The Unknown Kerouac

by Jack Kerouac

  “It was easy,” Agnes said. “I’m going to do it again.”

  “Not when you’re with me.”

  Agnes smiled at Will when he said that. Phillip picked up his glass and said, “Dennison has civic pride . . . doesn’t want to go to jail for anything less than grand larceny.” That’s what he said. We were always saying something or other like that. Then again, there was no point in not saying anything at all.

  “I need some water. I can’t drink this stuff straight.” This was Agnes, the only woman in the room. She was a sturdy Irish girl with close-cropped black hair and a vigorous, manly look about her. She always wore pants, as tonight. Dennison went to the bathroom and brought her a glass of water. Agnes thanked him.

  “It’s a pleasure,” is what he said.

  Everybody began to drink. Phillip coughed on his and reached for Agnes’ water . . . he drained the glass fitfully. “Get her some more water, Will.”

  “Not a broken leg, I trust?”

  Phillip was going to get up when Ramsay Allen took the empty water glass and went to refill it himself.

  “Just the weight of the world,” Phillip told Dennison.

  “Yes?” hissed the other. “You must tell me about it sometime.”

  They were good friends, these two, but one was wary of the other. Now as to Ramsay Allen, he just sat on the floor at Phillip’s feet, and there was never any question of circumspection there . . . Goofy is the word for the smile he had on his face as he looked up at the young prince in the easy chair.

  Phillip was eighteen years old at the time, or perhaps even seventeen. He looked like a beautiful Oriental woman, with his white skin and green, serpentine eyes hemmed in by high cheek bones, and black hair tumbling in clots over his brow. When he walked, he looked like any other young American, however. He swung along, clicking his heels, head erect, scowling a bit. He was slender and wiry, with hard muscular forearms always showing beneath perpetually rolled up sleeves. It was hard to say what people on the street thought of him when they saw him. From a distance, he looked like a hoodlum, for that’s the way he dressed, like Mike Ryko—the nearer you got to him, the more exotic he was, and surely he was resented on the streets for that.

  He called himself Phillip Tourian, although he had a choice of names. His father went under the name of Rogers. Mr. Rogers, at the moment, was in Atlanta on narcotics charges . . . Mr. Rogers had had several names in the past. Phillip liked Tourian best of all. No one could be sure what nationality he was . . . true, his father came from somewhere in the Near East, Phillip himself had been born in Istanbul, his mother was American, he had Greek and Syrian and Armenian uncles, and one Magyar aunt. Still, as you can very well see, it was hard to say what he was. Surely there must have been some Oriental blood there somewhere . . . or was it just Ural-Altaic?

  As to Phillip’s companion, Mike Ryko, he was a plain Finn with reddish hair and bony features. It was habit to sit and say nothing for hours, which is just what he was doing that night.

  Phillip and Mike had had a talk that night, before meeting Al and Agnes. They had stood at the bar in a Greenwich Village tavern, talking . . . one of their favorite occupations. They liked to look upon themselves as artists, both of them. Young intellectuals, that’s what they were. Out of the welter of their lives, they were trying to fit things into a pattern, God knows why . . . For if ever they were offered a patterned world, of course they would die of boredom. Young intellectuals! Phillip was now going to spring his latest theory on Will Dennison. He, for his part, cared not a jot for anything of the sort. Still they came to him—we came to him, all of us, to have our theories smashed. There was your Dennison!

  “I’ve been figuring out a philosophy,” Phillip told him now, “of creation as good and waste as evil. So long as you’re creating, that’s good. All waste is evil. It’s dichotomized like this: there’s creative waste, such as talking to you now, such as all of us sitting here drinking and talking . . . and then there’s wasteful creation, such as the Saturday Evening Post.”

  “Well of course,” replied Dennison, pouring himself another drink, “I’m just a befuddled bartender, but where are your criteria to tell waste from creation? Anybody can say that what he’s doing is creation whereas what everybody else is doing is waste. The thing is so general it doesn’t mean a thing.”

  Phillip immediately changed the subject. Now he wanted to know if Dennison had any hasheesh. Dennison said he had some, but not much. Phillip insisted he wanted to smoke some. So Dennison fished out a marijuana cigarette from a drawer and lit it up and passed it around. Everybody inhaled deeply. Nothing happened.

