by Jack Kerouac
In a swash, no, who says paragraph, who says swash,
In a simple swash of dust clouds things were accomplished and I simply took off for Denver to that is for San Francisco, to see Cody…necessarily I had to leave a lot out there. The trip consumed a considerable amount of my energy; but it was far from flagging; I sat, in the rear left corner of the car with my head against the glass and let all the dry old Nevadys rollon; there be nothing easier than riding in a good new car across the West, especially when, as in this travel bureau car, you have no personal responsibilities with the driver or drivers, and so don’t have to talk or keep time; but just sit back, making more time than a bus, and more stops, and fewer bounces, and less fare, cool all over, just sit there, especially at night, and let that land unfold, unfold, with the poor driver to boot it onwards into the mist that hangs over the road.
O dewy road,
Filmy eyed dove,
Road of gold, rove
Noun of roads,
The town of roads,
Road, a road,
The same new old,
The near a ling.
At the junction of the state line of Colorado, its arid western one, and the state line of poor Utah I saw in the clouds huge and massed above the fiery golden desert of evening fall the great image of God with forefinger pointed straight at me through halos and rolls and gold folds that were like the existence of the gleaming spear in His right hand, and sayeth, Go thou across the ground; go moan for man; go moan, go groan, go groan alone go roll your bones, alone; go thou and be little beneath my sight; go thou, and be minute and as seed in the pod, but the pod the pit, world a Pod, universe a Pit; go thou, go thou, die hence; and of Cody report you well and truly.
* * *
VISIONS OF CODY: I’ve had several visions of Cody, most of the great ones in the middle of a tea-high and the greatest on jazz tea-high, matched only by the vision I had of him in Mexico. My first great vision of Cody didn’t come, as I say, as I keep saying, as though I had to struggle to keep saying, until 1948, goodly two years after I met him in that naked door. It was as if he was a superhuman spirit walking, or that is racing in flesh sent down to earth to confound me not only in my actions but in my thoughts: wild, wild day I suddenly looked from myself to this strange angel from the other side (this is all like bop, we’re getting to it indirectly and too late but completely from every angle except the angle we all don’t know) of Time—which he kept talking about all the time. Cody now says “Time—goes—by—fast!!—you don’t realize or notice or come to tell how fast—time—flies!!” Beware, he is saying, time is flying; he’s not saying later than you think, or Life begins, or the hour is struck, he just says that time is passing us all by this very minute. Then he looks at you primly, with an expression he rarely—Cody has a broken nose that gives a ridge to his bone, Grecian and slight, and a soft nose-end that only slightly Romanizes down but not like a banana nose, it is exactly the nose of a Roman warrior or prelate and like a nose I once saw in the sketches of Leonardo da Vinci that he has made in the sunny streets of active day in old medieval Italy (the Renaissance, like its name, was really French) a curly downward nose-tip like angry old men…Cody’s cheekbones are smooth, youthful and high; this, with the nose, and alert darting open eyes, makes an arcade-covering for his mouth whenever demurely he presses and prunes it together, or warps, or persimmons it, for a moment of patience, which usually comes after a statement like he made about Time, patience to await the foolish unconsidered words ever ready to blurt from the mouths not the minds of poor mortal humankind. Consider, harken to Cody’s face—his expression—his now-patience—after all the franticness of his boy days—why he walks in the rain (or drives) and smiles like that? (it’s an interior splashed smile, the primness). His Germanic head is crew cut: when hair crowds over his skullbones he combs it to the side like Hitler only sandy, only bullnecked, rocknecked. He loves to mimic women and wishes he was a sweet young cunt of sixteen so he could feel himself squishy and nice and squirm all over when some man had to look and all he had to do was sit and feel the soft shape of his or her ass in a silk dress and that squishy all over feeling, and he’d like to spend all day over a hot stove and finger himself and feel the rub of his dress on his ass and wait for hubby who has one sixteen inches long. Adamant nature, though, made him cheekboned impenetrable as steel; a daughter may delight in her father’s soft cheek, pinch it, let her try to pinch and purse up his cheekbone with its arid juiceless stubble. Cody reads Proust slowly and reverently, has been 729 pages along in Volume I over the past two years, reading damn near daily, sometimes less than half a page at a time; he reads out loud, as I say, with the pride and dignity of a Robert Burns, a Carlyle a Hero of Hero Worships, of whom it may be said “What light glares into his soul that he should be so.”—should be so harsh, unbending, raw, the now-quiet father of supper hours with potential souls on his knee—Emily, Gaby, Timmy Pomeray so golden, fat as corn pudding, the same Cody that I saw from the lower deck of the ferry crossing the Mississippi when we passed through New Orleans and Algiers that drowsy afternoon careering as it seemed to me like a flag, a pennant in the blue from the upper deck overhanging the brown river of his Missouri great fathers, Joanna, his lovelife, grinning feebly behind him and ready to jump with him if he was ready for the ecstasy (just like Julien and Cecily on other roofs). Dear Lord above, I’m high…(or wish I was).
