The Unknown Kerouac

by Jack Kerouac

  Phillip’s father was a slender man with very handsome features. There was something hard and dead and glassy about the eyes and upper part of his face, but he had a charming smile, and certain quick gestures that won the admiration of the females. He had a way of turning his body sideways when he walked through a crowd in a movement that was aggressive and graceful at the same time. He never jostled, or was jostled, in any way.

  Outgrowing the crudities of his early youth, as they say, he gradually established himself as a sort of underworld broker dealing in dope, women, and stolen goods on a wholesale basis. If someone had something to sell he found a buyer and collected a commission from both ends . . . he let others take the risks, he let others jostle around. Life is packed close in Istanbul and places like that. Tourian, turning sideways here and there, was always able to establish himself a path through which to pass in fine fin-like grace. As Phillip put it, “The old man isn’t a crock, he’s a financier.” As an American, Tourian would have been one of those who pass through congested Times Square when the light is green, in sleek fast cars, with a destination gleaming in their eyes. His life was a network of complex transactions through which he moved, serene and purposeful . . .

  Phillip’s mother was an American of a Good Boston Family. After graduating from Smith she was travelling in Europe when her Lesbian tendencies temporarily gained the ascendance over her inhibitions, and she had an affair with an older woman in Paris. This affair plunged her into anxiety and conviction of sin. A typical modern Puritan, she was able to believe in sin without believing in God. In fact, she felt there was something soft and sinful about believing in God. She rejected such indulgence like an indecent proposal . . .

  After a few months the affair broke up. She left Paris resolved never again to fall into such practices. She moved on to Vienna, Budapest, and came finally to Istanbul.

  Mr. Tourian picked her up in a cafe introducing himself as a Persian prince. He saw at once the advantage of an alliance with a woman of good family and unimpeachable respectability. She saw in him an escape from her sinful tendencies and breathed for a moment vicariously the clear air in which there are only facts, and anxiety, inhibitions and neurosis dissolve. All the subtle intuitive power that in her was directed towards self destruction and self torture was here harnessed to self advancement. She made an attempt to incorporate this vision of harmony evoked by Mr. Tourian.

  But Mr. Tourian was serenely self sufficient. He did not need her, and she turned away from him and descended on little Phillip with all the weight of her twisted affections . . . She dragged him all over Europe with her on continual obsessive tours, she kept telling him that he must not be like his father who was selfish and inconsiderate of her feelings. Mr. Tourian accepted this state of things indifferently.

  He built a large house and started a legitimate business which prospered side by side with his other enterprises, which absorbed more and more of his time. Drugs, which he had used periodically for years to sharpen his senses and to provide the stimulation necessary for long and irregular hours, were becoming a necessity . . . he was beginning to break up, but without the conflicts and disharmony that accompany a Western breakdown, as it were. His calm was becoming apathy. He began to forget appointments and spend whole days in Turkish baths stimulating himself with hashish. Sexuality slowly faded away in the regressive calm of morphine . . .

  Ramsay Allen met Mrs. Tourian in Rumplemeyer’s in Paris, in 1939. The next day he had tea with her at the Ritz and met Phillip. Al was 34 at the time, Phillip was 13.

  Allen came from a good Southern family . . . he was unusually popular in certain Richmond circles. He had been engaged to at least four debutantes, and each time had dashed off to reconsider the matter. After his graduation from the University of Virginia he had gone to New York for a summer and discovered that it offered wider scope to his sexual tendencies. On each of his four escapes from the possible ordeal of being anchored firmly in Southern society, he had gone to New York to think things over. After awhile, his visits there became protracted stays. He worked as an advertising copywriter, a publisher’s reader, and often he didn’t work at all.

  He had an older brother who was ambitious and a steady worker. This man, a few years older and more sure of himself than Al, was about to go to town with a paper mill of which he was part owner. He offered Al a job in the mill: Al decided to go back home, for a while at least. He had excellent prospects of being a rich man in a few years. He got back in the swing of things and was about to be engaged to another flower of Richmond womanhood. Still he was not sure of what he really wanted to do about that, about marriage. He went to Europe that summer . . .

