by Jack Kerouac
I begin to wonder or that is realize about his red lollipop; at first I thought it was a whistle; and then a gadget; and then an eccentricity; and then a gag; and then a plain lollipop that happens to be on location; the Director with the Lollipop, he gets his ideas better by suddenly lifting it to his lips, in the glare of kleigs, at a moment when the crowd expects him to do something else, so that they’re all arrested and bemused and made to comment about the lollipop. Meanwhile I looked anxiously everywhere not only for a better place to see from, but up at the apartment house where the old ladies wrung their hands in hysteria. Apparently (for they could have drawn their blinds or rigged something up) they wanted actually to see what was going on in the street, what the actual hysteria of the scene being filmed, in which subconsciously I sensed their belief; so that in the midst of some awful sprawl by kleiglight grayscreen gangster extras getting all wet and bloody in the street with ketchup as the camera actions, the old ladies would come plummeting down from their five-story window in a double wild believing religious hysterical screaming suicide which would be accidentally filmed by the expensive grinding huge cameras and make a picture so stark that for another century Hollywood tycoons would feature this film as the capper to an evening of dominoes and deals, for relaxation of the nerves; two wild women flying in the night suddenly into the area of the lamps, but so suddenly as to look to the eye like rags, then instrumentations of the eyeball, then tricks of the camera, then flickers of electricity, then finally humanizations in twisted hideous form under the bright glares of the wild fear of old women in America, plunk on the ground, and Joan Rawshanks in the fog, not smiling, or fabricating tears, standing, legs aspraddle in a moment of dubious remembrance of what a moment ago she’d thought to decide to remember about just where, halfway up the ramp, to start walking very fast so that her momentum and carrythrough would really get her up that ramp so that in the last steps she wouldn’t be a middleaged struggling lady on a cement slope but a young despairing woman of the foggy night walking with lean absentminded pumping legs (being more concerned with affairs of the soul, love, night, tears, rings, fog, sorrowtomorrow) straight up that thing, no hassle. Reason, I saw those ladies, in the kitchen the old damsel had stood up a lamp, took off the sides of it somehow, so that she had a pathetic private kleig light of her own now shining down on the eyes of the crowd (didn’t want people looking into her room) (her kitchen or anything) but in the general glare unnoticed, though on an ordinary night it would have upset and gassed and turned on the whole area; but nevertheless she had her lights out in the livingroom and stood there, with a sister or a neighbor, looking down on the scene wringing her hands and I could see declaiming, as though she wanted somehow to be in the movies, be photographed somehow as she declaimed in the general vicinity of a Take, very hysterical, strange, I thought she was crazy and was one of those old sisters who end up hermits if it wasn’t for hotel apartments like these that provide them with a minimum of service, saving them from the fate of the Collier brothers, really, and all over America dotty old rich ladies live like this in hotel apartments; well imagine their horror this evening with all those lights suddenly literally turned right on their windows and into their livingrooms and how they wail and cling to each other and think, naturally, the end of the world is bound to come soon if it hasn’t and isn’t in the process of right now. There was a fat guy with a red baseball cap; he ran up and down the driveway in some capacity allied with that of the police guards, keeping it clear of incoming cars, of people, or something; every time they shot Joan Raw-shanks fiddling with her keys and yanking at that door, traffic had to be stopped on Hyde Street because of the arrangement apparently of the cameras. So I began noticing another crowd sort of thickening on Hyde Street itself, and restricted to one side there, for no reason really, of course, every now and then the fabled-cable-so-photographable coming by with a ringdingding and people, passengers, who are just riding home and have nothing to do with artistic San Francisco societies that fight to keep the colorful cable car (and so in fact the Hollywood men, I expected them to look with interest at the passing cable car in the night but they didn’t from which I concluded that the sharpsters of Hollywood apparently, like New Yorkers, think all the rest of California is square so anything they do or have is of absolutely no serious interest, in fact feeling a twinge of civic pride and wondering, why, on the sly, one of them didn’t just snap a photo of the cable car) (Budd Schulberg, that’s who the director looked like.)