The one great occasion that I saw him with eyes of fire or on fire and saw everything not only about him but America, all of America as it has become conceptualized in my brain, was when, in Mexico, having just blasted a great rugged cigar of marijuana in the desert parked in front of the stone hut of a family the mother of which as her sons lazed in the fly door, the door that was not only the dreamy occupancy of flies in drowse and drum dum but of brothers and cousins, male, with regardant legs in the dust, no hillbillies, paisanos, cats of the pampas, campo people, went back in the green dancing shade of well planted trees swimming in a fresh, or relatively fresh afternoon breeze from over across the yucca and the peyotl and the crazy weeds and sand dust blowing, where the daughters were pounding the supper and humming little drowsy songs like the wind as they waited for nightfall and the tower and the well (outlook and imagination), a tired old Mexican mother but happy and among hers, in colorless shroudy apron more like the great dresses of Dutch navvies in old black prints stooped humbly and seriously to scoop with her closed palm and like milking the long thin dry stalk that knocked its rattly pod-leaves in the paper she held open underneath with the other hand, in the apron, throwing precipitate like wheat from a wagon the curled green burnt conglomerations of crackly weedleaf which is marijuana. On the completion of this tremendous bomber, and as Cody drove back to town for our afternoon in the whorehouse, and money in our pockets, and no place to go, and in a foreign land, and high, and in the sun, I looked at him (as he sat back driving five miles an hour through narrow stucco alleys that were streets, with dark eyes watching from all kinds of sudden spots, as if we were in Afternoon Land not Mexico (famous for its night) and as, graciously taking instructions from the sweet and naive little Mexican cat (nineteen) who’d turned us on, left, right, derecha, izquierda, with pointings, to which Cody replied with grandiloquent purple robed Yesses and That’s Rights and I Do Hear Yous, Man, the same kid showing us his infant son for a space when we were so high it seemed like an angel suddenly being shown to the tea-heads in Teahead City by the Youthful Mayor, whose Beauteous Wife who Was Simple Like Ruth in the Corn watched from a dark Algerian door (with gold in the stone) finally, feeling so well at ease with the world, leaning back, bushy haired from a sudden wild high (Americans never smoke marijuana cigars) that must have blown his top up and the hair too, surprised, flushed, blinking, looking down to see the steering wheel of that old ’37 Ford jalopy we bucketed down in from Denver over many a dusty bushy mile running roughly down the spine of the Americas, to see if the wheel held, but actually in complete possession of all his wits
and joys and in fact so completely and godlike-ly aware of every single little thing trembling like a drop of dew in the world, or sitting like the antique clinker of a paper bookmatch on an insignificant green desk somewhere in the world, aware of the glow in his stomach related to the strength of his father, aware of myself and Sherman in the backseat high and dumb, and of the kid, the town, the day, the year, the consequence, and time passing us all by, and yet everything always really all right, that he suddenly glowed up like a sun and became all rosy as a rosy balloon and beautiful as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and said, from way far back maybe ten minutes, an hour or a year or years ago, “Yes!” At that moment I decided never to forget it (even as it happened); Cody was so great, so good, that I couldn’t believe—he was by far the greatest man I had ever known. Do you know that now I realize and look back and see that in the beginning he made everybody smoke tea so they’d look at him in their original virgin never to be repeated kicks?…the bastard sensed it. Yet he’s an angel. I’m his brother, that’s all.