  Little Phillip was very much flattered that an older man should take the trouble to see him constantly and take him to cinemas, amusement parks, and museums all over Paris. Phillip’s mother would no doubt have been suspicious except that nothing concerned her any more but her illnesses now, which were gradually taking organic form under the compulsion of her strong will to die. She had heart trouble and essential hyper-tension.

  Al had tea with her almost daily and kept suggesting that after all she should return to America now that she was so ill. There she could get the best medical care and if the worst should come, at least she would be in her own country. Here he looked piously at the ceiling. When she confided in him that her husband was a dealer in dope and women, he said “Great Heavens!” and pressed her hand. “You are the bravest woman I have ever known!”

  At this time, it so happened that Mr. Tourian himself was also looking towards the New World. His deals were so extensive that the number of people with real or imaginary grudges against him was growing to unmanageable proportions. So he began dickering with an employee of the American consulate. Needless to say, he had no intention of going through the tedious steps proscribed by law for immigration to America. The negotiations took longer than he had planned . . . While they were still in progress, Mrs. Tourian died in Istanbul. For seven days she lay in bed looking sullenly at the ceiling as though resenting the death she cultivated for so many years. Like some people who cannot vomit despite horrible nausea, she lay there unable to die, resisting death as she had resisted life, frozen with resentment of process and change . . .

  There was no one around her sufficiently keen, in a certain way, to understand her predicament. She was not sure of herself . . . she spent the last seven days balancing life, which she hated, against death, which she feared . . . She became so absorbed in this introspection that her body, weary of neglect and waiting for the word from above, died of its own accord. In some respects, hers was a complete death: her paralyzed soul, rid of all function by this neurasthenic indecision, went down the drain with everything else . . . rather absent-mindedly. As Phillip put it, “She sort of petrified.”

  After that, Phillip arrived in New York with his father. Al was back on the job in Virginia, in the paper plant, and wrote long letters to Phillip. Finally he grew bolder and began to spend weekends in New York. Mr. Tourian was busy with his new enterprises . . . things were harder in America . . . he paid no attention to his son’s visitor. It got to the point where Al called Phillip the first thing on arriving at La Guardia Field: when Mr. Tourian answered the phone, Al would say, “Oh hello Mr. Tourian, is Phillip in?” Mr. Tourian was too preoccupied to know whether the boy was in or not. “Tell him I’ll be over right away.”

  Al and Phillip would sometimes be gone for whole weekends, on mad trips to Boston or Baltimore or Washington . . . Young Phillip was obsessed with all kinds of desires . . . he wanted to drink, hike in the mountains and woods, meet as many people as he could, ride in a car at ninety miles per hour. Al, for his part, was too genuinely ravished by all this to make any attempts on Phillip’s person . . . That could come later. In a way—considering Al’s other affairs with older men in town—Phillip represented some kind of angelic and virginal symbol of homosexuality. Al began to write long lyrical poems to the boy.

  They
toured New England, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland, upper New York state. One long weekend found them in Montreal, in the whore houses on St. Catherine Street. And finally one summer they went to New Orleans in a car Al had bought for the occasion. It goes without saying that he was neglecting his job back home . . . and finally he did altogether quit. His irate brother wrote him a letter denouncing him as a “worthless tramp and a degrading pervert,” and as far as he was concerned, he could stay that way. So Al cut off all contact with his past life and dedicated himself to Phillip. He moved to New York permanently and got a job as a longshoreman, then as a tutor. He finally found the ideal position, as tutor for a rich old woman who really didn’t want to learn French but only wished to have someone to tell her troubles to. This old monied bitch had one complaint in life: that her daughter had gotten married without her consent.

  “I’d given her all I had in my power . . . education, security, the comfort of a home . . . I took on the responsibility of a father, for her. Don’t you think that’s true? And then she went off and married that horrible man. I do think that she should have given me some consideration . . .”

