans a little unimportant record-necessity race of their own and get the final form chart finished and laboriously hand type it in pencil in my beautiful gray strips of paper I’d gotten from my father’s printing plant, everything had to be gray and it had to be raining. If on a day when I planned to race my marbles it should happen to be sunny, I would transfer the scene from gray misty Mohican Springs to Postmon Park, a sunny racetrack closer to Lowell, full of well dressed dudes and rich women and flags waving in the sun, and resume the Postmon meet, with attendant special handicaps and Derbies (of a higher order, with bigger purses, than my favorite beat Mohican Springs where everybody was gaunt and sad and poor but kept running their meager string of horses in the hopes of making the big time someday at sunny Postmon Park). Mohican Springs however was the scene of the great sad gray Derby of all our imaginations, you cant sometimes think of the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs without thinking of rain, and roses in the rain, the hoop of roses around the winner’s neck (Cavalcade, Omaha), the old names and old rainy records there. Now I sat there writing out the list of entries for the great anticipated Derby, & Derby plotted at school desk when I was supposed to be pondering over Sir Walter Scott altho at times in the jousts of Scott’s knights I thought I detected the hint of distant gray hills and the scent of rain, with far away, further away echoes of Robin Hood which led my imagination back to the hills behind my own house and brought me by Vicoan circumlocution to my Derby at Mohican Springs.

  But also it all had to be written on gray paper, or sometimes pale green paper (the green to go with my dead brother Gerard’s desk) and the general gray green of rain. How noble was the name of Ladysman, and the name of Don Pablo, and the great sad names, Amber Hill, Gunwale, Arctic Post, Head Play, Time Supply, names I’d gotten out of the official race charts of the world but only recently I’d begun to make names of my own which would supply me with the proper raininess: Sweepogan, Chippewa, Zarney Green, Sarada, Smoker, Chopdown, Repulsion the champ, Retaliate his lesser brother, Elenac, all the names, I hoped against hope to come up someday with a rainy gray name as great as Jack Westrope all by myself. Jack Lewis almost made it but not quite.

  After writing out the list of entries I’d then rig up a little newspaper, all by hand, with a headline, announcing the day’s card, and a few cartoons showing bettors discussing the race (I could draw) and then a few news items discussing breeding or money matters. All my marbles had names, sexes, ages, ratings, owners, money-earning records, dams and sires, and about all of them I always wrote a little item showing their improvement or downhill decay and semi annually I held a great marble smashing bacchanal where the idea was to knock chips off the marbles and render some of the horses crippled, incapable, some had to be destroyed, time had to go on beneath this rain, this dust of records, so that for instance the great Don Pablo was practically smashed in half that year and descended from Turf greatness to a minor position as plater racer in opening races or perhaps the last sad race when the sun is sinking behind the rainy hills

  [The text from this point on is from Kerouac’s scroll version.]

  and it’s so dark you can hardly see the horses (in imagination) racing across the back stretch and the last horse is likely to be led in by lamplight by an old bowlegged barn hand who coos endearments nevertheless to old Boocap and says “Alright so they’re gonna make glue out of you but I love you still” and in the middle of the night he carries off the crippled horses in a makeshift van and brings it back to Wyoming to pasture forever in the meadows of God. Without the smashing of the marbles the racing seasons would have gone on year after year with no change, unlike real life, sometimes marbles were utterly demolished in half (smack against one another I’d ram hordes of marbles, chips would fly) and that horse would have to be “destroyed,” or retired to stud, and then I’d go out and scour all Lowell for greater newer marbles. Color had a lot to do with it, since the white and orange Time Supply mustnt look too much like a similar sized new white and orange marble, I had to look for new color combinations and finally (a little later) I did discover the greatest horse of them all in a large sized ballbearing, pure silver, no other horses like it, which I promptly sold to the Jack Kerouac stable and made Jack Lewis (me the jockey) and named him Repulsion because I knew he would repulse all other horses forever . . . which he did. But also I did find some vast marbles as big as a golf ball who were tremendous rolling off that incline and across the smooth linoleum and booming down the woodfloor stretch with a noise that thrilled my heart and smashing into the wall 12 lengths ahead of everybody’s Derby entry, great champions, Y Z Z, who sometimes beat the smaller but heavier but smoothrolling Repulsion. Then I’d have my phantasies, and lean on the rail with my father, or with my said cousins Ned Gavin and Tod Gavin from Arkansas, we didnt have much money and we hoped to win the purse or have to head out . . . We saw Postmon Park in the sun the flags whipping as the great goal of our lives. But when I bent my serious little head over the gray records of past Derbies, and sighed to see so much time had slipped by since the early almost disappeared-into-mist days of my “Turf,” and when I filled the gray sheets with minute informations, sometimes I’d cry, or a tear would come into my eye, or remember an old favorite that had to be destroyed, it was sometimes too much for me. Too, I had the old Victrola in my room and cranked it and played the same record prior to every race, “Dardanella,” or sadder records sometimes, like Al Jolson and Rudy Vallee (just as, at Rockingham Park where my father took me they always played records over the public address system between races). But Dardanella, the sound of the old saxophone sections and of the banjo strumming the beat and the trumpets, etc. the savor of my grain race tracks became indissolubly mixed with the sound of the record, and to the point too where there is no describing the amalgam of emotions with rainy day, no school, marbles, dusty old papers, my pencil, Dardanella, even the dusty hole inside the Victrola, the dust on the floor, the rain sounds outside, the cool gray Atlantic feeling in the room that seemed to open out westward to the Mohican lands, the whole, in any event, mad assorted details of a complete childhood madness and sublimity that kept me happy and absorbed that afternoon (as on many others) while my mother slept, my father wor
ked, my sister went to school, and that old river rushed on, swelling now, over rocks, the whole swirling imaginary memory babe mind and dreams of Kings and Horses and later heavenly visions.