  “This is very poor stuff.” Dennison took another drag, and looked at the cigarette. “Marijuana is very hard to get now, and I don’t know where I’ll get any more after this is gone.” Phillip took the cigarette and smoked some more. Dennison poured himself another drink of Canadian Club.

  “I had some very good stuff in New Orleans,” Ryko put in. “Two or three drags and I was floating down the street.”

  A lull fell over the room. Someone blanked the cigarette in the ashtray. The smell of burnt hay lingered . . . Gradually, the smoke from the cigarette was stealing out through the open window, curling over the sill and down into the night. Everyone was silent.

  There’s a picture for you! People exhaust one another so quickly. It seemed as though there were nothing to talk about any more. It was five o’clock in the morning. Ryko had begun to doze on the couch.

  Something had to happen, someone had to do something. Al sat on the floor at Phillip’s feet, a large flabby gray-haired man venerating an adolescent—as he had been doing for three years, ever since first meeting him in Paris. Phillip sat ignoring his admirer: eyes slitted like an Oriental, continually gesturing, he kept on talking: he had to. To him, silence was death. There was no end to his curiosity. Now he wanted to know this from Dennison, now that from Agnes. What was he trying to decide? All this insane thirst! He did not work: his father’s uncle paid for his keep, he lived alone in a hotel off Washington Square, where he knew a hundred people. He spent his days and nights drinking, wandering around the city, talking to people he met in bars . . . with Ramsay Allen at his heels, like a faithful pooch. Allen did not work either, except when he had to: usually, in such cases, he cleaned out garbage for his landlady or did odd jobs. His life was Phillip . . . and he was old enough to be his father. A strange pair!

  And there Ryko slept on the couch. Like the Finn in Nigger of the Narcissus, he seemed to be dreaming all the time. His presence there was some sort of mystery to Ramsay Allen. He saw nothing there to interest Phillip—but Phillip had met Ryko in a bar, several months ago, talked: presto! they were friends. Now they were three, routing out the mysteries of the city together, wandering around in a perpetual alcoholic fever. To look at them! . . . Fagin and two young and dirty Oliver Twists!

  There was a brief silence in the room during which there was heard music coming from a car parked down on the street. Voices argued. Then the car roared off in first gear clear up to the end of the street. It was going off to join the rest of the noise around Seventh Avenue.

  Three perfectly useless citizens, that’s what they were. But no one was complaining. An Irish cop might say to himself, “Now there’s three that’ll bear watching, or me name ain’t O’Toole.” But that was all.

  We could understand Phillip with Ramsay Allen, because Allen was a faithful dog; we could understand Phillip with Ryko, because they were more or less alike on the surface; but we could not understand the three of them together. It was mad. Like everything else.

  So Phillip picked up his cocktail glass and bit a large piece of glass and started to chew it. You could hear the noise across the room. Ryko woke up, and Agnes O’Rourke made a face, as though someone were scratching fingernails on a blackboard, on a cold dry day. Ramsay Allen watched for awhile . . . “What are you doing?”

  Through a mouthful of glass, Phillip said, “Eating glass, what the
hell do you think?”

  Like that! Allen picked up his own glass and took a bite. He too began to chew glass. The crunch of teeth against broken bits of glass filled the room. Ryko sat on the couch in full amazement.

  “They’re going to die!” cried Agnes. “Like Cellini, or someone . . .”

  Dennison watched for awhile and then said, “No, all this talk about people dying from ground glass is hooey. There’s no danger if you chew it up fine . . . it’s like eating a little sand.” Satisfied with his thesis, he watched some more. Ryko went and sat on the window sill.

  Ryko said, “I’ll be damned.”

  Dennison got up and said, “I am neglecting my duties as a host. Is anyone hungry? I have something very special I just got today.”

  Phillip and Al were now picking stray pieces of glass out from between their teeth. Al had gone into the bathroom to look at his gums in the mirror, and they were bleeding. “Yes,” he said. “Let’s have some eats.” Phillip said he’d worked up an appetite on the glass. Al wanted to know if it was another package of food from Dennison’s mother.

