Visions of Cody

by Jack Kerouac

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  IN THE FOREFRONT OF THE THOUGHTS of Charles Brevet (“Ah! Close-ups of Curvy Cuties Oscar! Could You Ask for Anything More?”) I could ask for October again, and the first falling leaves gathering soot by the railroad track in the New England heaviness; I could complain about the honey in a woman’s cunt, or sing a song about how you can suffocate on steam in a closed tunnel; or spit at ruby lips that frame and flesh the inward desire to do nothing but get fucked, which is the look on a good woman’s face, Jack. This one with her imitation lace to conceal her real cunt (imitation etc.) her with her eyes all pool-ly and dark, all wild and midnight, all apple tree and gold, no pale stupid pose and camp, no hateful commercialism, like a willing pursy-mouthed whore, but the sloose lips of indulgence, suck, lie around, eat it, love it all the way, you beautiful doll the hairs on your thigh are my midnight; the lights in your eye-stars make me see the moon with its old sad face always mooning over the world no matter what’s happening; it were you and me, under a roof, dar, love, heart, the moon with same saddened biceptual, bisexual condomidance would erupt her blue lights to our souls and you, you angel, your wrist makes me hungry, your every tiny womanhood part of you and all over you is and it is woman, I couldn’t resist you in church, I’d lick your snowy belly anywhere, in front of any crowds, any time, on the cross, in Golgotha, on a snowpile, on a picket fence, I’d bring you $57.90 a week base pay and let you suck me off by the washing machine when the long red sun sinks like a john in the red western pacific, oh you lovely ashen-eyed lovely of the sols, you woman, you gorgeous heart, you small-eared perfect doe, you rabbit, you fuck you, I want to grab your thighs with my two hands and spread them forcibly and I want you to just lie back and watch me, watch me, you can watch me all you want and I can watch you all I want, perfect understanding, no more Rimbauds, no more toiletries, poetries, just like you always, wanted to be, from the beginning to now the start, just like always hunny baby, so it will be, and is the rain still moonsawing in the poor void?

  Your eyes are like the star of midnight, your lips are like the blood of a sacrifice by moonlight; your shoulders are like the yieldings of elephants in the flesh, as they mill and stamp, and moo and turn, their great forms succumbing to the incredible weight of the herd entire, so your shoulders loosey disconnect and ain’t all loused up tight and musky in your muscle bones; but pretty as snow; the cake of your breasts when you hide them behind black lace as if I wanted to spread peanut butter sandwiches on it; the cake of your, the icing of your fine and wonderful cool nipples that I dig all the way, even unto the point there they get a little hard and bespeak your inner excitements that this is the only way I can reach them; when I was born on that raft, I mean on that barge on the East River, my father was a riverboatman of old beerdrinking wild rail-road-building generation New York of the 1900’s; why you darling, the night has no meaning without you, and without you I have died a many a many night you weak sisters of the pale! Now that I find you darling, Ruby is your name, Ruby, Mary, ruby mary, filthy bloody mary, you’ll an old hag be? not without I don’t have something to do about it to hasten you on your way old Yeats will butler, he really was a cunt man that old Irish sod I love him and dig him, why paterson williams the carlos poet, so carlos he makes a shroud out of a mill, or turns clandestine calvers out of the next stick of half tea that I myself brewed in China that time without even bothering to inquire into the price of pselgnels.

  Poordoll, I know your juicy hole…don’t die so; baby doll, your lips are cold, you don’t stay high with me; if you could stay high with me forever, and together we’d lay in the pool of myself wrapped in your self, why, Andean princess, I’d lay you, like my first wife used to say, with “violent love.”—make violent love to you, hard, if you so wish…ask if you want…I don’t care either way…my way is your way, name my way, your way, I’ve got, I got no way, you got a way, your way is MY way, my way is YOU rrrrrrr way, doll, run on ahead, f, f, f, f, f, f, f, f, f, f fuck f f f fuck f f f fuck, why—I licked your eyebrow that time; from over here, that is, mentally, not actually; why did you hide from me (last night); if you die I die.

  Well and what could Clementina reply to that? that she then, not that she “nlt” then, with moulct of feathers and torn betwixt twelve fine and “furduloure” types of “clanderi,” your “siwht theh eyiou,”; in the middle of the tight fit I’ve always advised all my students to stick to their gums.

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  BUT YOU CAN’T SAY THAT ANYTHING REALLY TREMENDOUS happened to Cody and me till the summer of 1949 when I went out West to find him.