  “Yes,” Al would say, reaching for another cheese soufflé, “you’re perfectly right, Margaret you’re perfectly right there.”

  The old woman had Al in for three hours every day, at five dollars an hour. Al spent the remaining twenty one hours with Phillip or worrying about where Phillip was when he couldn’t find him, and gnawing his heart out wondering whether Phillip might not love him some day.

  Phillip was a most precocious boy. He had long ago learned that to get what you wanted, you must be relaxed . . . this he inherited from his father. He attended a few private schools but promptly threw that up in favor of the wild free life of self-education through experience and extensive reading. By the time he was sixteen he was more than a match for Al in matters dealing with culture and anything else they found worthy of busying themselves with.

  The love poems did not faze him. He knew what Al was after, but he also knew how to hold him off. In a way he liked Al a great deal, as most people did, and he didn’t want to lose him as a friend. Besides, when Phillip began to get around among the young intellectual sets in New York and Boston, it added greatly to his decadent glamour to have this gray-haired Oscar Wilde tagging after him . . .

  Phillip began to involve himself in love affairs, to Al’s extreme consternation. It was characteristic of Phillip that he should have chosen as his one true love a young sculptress from Boston who looked like a younger Madame de Castaing with however much more sex appeal . . . They copulated to excess and oftentimes mutilated each other . . . They had orgies in baths of wine . . . Helen would sometimes tire of Phillip and run frantically outside, and there pick up a handful of mud and cry: “I’m sick of you! I want to create something with my hands.” They had met at a Communist rally in Boston Common, in the rain. Al was somewhere around during all this, waiting with abject patience . . . Helen herself began to spend weekends in Manhattan.

  It was at this time that Phillip’s father was caught negotiating the sale of 20,000 grains of heroin.

  He drew five years in the Atlanta penitentiary and the fines left him flat broke . . . Mr. Tourian had been losing his grip in America. When he got to Atlanta they had to ease him off the morphine habit in an interminable series of ephedrine ­injections . . .

  A relative of Tourian, a New York Greek who was also a very influential politician, took over the guardianship of the boy. The idea was for Phillip to drop in on his uncle once a week in case he needed any extra money or wanted help of any kind. Phillip lived alone: his rent was paid, he had a limited allowance, and he was as free as a bird. This would have elated Al except that now Phillip and Helen were thicker than ever. Helen’s weekend visits from Boston increased.

  Al stayed on. Instead of abating, his passion for Phillip was growing stronger by the day. And it was now increasingly evident that Phillip resented Al’s attentions. When his antagonism began to express itself in an open way, Al only retreated deeper into his masochistic position and hung on . . .

  The fact that Al was a homosexual did not bother the sophisticated Phillip: it rather amused him. But what he now began to resent was Al’s abject and melancholy demand to be loved. Al felt that it was coming to him; he had a ruined life to prove it; in so many ways, he made Phillip conscious of a most reprehensible and loathsome responsibility. Phillip did not see it as a responsibility, as anything of the sort. He clearly saw that it was Al’s own error. And Phillip felt he had nothing in his power to retract the situation. He began to tell Al off . . .

  And yet their friendship had been so strong, there was something so intimately tied up with his mother there, Phillip could not quite call it off altogether. When Al, in desperation, began to make advances, Phillip rejected him wearily. Things were beginning to drag horribly. The essential sado-masochistic nature of their relationship was at last coming to surface.

  Meanwhile Phillip’s fantastic education continued. Dennison, the bartender he and Al had met in a Baltimore bar, became a kind of successor to Al as a teacher. “The best thing for you to do, my boy, at any time, is to drop every book in your hand, burn all your paper and pencils and poems, and concentrate on living. Didn’t you ever hear that song ‘Life is Nothing but Living’? You are now living in a civilization, not a culture . . . in a late life of facts.” Needless to say, Dennison at the time had been buried in a book himself, Spengler’s book. Phillip absorbed all of Dennison’s sober commonsense and clear vision; he had already absorbed Al’s wit and charming intelligence.