  “As a matter of fact, yes, something real good.” Dennison went into the closet and rummaged around for awhile, and came out with a lot of old razor blades on a plate with a jar of mustard. He set this down on the table.

  “You bastard!” said Phillip. “I’m really hungry.”

  “Some gag, hey?” said Dennison. He felt pretty good about it, his whole body shaking with silent mirthless laughter.

  Ryko came up and poured himself a drink. “I saw a guy eat razor blades in Chicago. Razor blades, glass, and light globes. He finally ate a porcelain plate.”

  And after awhile, even that was over . . . eating glass, and talking about things like that. The marijuana was no good, the whiskey was almost all gone. Poor defenses against the phantom lurking outside the window! We always knew it was there, we still know it now. But we contrived, sometimes, to erect little defenses, little divertissements. Not that we wanted to forget death and darkness. No. But after all, we were alive, and there was time on our hands. That’s what Phillip thought . . . so he ate glass. He had punctured a hole in his ear lobe a few days earlier, and passed a safety pin through it, and let it hang there like an earring. Allen, of course, was also in the latest fashion, and wore his safety pin proudly at the swollen ear lobe.

  We understood, I suppose. Ryko least of all understood. He dreamed. Dennison, of course, knew everything . . . He lacked the end of his little finger. One day, in his youth, he had told someone, “I’d cut off the end of my little finger for you.” Invitation! So home went Dennison to sit at table and cut off the end of his little finger with a razor blade. Was that a gesture? . . . one worthy of a Greek hero!? Yes . . . but only half of it: he then never told the object of his affections about the mutilation, and went away, and never came back.

  Now everyone was drunk except Dennison and Agnes. Phillip was talking to Al. They were fidgeting around the room nervously. Phillip smashed his fist down on the marble mantelpiece: he was talking about William Blake.

  Dennison wanted less noise. “The landlady’s just above, on the next floor.” Phillip went over and opened the window wider.

  Agnes sat in a stupor of boredom; she had already begun to yawn. She liked Ramsay Allen very much as a person, but she couldn’t bear him when Phillip was around. Separately, they were remarkable people; together, they were unbearable, noisy and dangerous. With that Ryko, they were even worse, for he was on the verge of madness, and sometimes got so drunk that he lost his psychic balance altogether.

  Dennison finished the last of the Canadian Club.

  “Let’s go up on the roof!” cried Phillip, aflame with his idea.

  Al said, “All right,” jumping up as though he’d never heard such a wonderful suggestion.

  Dennison said “No don’t. You’ll wake up the landlady. There’s nothing up there anyway.”

  “To hell with you, Dennison,” Al said, sore that he should try to block an idea coming from Phillip. Phillip and Al lurched out the door and started up the stairs, talking in loud voices.

  Dennison closed the door and sighed.

  “I’m going home,” Agnes said. Ryko was asleep on the couch. He had been dozing with his head against the wall, now he occupied the whole couch and snored, his feet on top of the pillows. Dennison went over and removed the pillows.

  There was a loud commotion on the roof and then the sound of glass breaking in the street. Agnes and Dennison went to the window. Agnes said, “They must have thrown a glass down on the street.” This seemed logical to Dennison; he stuck his head out cautiously, looked up, and looked down. There was a woman down in the street looking up and yelling.

  “You crazy bastards, what you wanta do, kill somebody?”

  It was getting gray in the street.

  “Shut up,” said Dennison. “You’re waking everybody up. Beat it or I’ll call a cop.” He was a firm believer in the counter-attack. He had his little plan. He rushed back to the light switch and turned the light out in the room, to make it seem as though he’d gotten out of bed and gone back again. After a few minutes the woman walked away, still yelling and swearing. Dennison and Agnes waited in the darkness awhile, a darkness milky with dirty gray light from the murderous, hot August dawn . . . Then he turned on the light again.

  Dennison was swearing. “All the trouble those two have caused me in the past! They piled up my car in Washington, the bastards, and got me thrown out of a hotel in Boston when Phillip pissed out the window. Plenty more of the same Joe College stuff . . . 1910 style. This happens whenever they get together.”

  “Isn’t that so?” Agnes said. “I like Al but not when he’s with Phillip. They act so silly together . . . By God, something’s bound to break soon. They’ll get arrested sometime.”