But enough of my greatest enemy—because while I saw him as an angel, a god, etcetera, I also saw him as a devil, an old witch, even an old bitch from the start and always did think and still do that he can read my thoughts and interrupt them on purpose so I’ll look on the world like he does. Jealous, all over. If’s anything he can’t stand, Val Hayes first off said in 1946, is people fucking when he’s not involved, that is, not only in the same room but the same floor or house or world. And I discovered he can’t stand people talking or putting forth a thought or even thinking in the same world. He feels that he is indispensable to his wife, children, his former wives, me, and the—that would be Heaven, or Time, or Whatever. He’s afraid of death, very cautious, cagey, careful, suspicious, wary, half near a thing—out of the corner of his eye he talks about danger and death all the time. He believed in God right away when he exploded into T and that trip in 1948, told me so immediately as we drove through the night across oceans of rain and the desolation of the Wilderness and of the Dark Cities. While eating supper he continually nudges his wife’s thigh and sucks juices from her lips and pats her kindly on the head and slaps applesauce out of a can into his children’s (his daughters’) plates, drinks milk out of the bottle, won’t hardly allow me a glass, himself doles out the Nescafe in cups, runs bread in hand and his bread always is wrapped in a sandwich around the evening meat to the stove, handles precarious cast-iron covers of old stove with teetering jumps and balances and Whoops like W. C. Fields, “Lookout there! lookout! lookout! yeaaah!” Everybody got excited this year about Marlon Brando in Streetcar Named Desire; why Cody has a thinner waist and bigger arms, personally knew Abner Yokum in the Ozarks (Marlon Brando is really Al Capp), has probably bigger bats and catchers mitts, wears week-old T-shirts covered with baby puke, is like a machine in the night, masturbates five or six times a day when his wife is sick (in fact all the time), has private secret rags all over the house (that I have seen), writes with severe and stately dignity under after supper lamps with muscular bended neck three or four times the half, can run the 100 in less than 10 flat, pass 70 yards, broad jump 23 feet, standing broad jump 11 feet, throw a 12-pound shot 49 feet, throw a 150-pound tire up on a 6-foot rack with just one arm and his knee, plays pinochle at night with the boys in the caboose, wears a slouched black hat sometimes, was walking champ in the Oklahoma State Joint Reformatory, cuts and switches poetic old dirty boxcars from the Maine hills and Arkansas, holds his footing when a 100-car freight slams along in a jaw breaking daisy chain roar to him, drives a ’32 Pontiac clunker (the Green Hornet) as well as a ’50 Chevy station wagon sharp and fast (I see his head bobbing into sight from the sea of heads in cars on Market Street, girls throng at the bell and the greenlight walk among clerks and Bartlebies and Pulham Esquires and Victor Matures of California, Chinese girls, luscious office girls with tight skirts Chineesing at their knee-sides and the juice drippin down their legs) (why I could tell you stories make your cock stand) and “Wow” “Yes!” Look at that one!” And we dig the cops too, not as cops, but say, “See? that one is all hungup on a pain in his neck, he keeps rubbing his neck, jess standin there, working, thinking, worried about his neck.”