  Equipped with this formidable business, Phillip proceeded to rout out all the intellectuals he could find anywhere—the “little oases in the wasteland,” he called them—and annihilate them. He eventually got a room in a family hotel off Washington Square and got to meet some of us, Feinstein, Ryko, Quincy, Alexander, and several score others. He also met Praline LaJeune, a beautiful blonde, a veritable capacious sea of womanhood, who, in her own sweet and innocent way, could attract any man in the world. She attracted Phillip. She of course didn’t try to resist him.

  Phillip and Helen were just breaking up at that time anyway. Their relationship was impossible . . . Tempers like theirs could not counterpoise. She was of course annoyed, nay whipped into annoyance, by Phillip’s hesitating refusal to send Al off packing. At this time anyway it would have been impossible to send Al off packing . . . he just would not go. His life had left his body and gone into Phillip’s. Those few times that Phillip was in accord with him, were enough to make him deliriously happy. He never doubted his emotions . . . He told Dennison to go to hell whenever it came to a question of giving up the Phillip idea . . .

  Dennison, in his weary way, had developed an interest in these two. He was curious to see what would happen. And he thought Al a most interesting psychological phenomenon. That’s what he said . . . The fact, however, is that Dennison genuinely liked Al. He was attracted by his fantastic courage, his color, his charm, and his twisted life. There was something ugly about Al’s life that seemed beautiful to Dennison. He became Al’s only living father-confessor. Dennison was excellent and superb even, in this role: he himself, like Phillip’s father, had left sexuality by the wayside some way back there on the opium road . . . Dennison was something tied on to a brain. Occasionally he had a woman in his rooms—but there never was any question of dedicating his energies to luring a woman up there. They came, he received them . . . Sometimes he went and had himself a Turkish bath. Once a year. The rest of the time he worked, earned money, ate, slept, had his junk, and examined the people he knew under his shabby microscope.

  Phillip and Praline LaJeune developed in accord a flaming romance. They fled each other in order to be more fascinating, and bounded back into each other’s arms. They sat around for whole days at a time in a wreckage of books and talked and kissed.

  Phillip had met Ryko in a bar. Ryko, the moody Finn with the mysterious air of the
confirmed introvert, fascinated Phillip . . . Phillip and Feinstein went up to Ryko’s apartment the next day. Ryko lived there with his woman, Janie Thomson. When they got there Ryko was asleep. Janie woke him up and he growled at her; then, getting up from his couch, he announced that he was hungry. The girl went into the kitchen to fix his dinner. Ryko scowled at Feinstein and said nothing. Feinstein was terrified.

  After that, Phillip and Ryko became close friends, and Apartment 32 became the meeting place of the whole bunch. Phillip and Praline rendezvoused there perpetually . . . The others, mostly students, were there at all hours of the day with their tons of books. The whole thing was beginning to find its focus in one apartment . . .

  It finally did. Ramsay Allen became an incurable caller. He told Phillip that he thought his little chums were charming . . . Eventually Dennison himself came, once, twice. He came, looking like something from an African compound, and squinted at all this young silly life . . .

  Life is monstrous, but the young don’t believe so. It was therefore amusing to gather it all in its mad unconcern under one roof and look at it. . . . No one bothered about death and darkness—even if they did read Rilke and discuss him. No one even bothered to ask why. Things just were. . . .

  The last streetlamp down at the end of the street, the darkness beyond it . . . the mad twistings of destiny, beginning in Istanbul in 1926 . . . or for that matter whatever destiny went into the bringing-about of all the others, Dennison, Allen, Feinstein, Praline, Alexander, Quincy, Janie, Ryko, all of them . . . was not under consideration. These then were the little foeti crowding the race while a man lay in apathy in a Georgia penitentiary and a woman’s bones rotted in the Turkish dirt . . .