The Town and the City

by Jack Kerouac

  “And then we’ll go to Thompson’s and eat some ice cream!”

  “All the ice cream you want!” shouted the old man triumphantly. “All the steaks and chops and lobster you want, sonny, all the ice cream and pie and cake in the world! Everything! Fried clams! hotdogs! hamburgers! sauerkraut and franks! What’ll we eat? Where’ll we start?” he cried happily. “Boy! I’m as hungry as a horse! What about the Old Union Oyster House for some lobster meat and melted butter? Or maybe we can go to Jacob Wirth’s for beans and brownbread, or knockwurst, or steak, and some of that nice Bock beer for me? By golly, I’m starved! Huh, Mickey?—or Pieroti’s for some nice thick chops? Huh, sonny? Where’ll we eat? Where’ll we start?”

  They swaggered arm in arm out of the track and drove off towards Boston, triumphantly hungry and gleeful.

  And the sun went down on the legend of Green Swords in the last race, the solemn chronicle forever recorded in gray files. The sun sank and the highway lights blinked on along the road in the fogs of dusk in New Hampshire.

  [3]

  Francis met a strange man that summer. He was in the Galloway Public Library one day scanning a shelf of paper-backed French novels—he had begun reading French prior to his enrollment in a college that Fall—when he heard someone step up softly behind him, pause, laugh dryly, and say: “Comment!—on lit le français dans les petites provinces des Etats Unis?”

  Francis turned and stared at the man.

  “I was only expressing my astonishment—” Wilfred Engels bowed slightly, his coat over his arm, his sweaty collar undone, smiling, mopping his brow—“my astonishment in finding a young man interested in the French originals in this little provincial American town.” And with this he laughed again and toddled away.

  But a moment later Engels turned around and came back, and introduced himself suddenly in an ingratiating manner—

  “You may wonder about me, I can even see it in your eyes now, you’re asking yourself: what can this seedy outré-looking man be wanting with me, I was only minding my business! Tell me immediately though, do I bore you, does it pain you to have to stand here talking to me!—”

  Francis began to stammer something.

  “Good! good! You have that sensitive regard for strangers that so few Americans have. But I will be brief: I’m here in this gloomy little town on a business trip, I walk the streets in solitude, alien, you see, alien and alone and far from home, I come into the library to get out of the rain, and lo! I find this intelligent-looking young man reading casually through the pages of Julian Green, Balzac, Stendhal … But that look in your eyes is still bewildered! Believe me, I’ve been in America long enough to know what that look means.… What’s your name?” he asked suddenly, bending forward stiffly.

  “Martin—”

  “Believe me, Martin, in France, in Europe, people who are perfect strangers speak to each other like this every day!”

  “I didn’t say anything,” grinned Francis.

  “Ho, ho, ho!” the man roared with laughter, as the librarians looked up with annoyance. “Now I feel better, I have a witty acquaintance. I was feeling very disconsolate; outside in those rainy streets it’s like a scene from Flaubert. What would you say to some tea?—I’m curious to know what a young man like yourself thinks about, really! You look so different from all the others—”

  “Well—” began Francis.

  “Don’t feel called upon to humor me, whatever you do!” he cried, holding up his finger with a strange cackle.

  “Well,” said Francis, “it struck me funny—I mean the tea, the tea!”

  “I want to know what you think about in this out-of-the-way part of the universe,” said Engels with sudden gravity, staring at Francis intently, with a squint from behind thick lenses. “Believe it, it will be like an education for me. Do you feel particularly accosted?”

  “Oh, no, no.”

  So Francis got his raincoat, amazed, snickering under his breath at the thought of the whole thing which was assuming such funny proportions. “What a character!” he thought. “Who would have thought it possible!” They hurried across the street to the lunch-cart near the railroad tracks. As they sat in a booth by the steamy kitchen door, the counterman stared at them, finally leaned over, and said—

  “What’ll it be, fellers?”

  —and they ordered tea.

  “Tea!” he cried, staring at them. “Tea?” He looked around wearily. “Well,” he sighed, “I don’t know. I’ll see if I got some tea-bags left.”