—passengers who are riding by are surprised to pass a movie lot but really californially don’t give a shit or shinola. In the back, tragic tent flamps move in the shroudy wind that comes smack from the great hidden dark bay where also poor broken tragic King Alcatraz like a muzzle of the cannon sits in the center of the bay, all bright lights in its pavilion in the night, its arcade and bat shrouds, the sleephouse of two thousand dead criminals, who with great devouring eyes must look at San Francisco all day from behind bars and plot huge crimes and paranoias and love-triumphs such as the world has never known, ahem—the tents flap, the technicians bend to stricken tasks by flashlight, there’s mud at the wheels of their trucks, somehow wagons surround them, they’re the backbone of Hollywood for the movies have nothing now but great technique to show, a great technique is ready for a great incoming age, and these workmen of the progress of machine to aid and relieve the world, these ambiguous wonderers at the limits of set and imposed but useful and will-get-you-there (ho ho) task huddled in the night doing their work behind the fuffoonery and charaderees of Hollywood so mad, Hollywood, the Death of Hollywood is upon us, and the wild semi-producers and booted lieutenants of said same, the group huddled beneath the wet flapshroud, the generals of Antietam, how they huddle there in dark misêre, looking for every possible angle, they think important, actually utterly unimportant; for the director will leap out in the drizzle to test a strand of bushes that forms the edge of a shot of Joan Rawshanks down the driveway (it’s not Joan who stands there waiting all this time as the geniuses speculate and gape, it’s the extra, young, prettier, gamer, just a girl, tired on her feet, working for a living, etcetera, but ambitious, she’ll get there, all she’s gotta do is bang the right people is what I say, that’ll get you there fastern anything why did I ever tell you what C. S. Jones the hoghead on the, you know that old engineer with the grimy wrinkles that spits and leans beneath the watertower at dusk in New Mexico and from his wrinkly sacks of eyes surveys, appraises land tracts reaching to the mist of the mountains under a cloudheap that on the horizon sits like the, like God on a couch; why, shore, (spitting), I could tell you stories about that there Hollywood—only assuming;) the director will go to all that foolish trouble to move and test a twig and if he wants to cut it he can, as if that would add reality, but he ends up not cutting it, just testing it, this consumes the attention of a thousand eyes and the tickings of moments that cost a company that puts up props by an actual apartment the same amount of money it would cost them to build an actual apartment house itself likely, what with all those union technicians milled and snarling in the background and all them kleig lights and bought cops and mad producers and geniuses with lollipops spending their precious time in a rainy Frisco night—Joan Rawshanks in the fog….
I had no difficulty picking her out, I knew her well; “Good evening lady” uttered a little teenage girl when the director first ran up to talk to Joan, the little girl throwing in her own line of dialog about how’d she feel meeting Joan Rawshanks like that say on a cable car, as oft you see, here in Frisco, dignified ladies in furs riding the cold and draughty inconveniences of the city; Joan Rawshanks in the fog, I didn’t rub my eyes, I didn’t blink across the fog and darkness of the night where stood the very bridge from which in a dream a friend of mine once fell, like a floppydoll, while I, the last to arrive at the carnival in the canyon, was given first-prize on the last prize, a stale sandwich, as sadly the elephant tents were folded and a dust proceeded to emanate from the plain…. Yes, because when I thought
of Hollywood camera crews I always pictured them in the California night, by moonlight, on some sand road back of Pasadena or something, or maybe in some tree-y canyon at the foot of the Mojave Desert, or some dreaming copse like the one in Nathanael West where the cowboy who kills the chicken is pausing suddenly at eventide to answer the chirp of a bird luting in the dewy bushes over by the lemon dusk just showing at the foot and mouth of the grove down there in the canyon where they went for a Technicolor picnic it seems with their red shirts glowing phosphorescent in the campfire—I thought of movie crews in a location like that; best of all I thought of them in the San Joaquin Valley of California, on a warm night, on a sand road running through some rolling browngrass fields that at this point happen not to be in cultivation, just ragged indecipherable-by-moonlight fields, and a few fences, and overhanging inky trees with the ghosts of old outlaws hanging from the cottonwood limb, and maybe a wagon standing in back of crazy-ranch corral where maybe actually an old Italian fruiterer lives with fat-wife and dogs but in the moonlight it looks like the corral of a cursed homesteader; and on the soft dust of the starwhite dirtroad in the moonlight softly roll the big pneumatic tires of the camera truck, about forty miles an hour, scooping up a low cloud for the stars; and on the back of it the camera, pointing backwards, handled by gumchewing California Nightmen on the Local A.O.U.; and on the road itself Hopalong Cassidy, in his white hat and on his famed pony, loping along intently with beck and bent, holding one rein up daintily, stiffly, like a fist, instead of hanging to the pommel; grave, bemused in the night, thinking thoughts; an escapee; followed by a band of rustlers posing as a posse, they catch up by the moment; the camera truck is leading and