In dark and tragic railyard nights of San Francisco like those so long ago in Denver we drive the wide-eyed children along the old red boxcars—“Erie, 15482,” “Missouri, Kansas, Texas, 1290,” “Union Pacific, Road of the Streamliners, 12807”—we pass the old cowboy switchman in his shack, also the eccentric flagman with a red flag, shortcuff pants, brown felt hat but circus like, fiery yellow but actually dirty gloves, strange rosy weathered expression, a card in his ear, the Men at Work sign at his feet, also ordinary blue shirted haberdashery switchmen who commute to work from coastal mountain fogs and inner bay gales and stand in the middle of the night all dead and abandoned, we pass the diner now closed, the spate of bay water with its oils and slapping boxboats and the ships five blocks away sitting on the same old Penang, we pass the orange rickety railway baggage carts, the steaming Pullmans reposant at the dead-end block, the old porters red-eyed and spitting crossing the rails, the chug-smoke of a locomotive, night, the old sad railyards of life and my fathers. “That’s what you’ll be doing when you’re braking—there’s the switchman, only you’ll be out on the mountainside or picking up an extra engine for the pass, easy-as-you-go, easy-as-you-go, there’s the sign, there’s the lantern waving, always have your brakeman’s lantern.” He once said you can also kill a man with it. “Man I don’t get frantic high any more,” he tells me, and I know we were high in the past because we were young, we were in the virgin kicks of youth and death. “Time to put the girls to sleep.” We drive back to his little crooked house on Russian Hill wedged and lost on a narrow unknown sidestreet and put the golden girls in the rosy bath, their toys and little ragamuffin dusts lay dolly dormant under the kitchen stove as in the night sweetly they draw breath in the peace and security of their father’s house, their mother’s care, angels of angels, daughters of man, children of God. Obscurely in the kitchen, by a little painted-Evelyn pantry door, hangs a collection of Out Our Ways and Major Hooples, pinned up by old continuous Cody.
High atop the sink pantry sits his roach kit, his tea bowl, his kick plate or kickpot or fixins, a dish, glass, deep dish, small, with rolling paper, tweezers, roach pipe (hollow steel tube), roach pipe ramrod came with the tube, attached, an art tool actually, bottles of seeds for possible future bourgeois agricultures settling down in a rose covered cottage on the blueberry hill with Evelyn’s dress flying in the wind when Cody runs like Jack ’n’ Jill up the hill to carry her across the threshold as the kiddies cheer, the daughters understand. In this dream I lie coiled under the hill like the snake, and the Bird of Paradise is very far away, in South America actually maybe. Cody’s roach kit includes old roaches from 1951, even 1950, so small they’ve wasted out of sight; and a marble, a mig, like the ones I raced.
War will be impossible when marijuana becomes legal.
The great jazz tea-high where I saw a vision of Cody equal to Mexico was in Jacksons Hole when we heard the little Irwin Garden alto; that night began early—
* * *
BUT THE LATEST AND PERHAPS REALLY, next to Mexico and the jazz tea high I’ll tell in a minute, best, vision, also on high, but under entirely different circumstances, was the vision I had of Cody as he showed me one drowsy afternoon in January, on the sidewalks of workaday San Francisco, just like workaday afternoon on Moody Street in Lowell when boyhood buddy funnguy G.J. and I played zombie piggybacks in mill employment offices and workmen’s saloons (the Silver Star it was), what and how the Three Stooges are like when they go staggering and knocking each other down the street, Moe, Curly (who’s actually the bald domed one, big husky) and meaningless goof (though somewhat mysterious as though he was a saint in disguise, a masquerading supderduper witch doctor with good intentions actually)—can’t think of his name; Cody knows his name, the bushy feathery haired one. Cody was suppose