  And the tea was brought to them in great cracked coffee-mugs. It was all too rich for Francis to believe.

  “I’m Viennese-born, you know,” resumed Engels, lolling back in the booth now with a delighted air of conviviality, “but you see I was raised in Paris. I suppose you know all about Paris?”

  “I’ve read about it.”

  “Ha-ha! Wary and cautious!” Engels produced a long cigarette from a case and tapped it dreamily now. “Perhaps you’re wondering what my business is. You don’t think, ‘Ah, a businessman, a Babbitt!’ That is the furthest thing from your mind, isn’t it? Well, you see, I’m connected with an export company in Boston, and here in your charming little town they manufacture textiles. You see before you a businessman, a mercenary man, completely Americanized and mechanized in his three years in the States.”

  “You’ve been here three years?”

  “Yes! I’ve taken out my citizenship papers, the call of the dollar is too strong, I can’t resist it!”

  He removed his thick-rimmed glasses and began to polish them in a slow, deliberate, musing way. Francis saw that he was well in middle age, with drooping lidded eyes and a round face like an owl’s, with something weary and bland in the expression not at all in keeping with the way he gushed joyously, with a faint suggestion of irony about the brow that you could not say was not somewhat heightened by a deliberately raised eyebrow. Francis marveled at the whole odd, dark, sharply intellectual, strangely distinguished look of him, amazed that he should be in Galloway on a rainy Friday afternoon.

  “Perhaps we can swap ideas! That’s what I like! And who knows, perhaps I can teach you a few things—I was a teacher for a while, you know. Ah! I’ve done many things in my long and obscure career. Perhaps I can tell you about it sometime, a lesson in stubborn resistance to the wretchedness and futility of our times—” He gazed away angrily. “However, you’ve saved my life, you’re going to turn business into pleasure. I shall have to come around here every now and then. What’s more, you’ve resurrected my faith in America. Yes!”

  And he went on like that for a bit, as Francis grew somewhat embarrassed. Suddenly Engels stopped and laughed nervously:

  “Look here. Martin! Is that your first name? Francis? Well, believe it, I’ve been putting on an act for you, a sort of Continental act in the worst taste. But you knew, didn’t you?” And he looked away gravely. “But understand, I was only trying to impress you, to interest you first off. The fact is, I’m just a lonesome old fool and I wanted to make friends. I rather imagined you felt yourself a young romantic in an unromantic town when I saw you poring over the French novels.”

  “I don’t fancy myself a romantic,” said Francis soberly.

  “Everyone is so serious in this country! It’s really refreshing, believe me. But shake hands, Francis Martin, we will be friends. I’m very glad to know you now.”

  He laughed with a kind of gloating rapture, and they spent the rest of the afternoon in the lunchcart talking, Engels mostly, with great verve and excitement, Francis listening, curiously, trying to make him out, trying to decide what it was that he wanted to learn from this mysteriously eloquent, somewhat ridiculous, nervous, somehow grossly important odd sort of “European” man.

  They promised to meet in Boston in a few days, where Engels said he knew a lot of interesting people who were, like himself, “radically involved in art and politics and change.” “You see, you’re not really alone in your opinions of modern life! You ought
to get around more!”

  After that Francis mused alone in front of the library. It was about six, it had stopped raining, everything was clean and fresh, with a washed glitter around the library and city hall, a luminous gap in the clouds, a clear afterglow; all of it, suddenly, in his reverie seeming somehow like a French town in the Provinces to which he was magically transplanted after his long talk with the interesting gentleman from France. But he saw how far from a French town Galloway really was—he laughed thinking of it—he saw the redbrick mills, the dirty alleys behind the saloons on Rooney Street, and then the Victorian houses with potted plants on the screen porch.