rolling them down the slope of a long hill; soon we will see views of a roadside cut, a sudden little crick bridge made of a log or two; then the great moony grove suddenly appearing and disappearing; all pure California night scenery and landscape; the great hairy trees of its night; then through a sudden splash of dark that completely and miraculously amazingly obscures Hoppy in a momentary invisibility; then the posse comes pell-mell from the other hand; what will happen, how will Hoppy escape? what his secret thoughts and stratagems! but he doesn’t seem to be worried at all, in fact then you realize he’s going to hide in those dark bushes of space and let the posse ride by on momentum, then he’ll simply cut back silently on his horse which is good at these tricks, (Cody “And etcetera that’s exactly right and more”); I thought of the camera crew doing this in the soft Southern California night, and of their dinners by campfire later, and talk. I had never imagined them going through these great Alexandrian strategies just for the sake of photographing Joan Rawshanks fumbling with her keys at a goggyfoddy door while all traffic halts in real world life only half a block away and everything waits on a whistle blown by a hysterical fool in a uniform who suddenly decided the importance of what’s going on by some convulsive phenomena in the lower regions of his twitching hips, all manifesting itself in a sudden freezing grimace of idiotic wonder just exactly like the look of the favorite ninny in every B-movie you and I and Cody ever saw (the same expression as the cop posing, the older cop, probably himself it was) to suddenly realize that he is completely witless and therefore achieving the only thought of his life, the single adult realization of anykind, before twitching and reverting back to his puppy roles, puppy thorities of a kind, going down the stairs of his own home without realizing that he is doing so in the great dark shadow of time and himself falling…with what fascination another oldtimer in the crowd watched that older’s face under the floodlights of Leon Errol the rubberlegged tragic mistaken comedian of an accident, how else could I or the oldtimer get to know—when he saw that he was under floodlights, when it, the simple symbol (Where were you on the night of june fourteen) finally dawned on him long after it had dawned on the whole crowd who also got their fill looking before he realized, but when it did assert itself on his very tiny brain he looked, he let his lower lip slip up over his upper teeth in a simper of complete idiocy and looked to his companion, with a nose wrinkled complete giveup of what to figure or what to do next; recalling, not instantly but after awhile, that he is a policeman, and at that moment striking the copy coply pose in the flare of lights to return his attention to the drama of the filming of Joan Raw-shanks in the fog, whom I saw even then looking fitfully into the sky as the camera took. Joan Rawshanks in the fog…it isn’t that Hollywood has won us with its dreams, it has only enhanced our own wild dreams, we the populace so strange and unknown, so uncalculable, mad, eee…Joan Rawshanks in the fog…the little girls in the crowd were pretty, wore bandanas, so did Joan; the little girls were witty, pretty and nice; we had a gay time; out of the corner of my evil eyes I caught sight of little dumplings of every order, cherry lipped, nipptious, virvacious, flauntin their eyes at the boys, and I, an innocent ghost, gaping, a shadow; Joan Rawshanks in the fog, could it be the terrible dolors we all felt when we saw her suddenly alone in the silence, standing by the litup fence making ready to emote to millions, to erupt, vomit and obhurt to others; we are so decadent with our moues. No discussion was on among the shroudy shadows in the litup raining shadowy background of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Technician magicians, the mysteries, no discussion as to whether the emotional, political and social issues out front had anything to do with the state of a coil, or the kilowatt of a fowder, when of course she is eminently layable, but as to her flaunts and sundances, well, they’d have to take it up with the advisory committee on sex down at the union hall, the guys down there—at one point a millionaire dweller in the rich apartment below which all this was taking place took his stand along the circus electric jutter truck and far from, as me, looking nirpatiously over his shoulder for sign of anyone seein him, rather brushes lightly with his hand against the material of the truckfence he’s about to lean on, not that it’s not his own truck but it might be dirty; far from me, as I stood, behind the crowd, couldn’t see nothin—meanwhile the great drama ever unfolded in the area of the blazing lights that were so bright and white when I first saw them coming up Hyde Street thinking I’d terminate my walk on top of Russian Hill and get me a prospect then return home, so bright I thought they were being used by a new kind of civil defense organization crew that makes tests to see how bright lights have to be for bomber planes to catch them on foggy frisco nights; in this brightness, so bright that it embarrasses, I myself and all the crowd were finally delivered up judged and damned to them, because we couldn’t leave except through that restricted zone