d to be looking after his work at the railroad, we had just blasted in the car as we drove down the hill into wild mid-Market traffics and out Third past the Little Harlem where two and a half years ago we jumped with the wild tenor cats and Freddy and the rest (I dig the Little Harlem in rainy midnights comin home from work in the black slouch hat, from the corner, the pale pretty pink neons, the modernistic front, the puddles so rosy glowing at the foot of the entrance, the long arrowing deserted Folsom Street which, as I hadn’t remembered in my back East reveries runs straight into the far lights of the Mission or Richmond or whatever district, all glitters in the indigo distance of the night, to make you think of trucks and long hauls to Paso Robles, bleak Obispo or Monterrey, or Fresno in the mist of highways, the last highways, the California up and down coast highways, the ones with an end which is water orients and the empurpled Golgothan panoplies of Pacific Bowl and Abyss), past the dingy bars with their incredible names (colored bars) like Moonlight in Colorado (that one’s actually in Fillmore) or Blue Midnight or Pink Glass and inside it’s all wretched raw brown whiskey and mauve boilermakers, past Mission Street earlier too (before Folsom) with its corner conglomerate of bums or sometimes lines of dragged winos so torpid that when pretty women pass they don’t even look (even though they’re waiting in line to give blood for four dollars at Cutters so they can rush off and buy wine and pissberry brandy for the Embarcadero Night) or if they do look it’s accidental, they seem to be too guilty to look at ordinary women, only Steamboat Annies of pierfront bouges with knots in their sticks for calf muscles and hagless toothmarks in their purply gums, Jey-sas Crise!); bums of Mission and Howard, that live in miserable flop hotels like the Skylark in Denver that Cody and his father Old Cody Pomeray the Barber lived in and from which they took their Sunday afternoon walks together hand in hand and amiable after the previous Saturday night’s hassles over his overdrinking wine in the ceremonial saved-up evening movie so he’d snore at usher closeup time and lights on in the showhouse would reveal to shuffling audiences of whole Mexican and Arky families the sight of one of their fellow Americans a bit under the weather in a seat, this being the capper to a whole day of Saturday joys for little Cody such as reading the Count of Monte Cristo while his father barbered in the busy weekend morning, cleanup at the Skylark, and a regular good meal in a fairly good restaurant in late afternoon, and maybe a moment’s lingering with the majority of non-celebrating Saturday night bums wrangled around in seated positions in the sitting room the longer winter nights of which Cody endured aiming spitballs at plaster targets and celestial ceiling cracks as old big clock tocketytocked the Jinuaries away and like in a movie the calendars flapped and still the land and the man survived, stood fixed and immovable in a blurflap of white pages representing time, usually the man was Cody’s dad, the land Colorado, the occasion and occupation Hope, good boy hope for a change; but now it’s May and they’re going to a show and saying good evening to the bums who sit in state over this like old French sewing sisters in a Provincial town; May and Larimer Street is humbuzzing with that same excitement, that same countrified wrangly sad toot and tinkle of old Main line shopping streets in Charleston, West Virginia with all its spotted farmer cars ranged and the Kanawha flowing, and the Southern railroad town with moils of activity at sun tortured five-and-tens across from the tracks, awnings, nations of Negroes lounging by beater stores in near the tobacco warehouses flashing aluminum lights in the southern day-fire; and Los Angeles when the parade goes up and down both sides and the cracked old crazy John Gaunt from a rackety house in a telegraph grove outside the Bakersfield flats with his entire brood of nine packed and pushed up to the torn flap-ass black tarpaulin roof of his fantastic ancient 1929 touring Imperial Buick with the wooden spokes two of them cracked and a siderack for spares like a snail’s shell goof on the runningboard, old John Gaunt and Ma Gaunt with her overalls and sorrow (has to wait while Pa gets his fill at the shooting gallery at South Main, two blocks from System Auto Parks); it’s May and little Cody and old man go cutting together into the adventures of a hard won evening and one which of course like all life is doomed to tragic, unnamable, to-make-you-speechless and sadfaced forever death; just as I used to hurry with my father in May dusks of Saturday, towards unspeakable seashores, with lights before them, and swooping spaces fit for gulls and clouds scuds, towards ramps of yellow sulphur lamp light, overdrives, sudden dank side alleys when there came among the greases and irons and blackdust of ramps in cobbled avenues like the avenues of factories in Germany, those secret chop sueys from Boston Chinatown to make my mouth water and my thoughts hasten to the