  And when he got home, he saw the ugly old gray house, the yard littered with boards, buckets, old car seats, empty oil cans, a hose and a lawn mower. From the house the two radios blared swing music and baseball scores. Inside Elizabeth lay sprawled on the floor reading Thrilling Love Magazine and Movie Screen; Charley was reading Popular Mechanics; the father was reading the Galloway Evening Courier; Peter was oiling up a football; Ruth was talking inanely on the phone with one of her boyfriends. Everybody was doing something—but nobody was thinking, nobody was interested in anything finer, more beautiful, more exalted.

  “My God,” thought Francis, “there’s no culture at all in this place!”

  Francis and Engels met and talked and strolled the Galloway streets all that summer. Francis even went to Boston and visited some of Engels’ “political” friends, who had parties and discussed “issues” and went to concerts and rallies. Some of them were Americans who were politically and artistically fiercer and angrier than Engels could ever be; art students, young writers, law students, actors, college instructors, all kinds of people, young and old.

  What was most important to Francis was that for the first time in his life he heard spoken—and spoken in the articulate fluent language of “contemporary thought”—all the misty indistinct feelings that he had been carrying around with him for the last few years in Galloway. At last he realized that he had not been alone in these feelings. Elsewhere in the world other men and women lived and felt and reasoned as he did, other men and women were dissatisfied with the way things were, with society and its conventions and traditions and grievous blotches, other men and women wandered lonely in the world carrying in their hand the bitter proud fruit of “modern consciousness.” They, like him, had been frightened and alone at first, before discovering there were others.

  And he was amazed to think that a whole coherent language had sprung into being around this restless, intelligent, determined trend, this gentle, invisible revolt in America. They had words to name the key complaints and frame the major solutions, vast studies had been undergone in many fields in an effort to widen the disclosures of this new knowledge, thousands of people scattered everywhere in the country were reading the same rare unheard-of books.

  They had the words, they had their habits and demeanors, their kind of living, their common characteristics and the places and shows and restaurants and hangouts. Above all, they had this universe and the strange names and stars that constellated it: Freud, Krafft-Ebing, Kafka, Jung, Rilke, Kierkegaard, Eliot, Gide, Auden, Huxley, Joyce: names which, when first heard, brought so much mystery and joy and curiosity into his soul. He had one whole vision of this new kind of life and all the people with their books and ideas who were shaping it.

  “I’m glad to see you have chosen to go to Harvard, Francis,” said Engels. “It really is one of the very few decent universities in the whole wasteland. There’s Berkeley and Chicago, and, of course, Columbia and several of the eastern universities. But outside of that—my God! The others exist primarily as processing plants for football players and dizzy coeds, really! And some of the Jesuit colleges are just bastions of reactionary Catholicism.”

  So Francis could think of “Berkeley” and see great numbers of “real intellectuals” gathered there, walking the campus at evening in groups and cliques, speaking fluently all the magic words and all the magic names with a bland, almost disinterested assurance, but with a kind of soft earnestness too, a whole new exotic world suddenly discovered in the vast midst of a drawing, stammering, brute-like America. He could hear the words, the terms—“frustration,” “compulsive neurosis,” “oedipus complex,” “anxiety,” “economic exploitation,” “progressive liberalism,” “the facts”—he could hear the casually uttered names: Picasso, Braque, Cocteau, Heidegger, Tchelitchev, Henry Miller, Isherwood—and he could see the places and be amazed because they suddenly existed and awaited him quietly.

  “There’s hope,” Engels said. “There are a lot of good people coming up, and things are changing. The depression did it in a way. In many ways the depression was the best thing that could have happened here: Americans were frightened and sick—and like sick men they slowed down a pace—and new ideas moved right in and quite admirably promoted this change in all directions.”

  And Francis gladdened in these discoveries of an America that was not at all like the futility he had always known in Galloway.

  A strange thing happened one night when Wilfred Engels left for New York. He had visited Francis in Galloway and they were just running into the old turret-topped depot for his train, when they bumped into Peter and his chum Danny.

  “Oh, this is my brother Peter,” introduced Francis.

  “Well, well!” cried Engels, gripping the boy’s hand. “This is an unexpected pleasure!”

  “Francis has been telling me a lot about you, Mr. Engels.”

  “You’re the one who’s going to college to play football!” Engels cried. “The athlete who will never open a book!”