  A night I spent in Denver…prior to my departure to the Coast…some kind of preamble. I had just suddenly realized (I had just seen a very successful young American off on a plane, an executive he was) that nothing in the world matters; not even success in America but just void and emptiness awaits the career of the soul of a man. I walked across a giant plain from the airfield, of course all Denver’s a plain; I was a sad red speck on the face of the earth; I was also a beat hitch-hiker that nobody was giving rides to except one poor Negro soldier who tried to be nice to me when I asked him hep questions about Five Points the Denver nigger-town and he didn’t know, not being involved in a white man’s preoccupations about what colored life must be. I came to the streets of Denver in their infinitely soft, sweet and delightful August evening; dusk it was, I say, purple, with shacks in soft alleys, and many lawns, all over Denver’re many lawns all the time; you see a lawn at the Chinese rectory, at the factory, got drunk on lawns, lost your keys…rolled in the grass…. I walked in that Denver Night—but at 23rd and Welton or 25th, thereabouts, near the gastank and the softball field; I come in there carrying my sad thoughts and also a cup of red hot and really blood red chili; with beans; no, no beans that time; at 23rd and Welton the lawns of soft sweet old Denver are raggedier, it’s where Negro and Mexican children play all day, their parents don’t tell them to get off the lawn, there are no signs, you see therefore nice dusty paths running betwixt the lawngreens; and rickety fences are nearabouts, Denver, it’s all rickety fences and backyards and incinerators smoking in that blue morning air, but also soft sad dusk at dark; in 1947 in fact, right after I met Cody, and had those anticipatory dreams of me and him drinking and gabbling at bars in the construction worker night; I came to feel that the alleys, the fences, the streets were the “holy Denver streets” I called them, and just because of this particular softness—I walked along that, feeling low, seeing how the successful young executive, mysterious Boisvert, was just a bored old Tiresias completely beat and sighing; with nothing to do in his soul but flounce around and yawn and wait, always wait, wait; the dullness of the heart gone dead, the heart never got anything. The highest glamor he had, and was as sad as an old sishrag; in fact we stood on top of a mountain together at Central City and overlooked a hump of mountains with their special snowing iceclouds flying along a heavenly golden cold ridge, the roaring day of the Colorados, high up, and didn’t think much of it together; by myself I might have marveled or by himself he might have…but it meant nothing, to see, own, and possess the world from a height physical and social, to either of us. He talked some other nonsense, anecdotes of boredom maybe. You’ve got to get that World of mind. So I walked the streets of Denver in the night, and passed the dark shapes of women with soft voices, and children with soft voices, and the fragrant smoke from the pipes of workingmen resting on the porch in the evening; at one point in fact a young colored girl peered at me on the sidewalk and said “Eddy?” I passed the holy whitewashed advertisements, the paint-splashes of white in the blue dark greendark that is Denver; I looked up at the flowsy old moon still there with her tilted over sad head, weeping, weeping for the world. Down in Denver, down in Denver, all I did was die. I remember, that was my refrain. Suddenly I came to a softball game under bright floodlights, with earnest glad young athletes but amateurs rushing pell-mell on the dust to the roar of audiences made up of their admiring mothers, sisters, fathers and footman
buddies, whaling at a ninth inning rally, throwing up dustclouds at second base, slapping doubles off the leftfield foulpole and stretching them into crazy triples only it’s a foul and there are groans. I felt pretty silly for having been too long faced to play softball under litup tanks of the Gashouse Kids and Denny Dim wit at night with the Sunday funnies on the corner and the fair exchange of honesties in childhood, like this, but instead had to immediately be the star and in fact rush on to professional gravities and college instead of goofing with the original game. Poor little Mexican hero-Codys of the Denver night! With sadfaced little blond Joannas cheering from the bleachers, with soft hearts, loud voices, real loyalties, squealing, stamping their feet for their brother-boys, crying, cheering them on at that time when brothers mean something; and me, in the back, sitting with an old bum whose only interest at the moment is looking over at a neighbor’s sidepocket where latter’s keeping an extry can of cold beer while he’s opening the other with a can opener, the bum just wants to think if he’s got enough money for some too, fishes in his pocket; I look, on the street, at the intersection, cars are stopped at the red light; there’s exhaust smell; across the traffic, on the rickety porches, behind lawns, the folks stretch in their evening darkness and occasionally look at the game or up at the moon and stars, and it’s another summer. Poor heroes of the Night Cavorting in the Field! And this precisely the field that Cody had once told me about, and I’d listened so garbledly, that I now, and later, thought of it as the place where he had somehow lost his rubber bouncin-ball long ago, the ball he alway’s used to bounce to and from school with, at ten, eleven, when he lived with his father in the Larimer flops but also went to school, bouncing it in the clean spaces between sidewalk markers and then as he grew more dextrous bouncing and slamming it and sending it careering off the walls of garages and skyscrapers and dashing across steets and traffic to retrieve; as, even later, he began riding his bicycle, his paper route or later route, bumblebee route, bicycle route selling bumblebee bubblegum, the one in which, like a Saroyan hero, he made his soul get on the pedals for its existence and rationalizations; I was told by Irwin that he “made a living scraping bubblegums off windowpanes” and I pictured myself washing down the windows at Brock leman’s at Sunday dawn when they’re all going to church through Kearney Square, but actually I do know he worked for a Bubblegum Caterer and also rode bicycles for a living with an Indian buddy not Rinick but Ben Rowel with whom he was shot at Christmas Eve 1943 in the Ozarks by a mangy car-owner; an endeavor, the soul bicycling, that got him much further than the later contemplation of billiard balls as a background…relaxed foreground for anxious serious thoughts about money and—So I died, I died in Denver I died; I said to myself, “What’s the use of being sad because your boyhood is over and you can never play softball like this; you can still take another mighty voyage and go and see what Cody is finally doing.” Oh the sadness of the lights that night!…the great knife piercing me from the darkness…the night-cloud of my dreams rising, and the general brownness of my salvation which is like the brownness in old barrooms and also on Ninth Avenue in October and when they talk about scatology and in Rembrandt’s canvas corner when he draws the mighty and golden aracanions, archways, bulverses and mardigras gargoyles for his surrounding-space to the minute and fragile, lost, world-conscious figures of Jesus and the Woman Taken in Adultery, as priests stare. In a swash, no, paragraph.