wink of Chinese lanterns hung in red doorways at the base of golden tinsel porch steps leading up to the Mandarin secrets of within (so when Cody dreamed of being Cristo thrown in the sea in a bag, I was kidnapped and Shanghaied and orphaned to a strange but friendly old Chinaman who was my only contact with hopes of returning to my former life, orphaned in the interesting old void, hey?); May night on Larimer, when the sun is red on green store fronts and Army-Navy suits by the door, and makes a ray and a frazzle by an empty bottle, foot of a hydrant; illuminates the reveries of an aged lady in a window above the windows of empty store rooms, she looks on Wynkoop, Wazee and the rails)—we passed Third Street and all its that, and came, driving slowly, noticing everything, talking everything, to the railyards where we worked and got out of the car to cross the warm airy plazas of the day and there particularly with a fine soot-scent of coal and tide and oil and big works (a fly across haze oil shimmers) (the tar soft undershoe), noticing how great the day and how in the experience of our lives together we were always finding ourselves on a golden sleepy good afternoon just like fishing or really like the afternoons that must have been experienced by the noble sons of great Homeric warriors after (like Telemachus and the noble son of his host, Nestor’s friend) wild night charioteerings across the ghosts and white horses of Phallic Classical Fate in the gray plain to the Sea, rewardful afternoons for tired winners, caresses of cups and figs in the loll of Heroes, just like that, Cody and Me, only American and Cody saying “Now goddammit Jack you’ve gotta admit that we’re high and that was real good shit” and more instant and interesting, and always happening, and everything always all right. We sauntered thus—had come in the green clunker for some reason, wore our usual greasy bum clothes that put real bums to shame but nobody with the power to reprimand and arrest us in his house—began somehow talking about the Three Stooges—were headed to see Mrs. So-and-So in the office and on business and around us conductors, executives, commuters, consumers rushed or sometimes just maybe ambling Russian spies carrying bombs in briefcases and sometimes ragbags I bet—just foolishness—and the station there, the creamy stucco suggestive of palms, like the Union Station in L.A. with its palms and mission arches and marbles, is so unlike a railroad station to an Easterner like myself used to old redbrick and sootirons and exciting gloom fit for snows and voyages across pine forests to the sea, or like that great NYCEP whatever station I ran to over the ice that morning en route in Pittsburgh, so unlike a railroad station that I couldn’t imagine anything good and adventurous coming from it (we, in our youth, had spent goof hours around railroad stations, in fact the last time I was in Lowell we staggered and laughed past the depot to the nearest bar and jumped and whooped over four-foot snowbanks to boot, bareheaded and coatless). Nothing, only bright California gloom and propriety (and I suppose because Cody works for them here), nothing but whiteness and everything busy, official, let’s say Californian, no spitting, no grabbing your balls, you’re at the carven arches of a great white temple of commercial travel in America, if you’re going to blank your cigar do it on the sly up your asshole or in the sand behind the vine if they had a sand vine or sandpot palm, but really—when it came into Cody’s head to imitate the stagger of the Stooges, and he did it wild, crazy, yelling in the sidewalk right there by the arches and by hurrying executives, I had a vision of him which at first (manifold it is!) was swamped by the idea that this wa
s one hell of a wild unexpected twist in my suppositions about how he might now in his later years feel, twenty-five, about his employers and their temple and conventions, I saw his (again) rosy flushing face exuding heat and joy, his eyes popping in the hard exercise of staggering, his whole frame of clothes capped by those terrible pants with six, seven holes in them and streaked with baby food, come, ice cream, gasoline, ashes—I saw his whole life, I saw all the movies we’d ever been in, I saw for some reason he and his father on Larimer Street not caring in May—their Sunday afternoon walks hand in hand in back of great baking soda factories and along deadhead tracks and ramps, at the foot of that mighty red brick chimney à la Chirico or Chico Velasquez throwing a huge long shadow across their path in the gravel and the flat—