  When I looked up from my games at around 4 o’clock suddenly it was clearing and it had gotten colder and there was a phantom smell of snow in the windowpane. My mother was still sleeping. I looked up from my dusty records and I wanted to go outdoors now to where the brass & iron clouds were splitting to admit the look of the now pale winter sun, winds were blowing from somewhere, it would soon be rockety old winter in the yards and fields of Pawtucketville where I knew by now G.J. and Salvey and Rondeau and the others must be home from school already (eating their bread and butter sandwiches quick gulp in the kitchen before rushing out screaming letting the backdoor slam, aow, and out like arrows into the sere fields)—but I had to keep up my pretense of being sick. I heard my mother get up and go downstairs yawning and heard other noises down there where probably old landlord Mr. Froufrou was coming around to see about the broken door. I put away all my gray and blue papers in the closet box, the marbles back in their box barn, the jockeys and owners and handicappers and winners and losers all disappeared in the mist of the brain, and I tiptoed downstairs to see what was going on. My mother was so sleepy she seemed to have forgotten I hadnt gone to school that day. J peu tu allez jouer dehors? Si tu veu ti loup. Whoopee I rushed upstairs and put on my overalls and older sweater and got my things ready for the big baseball game I played by myself in the yard with a long new nail and a few ballbearings I mean the very ballbearing that was that great racehorse Repulsion. Here too my records and dusts of histories were so vast there was no keeping it all on paper. The days of the great teams, of course, were gone, nothing in contemporariness can ever match the great past, just as when oldtimers get together and discuss Cy Young or Honus Wagner they wont take comparison of any Warren Spahns or any of your latter day Mazeroskis. My great hallowed old names had been Henry Currier, Ches Queen, Bill Seifer (he was still pitching), Cy Locke the greatest shortstop of all time, all names I’d actually culled from the Lowell telephone directory but now in this new phase of mine I wanted to make up my own great names that would fit better that particular sorrowful flair I wanted. I had been looking for a long time for the perfect name for the perfect all time centerfielder and got it one day when I went to the Rialto Theater to see a double feature and it was an English movie with an English butler called Tibbs, a picture full of fog, redbricks of Chelsea, tuxedoed gentlemen, gray food being served on gray trays, weeping women with long vampire hair but I came out of that theater and stepped into the momentous snow of time with Tibbs burning in my mind. “Frank Tibbs, Frank ‘Pie’ Tibbs” the greatest centerfielder of all time and he’ll be short, with a dark complexion, strange, wont say much, will wear his pants real long almost down to his ankles (in prep school years later as leadoff man for my prep school ballclub I wore my pants the same way) and he will swing lefty with a long mean black bat like’s never been seen in baseball. So I’d rushed home and installed Pie Tibbs in centerfielder for the great hallowed old Pittsburgh Plymouths of my imagination and immediately he’d created a sensation especially as it was all up to me as I’d kneel there snuff nosed in cold dusks pitching the little ballbearing towards myself and over the little plate and smacking it with the nail, the “ball” would go lining over shortstop (which was a rock) and drop “safe” outside the three huge outfield circles I’d drawn out there at the ends of the yard to indicate the areas of putout effectiveness by the outfielders and sometimes real long whacks that would carry the ball clean over the fence into the next yard for a homerun. When the ball was simply rapped against the shortstop rock or any other infield rock including the pitcher’s, I’d rush over, kneel, put the ballbearing between thumb and forefinger and flick it or hit the firstbase rock. Thus for years, and with my recordsbooks beside me in the mud under our 2 apple trees in the backyard (which faced another brown house that had grapevines and pretty young dotters I never paid attention to) I carried on enormous pennants and world series and piled up a nostalgic mass of names and great players some of whom have long since died I’d say. Then I’d rush to my room again and write down the great names of the Hall of Fame of my own baseball history, the names of the great winning managers, Chase, Adams, Devine, Sloane, Ma affey, James and Simon. The names of the great sluggers, Henry Currier, Tibbs, Ches Queen, (feet tall), and especially the thunderous booming hitters Kirk Bancroft and Buck Barabara and in the very nose of my imagination these names smelled up thoughts of mud, nails and ballbearings whenever I saw them even if they belonged to someone else in a movie or in a book. . . . It’s too much to describe in every detail and now as on many other occasions my mother came out and said Ti Jean pourquoi tu jou tuseul, why dont you go down the street and play with the other kids, I cant understand why youre all alone, what are you doing there? I’m playing my baseball league. “But I dont see no baseball league” and I had no way in my childishness to explain to her that it was all in my mind and that upstairs I had every record of it. . . . “Rente dans maison bpi vien mańgez des ritz cracker pi t peanutbutter pi tu la.” “Okay.” “It looks like its going to snow. Tomorrow night we’ll put I mean tonight we’ll put up the Xmas tree.” So sitting at the round wooden table in the middle of our kitchen, chomping on my crackers and peanutbutter and pouring more and more milk into my huge childly glass (a sight, for me, if I were an angel looking down on earth, and saw a little boy drinking his milk, enuf to break my heart, dont ask me why) I seriously pondered the latest developments concerning Frank Pie Tibbs and then back to Mate and Ladysman my great horses who had just won Derbies that very afternoon and nothing indeed couldnt induce me those days to go out and play with the other boys till I’d finished the gray legends of my brain.