  “The sooner the better, I’ll be rid of them.” Dennison was fuming in his gentle way.

  “I’m going to bed, Will.” Agnes opened the door. “Say goodnight to them for me.”

  “I’m going to bed myself.”

  Agnes left.

  Will Dennison went back to the window and looked up . . . there was the sound of muffled voices up on the roof. He sneered with his teeth and pulled his head in again. Ryko was snoring on the couch . . . he didn’t care. He was as good as dead, all the time.

  “I hope they don’t get the idea to jump off,” Will announced to Ryko. Ryko didn’t hear him. “Well,” said Will, “they can roost up there all night if they want to. I’m going to bed . . .” He paused, listening to his own voice; and for any further noise from the roof: there was silence up there now. They were probably sitting on the edge of the roof with legs dangling over, six flights up, smoking and thinking . . . A perfect pair of idiots!

  The gray light outside was growing, fanning out . . . and as it did so, hotter and more breathless became the dawn. A terrible August dawn . . . like anything breaking out over Africa, it would seem. Dennison went to the window and looked up. He saw nothing. They were probably gone. Scrabbling about in dirty dawn streets, two beggars in tatters, drunk and disorderly and dangerous. Rimbaud and his Verlaine! They probably were overturning garbage pails, insulting old newsdealers, throwing rotten oranges at passing trucks on Seventh Avenue . . . anything!

  Will turned out the light and undressed. Ryko was not snoring any more. Now he might be awake, wondering where he was . . . a stupid dreamy Finn . . .

  Dennison stretched to his full length beneath the sheet and was almost simultaneously asleep.

  It was six o’clock.

  Ryko was awake. He heard Phillip and Al returning from the roof, whispering . . . It would be well to feign sleep, or they would lead him outside to all kinds of stupid acts . . . madness in the sane Sunday morning streets.

  The door opened furtively. “He’s asleep,” whispered Al. “Let’s go.”

  “Wait a minute, I want to leave him a note.”

  There was more whispering in the hall. Phillip was scribbli
ng a note.

  “He’s a good boy, I guess,” Al said. “Mike is a good boy, allright.”

  “Yeah,” said Phillip. He came over and dropped a piece of paper on Ryko’s chest. “Now let’s go.” They went away, closing the door carefully, whispering in the hall, scuffling down the stairs . . .

  Ryko opened his eyes and picked up the note. By the gray light he could very clearly see that Phillip had written an eternally indecipherable note in French. Not a word, not a letter, was legible. It was a mad scrabble of pencil-tip, nothing more. He stuck it in his pocket and got up. Dennison was asleep, that was plain: there he lay stretched out on his bed, sharp features upthrust, like a corpse on a morgue slab . . .

  Ryko waited breathlessly until he could no longer hear the voices going away in the street below . . . Phillip and Al chattering away as usual. Then he opened the door, closed it, and went down the stairs. A clean bed and sleep, that’s what he wanted.

  He was weighed down with an insufferable weariness and fatigue. He stumbled along the sidewalk. It was hot and breathless: Sunday morning: bells would start ringing somewhere soon, that was certain. Ryko would curse at the first old woman he met if she intended to go to church. “Vieille vache!” That would tie the knot! Then he could sleep . . .

  We all marvelled at this young man’s sense of decency: he was always as polite as he could possibly be. It was hard to believe that he could curse at old women, but he claimed he had, many times.

  There he went, that morning, stumbling home in the hot dawn. The phantom of darkness and death hid in dim doorways, and watched him pass. It lingered in a dark corner of the room back there and watched Will Dennison as he slept . . . It sped through the dirty air alongside the subway train, in the musty tunnels beneath the city: Phillip leaned on the subway door watching the darkness reel by, and saw there, the phantom . . . The phantom looked over his shoulder with interest at Ramsay Allen, who stood eagerly behind his beloved . . . The phantom was everywhere in the city . . . Long avenues of early morning stretched towards misty rendezvous: trolleys grated and clanged in the sleepy air; trucks growled; people walked, some stumbling, like Ryko, to home. The night was over. Day had come. The phantom was only forced to hide, that’s all. What courage was necessary to live that day, that morning! How red-blooded and lusty a race the phantom had for his nourishment! The same as always . . .