  “I don’t know about that,” said Peter, grinning. “Who says I’ll never open a book?”

  “I know you football players,” laughed the man, clapping Peter on the shoulder. “You always end up selling life insurance, that’s what you learn in college! You’ll join a fraternity, have a lot of admiring friends, and then sell policies at alumni reunions the rest of your life!”

  Outside in the lashing rain the train was chugging in with a great furor of steam and bells and rolling gigantic wheels. The depot floor trembled. In the sudden excitement of the moment, Engels staggered to the door with his suitcase. He kept shouting to Peter, as they all straggled: “Oh, I know you, I know you!”

  “I know you, too!” Peter was shouting, turning every now and then to look at Danny with a frown of amazement.

  “And what about your friend there, what’s his name? Danny? What does he do? What’s he got up his sleeve?”

  Danny glowered and said, “I work for a living, I work in the mills.”

  “Ah, he’s the dour one!” cried Engels. “Why didn’t I meet you before! This is terrible. Just as I’m leaving! And now you’re all going to college—except the gloomy millworker there—you’re all starting out on your lives! I’m getting on a train and going off to the ends of the night with my suitcase—just a lonesome old fool. Uprooted and drying up malignantly, in my own ancient and malignant juices—you understand that?”

  The boys stood around on the platform a little abashed. Engels seemed ready to burst into tears, but again he clapped Peter on the shoulder and cried: “I know you, admit it! You’re the type who deliberately conceals his true self from the world! Isn’t that true?”

  “Well—”

  “Be a good brother to Francis there, remember that! As for me, I’m just lonesome and silly and right now I’m going off to the ends of the night. I’ll write to you, Francis, first thing in New York! Good-bye, good-bye!”

  The train chugged and rumbled off in the lashing rain. They saw him waving and smiling and disappearing, and then the sorrow of a departing train in any night rain anywhere fell over the platform. They ambled back inside the depot with their hands in their pockets, and finally sat down on the old benches.

  “That guy’s nuts!” said Danny with amazement.

  “I thought you said he was a smart man, Francis. Who is that guy?”
<
br />   “He had a couple of martinis before we came here and he’s a little drunk, that’s all,” said Francis wearily.

  “What a character!”

  They heard the train howling far off in South Galloway, the rain drummed on the high roof of the old depot, and the silence of a departed train and an excited departed voice was all around and haunted with sorrow.

  And Francis, strangely, was suddenly thinking of Mary Gilhooley whom he had loved in high school and by whose house in South Galloway Engels was now speeding in a train, in the night rain, over the bridge and over the selfsame beach where she had rejected him that night, long ago. It was all so sad.

  “He’s a very intelligent man, Pete. You didn’t catch him at the right time, that’s all.”

  They stared outside at the glistening cobblestone street, the streetlamps dripping in the rain, the cars passing solitary in the rainy darkness, the dull glow of the factory windows ranked bluish beyond the brickheap alleys. There were puddles in the street, and rain drumming and splattering everywhere.

  They got up and ambled to the doors.

  “Look, there goes Nutsy De Pew,” remarked Peter. “What a crazy maniac. Look at him—drunk as usual—going home to sleep it off.”

  And Nutsy went stumbling by outside, and then there was nothing but rain and puddles and the glow of a red neon upon the cobblestones, and the drumming hush all around.

  “Someday I’m gonna get out of this lousy town,” said Danny. “You know?”

  No one said anything and they stood there with their hands in their pockets and looked at the rain. Somewhere far off they heard a faint howling sound, drowned immediately by a windblown gust of rain on the roof.

  “Well. Let’s go to Nick’s across the street—have a cup of coffee.”

  The door of the depot opened and a gaunt old ticketmaster came in, shook the rain off his coat, turned, stooped to a spittoon with a finger against his nose, and snorted. Now he strolled slowly across the worn planking of the depot floor, and looked up at the clock on the wall, and stopped to check on his own old pocket watch, and ambled on slowly to his office cage, and yawned. And the rain drummed and drummed above on the old roof.