and because of that they put the light on the alley of exit, for Hollywood of course is eager to see the populace itself, ahem, I mean, Hollywood wants to see more than anyone of us, than we do, than anything, we all had to cross that catwalk of lights and felt ourselves melt into identity as we crossed from the fingerprint rack to the blue desk, so much so that I took quick refuge beside two conmen who had commented on the old ladies upstairs as they really—they were burglars or eager to meet rich old dames say in a capacity as servant and then rob them, I took cover in their shadow so persistently as we walked the catwalk that one of them observed the tenacity of my presence somehow and looked annoyedly, so I had to dart forward, for a moment be caught, flying, etched in whiteheat wild Hollywoodian blazos, to take cover behind a librarian girl who’d had enough of her first glimpse of Hollywood filming since she’d arrived from Little Rock on her first sojourn in California. Earlier in the performance a beautiful crazy girl in glasses and ordinary coat and low heels came rushing up the driveway before the first Take as though she was lost and stopped to talk, or to be talked to really, by the pretty stand-in girl, who only and quite in a natural way began to explain something to her, but then we in the whole crowd saw the girl goof and titter and get that camera feeling and we all laughed her off as an eccentric movie crasher not a serious ordinary girl lost going home in the maze of a movie location scene; well she was a luscious little girl and came around with the rest of the crowd, finally, where it stood, on a grassy slope, watching; stood in
the back, smiling, isolated, bashful still…with a kind of crazy dream in her eyes. But I was determined to see the spectacle of Hollywood. There she was…Joan Rawshanks in the fog; she had taken up the stand-in’s place; they were ready for the last great Take. The whistle shrilled, that of the cop who by now had, in the background to all the moil and counter-confusion, worked like a ferret to finally achieve a pinnacle of success and power which had increased to the point now where he was actually blowing his whistle after every Take, in order to signal not only Hyde Street traffic it could move on but the remnants of the trapped crowd who wanted to sneak out the illuminated scandalous escape alley and go home, and had to face that ordeal to do it, running a gauntlet more cruel than any Cecil B. De Mille ever dreamed. So traffic, whitefaced and panicked, stayed suspended on the street; subinterior lieutenants of the uniformed corps rushed out; one big particular lug who was of course a perfect Hollywood version of the cop, they must have hired him for looks and not for training, he’d go running frantically with his hand on his gun-hock across or that is along the great Italian balconean rail that juts out from the front of Elite Arms and in full sight, in bright lights, against white marble, dressed all in crazy blackshirt black, he’d go running after some imaginary traffic disturbance that had somehow took root in the porch, otherwise he had no right immediately prior to each take to suddenly dart off shouting some fake name or ambiguous imitation of someone shouting for somebody, hand on gun as if they were filming him, the which I assure you if you’ve at all trusted my previous observations, they were not; understand; and so, ah, but, running to the end of the thing, darting a look over the precipice, the whole thing and the whole scene, the top of Russian Hill, overlooking great etceteras of the city and the Bay Bridge down there—the crowd gently surged forward to see Joan enact the scene of the frightened woman with the fiddling keys and the door that would only open to three tugs. Through the rain I try to discern signs of whether the camera is turning or not; then I could be ready for the big moment; I endeavor to hear someone shout a signal like “Camera!” There are strident disturbances in the crowd itself; feeling cold, surrounded, foolishified, foolified, trapped, they now make cracks, the kids wrestle in the dark, little dogs break away from the leashes so that pretty lovergirls previously turning smiling faces to suitors in the interesting dark are now scurrying among legs of pedestrians very ungirllike and so forth to refetch their little doggies, and an eccentric but goodlooking middleaged woman who never goes out alone but has decided to come down in a hasty coat to see a real Hollywood filming is now hysterically looking around with a smile of gratitude and goodcheer and light, can’t name it, she was watching so intently from the park curb that she didn’t notice when she started to teeter off it, so when she landed on her feet not realizing the instinct perfection she was caught surprised and stumbled forward and teetered and almost fell, but didn’t; to atone for this smiled at everyone in the immediate vicinity close enough to have caught her in the act, as I did; but no one acknowledged in the least, we all turned away, she ended up smiling in a void, understand, smiling too in the opposite direction from the cameras, the cameras are focused on the rainy asphalt all white, her vacant and inexcusable and imoondable smile is fixed on nothing but the rainy cape of night, the whole part of the wind and the night that sits out here juttin over the bay and a raw wet mountain or two that comes from Seattle and even the cold regions further North. Joan Rawshanks hugged herself, she was getting ready for another Take; she had her head bowed; I felt tired standing. She moves forward…ah, the signal must have come; the cameras are actually turning; just like when the great punter punts, the ball soars high and magnificent and spiral but the sound of the kick was unsatisfying; now the cruel cameras grind and gravel and turn and pick up Joan, and there she goes, hustling like mad up that ramp, fumbling for her keys in her purse, now she’s got them; it’s exactly the same thing they’ve already done twice, this is almost as perfect as a vaudeville act; she goes to the door, fumbles, gets the keyhole, plunges into the keyhole, with rapture, like she was coming, she has that awful ugh desperation we all saw at this moment, the door won’t yield to her first tug, gad, the door is closed, obstreperous, you can feel it in the crowd, their hostility for that door is already aroused and the picture isn’t even cut yet or the film dry; they’re going to hate that door en masse opening night; it’s just a door, though; I see Joan tugging at it, she tosses her frightened face to the sky, the overhead, actually, creamy concrete garage ramp light on the ramp steps; two tugs, three, the door finally opens, the crowd cheers scattered and forlorn in the rainy dismalities; and Joan has made her third Take—The camera men suddenly begin mutilating and dissecting parts of their equipment and camera, something is being slapped to the ground like a doggie, a cigarette lights, the director’s assistant (tall sort of grave fellow like a railroad baggage handler foreman with his hat on the back of his head only this one here wears a hunting hat casually and when an intelligent little boy in glasses impulsively wandered on-set to ask intelligent questions or be let to sit he was kind and fatherly and not police-like in succeeding in getting him, the puffy cheek wide-eyed educated curious boy, back, pudgy-legged and all, into the crowd, to watch, where he oughta watch from, like us); the Take was over. Joan vanished in a flare of cloaks, a Carriage was pulling up; just back of the rose vine wall there…but, no, then, actually, Joan was in the tent with the Generals; it appears they’ll take another Take and then everybody knock off for the night, see what Frisco’s got to offer; one technician saying to another “I don’t know as I wanta do that tonight,” in other words everybody on the job starting to relax and talk about afterwork matters, so that the crowd began to file away in great numbers that ate at its presence, in fact I went with this slice and batch, across those guilt provoking judgment day lights of greatlamps…the director’s assistant is going around clearing up things it seems. The prettiest girl in the crowd, darkeyed Susan, is inlove with James, the tallyoung beautiful handsomeboy of the neighborhood who will probably win a prize soon, go to Hollywood and become a basketball star simultaneously and also be sought, because of his demure purple eyes, which he can’t help, (and long-eyelashed languor) by queers of every kind; but Barbara, whose mother and elder sister are out witnessing with her, is also on the make for James but at the same time on the outs with Susan; so both she and Susan have been occupied all this time (while cops gain power, while producers gain time, while movie stars win thousands of dollars etc. and while old ladies wring their hands in despair, while the fog rolls and ships are sailing out into the darkness of the sea this very instant) occupied all this time in a catfight for James’ attention; James, however, being well attended by his squire, junior brother, and dog, and not unconscious of his power; so that after Barbara makes an elaborate fuss saying goodnight to her mother and elder past-prime sister, so that past-prime sister will whimper and coo for James, who loves it and withers, and writhes, past-prime says “Well if you insist on staying out, Barbara, you can tell us all the details in the morning…” so that James has to duck a little to miss the object, after that play-act going on simultaneous with the show down there, Barbara officially installs herself to talk to James but he is in love with Susan and keeps casting to her, and when that slice of the crowd I spoke of leaves, Susan is in it, simply going home, leaving James forlorn, defeating Barbara, but Barbara thinks she’s won! (defeat and victory all around); all this, too, after Susan and James leapt madly and gaily over the hedges together earlier, in the second try of the first Take, say. So long have I been here that the original interest I had found in observing the director, who was not much older than myself, got lost and with it the director got lost, I couldn’t see him anymore, he faded away into something rich and distant, like sitting by swimmingpools on drizzly nights in Beverly Hills in a topcoat, with a drink, to brood. As for poor Joan Raw-shanks in the fog, she too was gone…I guess they’d raise a glass of champagne to her lips tonight in some warmly lit room atop the
roof of a hilltop hotel roofgarden swank arrangement somewhere in town. At dawn when Joan Rawshanks sees the first hints of great light over Oakland, and there swoops the bird of the desert, the fog will be gone.
