by Jack Kerouac
Supposing the Three Stooges were real? (and so I saw them spring into being at the side of Cody in the street right there front of the Station, Curly, Moe and Larry, that’s his bloody name, Larry; Moe the leader, mopish, mowbry, mope-mouthed, mealy, mad, hanking, making the others quake; whacking Curly on the iron pate, backhanding Larry (who wonders); picking up a sledgehammer, honk, and ramming it down nozzle first on the flatpan of Curly’s skull, boing, and all big dumb convict Curly does is muckle and yukkle and squeal, pressing his lips, shaking his old butt like jelly, knotting his Jell-o fists, eyeing Moe, who looks back and at him with that lowered and surly “Well what are you gonna do about it?” under thunderstorm eyebrows like the eyebrows of Beethoven, completely ironbound in his surls, Larry in his angelic or rather he really looks like he conned the other two to let him join the group, so they had to pay him all these years a regular share of the salary to them who work so hard with the props—Larry, goofhaired, mopple-lipped, lisped, muxed and completely flunk—trips over a pail of whitewash and falls face first on a seven-inch nail that remains imbedded in his eyebone; the eyebone’s connected to the shadowbone, shadowbone’s connected to the luck bone, luck bone’s connected to the, foul bone, foul bone’s connected to the, high bone, high bone’s connected to the, air bone, air bone’s connected to the, sky bone, sky bone’s connected to the, angel bone, angel bone’s connected to the, God bone, God bone’s connected to the bone bone; Moe yanks it out of his eye, impales him with an eight-foot steel rod; it gets worse and worse, it started on an innocent thumbing, which led to backhand, then the pastries, then the nose yanks, blap, bloop, going, going, gong; and now as in a sticky dream set in syrup universe they do muckle and moan and pull and mop about like I told you in an underground hell of their own invention, they are involved and alive, they go haggling down the street at each other’s hair, socking, remonstrating, falling, getting up, flailing, as the red sun sails—So supposing the Three Stooges were real and like Cody and me were going to work, only they forget about that, and tragically mistaken and interallied, begin pasting and cuffing each other at the employment office desk as clerks stare; supposing in real gray day and not the gray day of movies and all those afternoons we spent looking at them, in hooky or officially on Sundays among the thousand crackling children of peanuts and candy in the dark show when the Three Stooges (as in that golden dream B-movie of mine round the corner from the Strand) are providing scenes for wild vibrating hysterias as great as the hysterias of hipsters at Jazz at the Philharmonics, supposing in real gray day you saw them coming down Seventh Street looking for jobs—as ushers, insurance salesmen—that way. Then I saw the Three Stooges materialize on the sidewalk, their hair blowing in the wind of things, and Cody was with them, laughing and staggering in savage mimicry of them and himself staggering and gooped but they didn’t notice…I followed in back…. There was an afternoon when I had found myself hungup in a strange city, maybe after hitch-hiking and escaping something, half tears in my eyes, nineteen, or twenty, worrying about my folks and killing time with B-movie or any movie and suddenly the Three Stooges appeared (just the name) goofing on the screen and in the streets that are the same streets as outside the theater only they are photographed in Hollywood by serious crews like Joan Rawshanks in the fog, and the Three Stooges were bopping one another…until, as Cody says, they’ve been at it for so many years in a thousand climactic efforts superclimbing and worked out every refinement of bopping one another so much that now, in the end, if it isn’t already over, in the baroque period of the Three Stooges they are finally bopping mechanically and sometimes so hard it’s impossible to bear (wince), but by now they’ve learned not only how to master the style of the blows but the symbol and acceptance of them also, as though inured in their souls and of course long ago in their bodies, to buffetings and crashings in the rixy gloom of Thirties movies and B short subjects (the kind made me yawn at 10 a.m. in my hooky movie of high school days, intent I was on saving my energy for serious-jawed features which in my time was the cleft jaw of Cary Grant), the Stooges don’t feel the blows any more, Moeisiron, Curley’s dead, Larry’s gone, off the rocker, beyond the hell and gone, (so ably hidden by his uncombable mop, in which, as G.J. used to say, he hid a Derringer pistol), so there they are, bonk, boing, and there’s Cody following after them stumbling and saying “Hey, lookout, houk” on Larimer or Main Street or Times Square in the mist as they parade erratically like crazy kids past the shoeboxes of simpletons and candy corn arcades—and seriously Cody talking about them, telling me, at the creamy Station, under palms or suggestions thereof, his huge rosy face bent over the time and the thing like a sun, in the great day— So then I knew that long ago when the mist was raw Cody saw the Three Stooges, maybe he just stood outside a pawnshop, or hardware store, or in that perennial poolhall door but maybe more likely on the pavings of the city under tragic rainy telephone poles, and thought of the Three Stooges, suddenly realizing—that life is strange and the Three Stooges exist—that in 10,000 years—that…all the goofs he felt in him were justified in the outside world and he had nothing to reproach himself for, bonk, boing, crash, skittely boom, pow, slam, bang, boom, wham, blam, crack, frap, kerplunk, clatter, clap, blap, fap, slapmap, splat, crunch, crowsh, bong, splat, splat, BONG!
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“OBVIOUSLY, AN IMAGE which is immediately and unintentionally ridiculous is merely a fancy.”—T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 1917–1932, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 383 Madison Avenue, New York 17, New York, Fifth Printing, June 1942, when little Cody Pomeray was sixteen, and was just beginning to learn the things that would eventually lead him through the mazes of the mind growing to all kinds of realizations that when a thing is ridiculous it is subject to laughter and reprisal, and may be cast away like an old turd in front of the pearly old pigs of the sty, a thing gone dead. There were no images springing up in the brain of Cody Pomeray that were repugnant to him at their outset. They were all beautiful. There was a clarity and pureness in his mind. Someday he would realize that it was necessary to go back and get it. Time and history are not made of turds; ridiculous Caesar wasn’t dead in a day; old Herbivorous Walt didn’t march through the brake for nothing, nor moons leering; pah! it’s a fancy sardine sold on paint. When Cody saw a piece of cow-flap along the stockyard tracks, and smelt the dying beasts within, listened sometimes to pigs squealing in their bleed, their upside down bleed of the evil Jews Armour and Swift of Denver; and when he thought of taking one of those pieces, and sitting it up on the frazzled stock porch of the platform, to let it dry and go fragrant in the sun, like tobacco, so he could, on some earlier noon than this red dusk he saw it by, return when the flies are druzzing in pit-plots of their own by the hum of dynamos of Noon, beez-treeings of noon, sunny warped-ass porch noon, platform noon, old noon of hydrants, fertilizer, and seed, noon in Liverpool, Ohio; come by there and watch the flies make their golden flopovers upon the steaming seeds of the cowflap now like an old turf flap, cakish, pie-like, Amos ’n’ Andy and the Fresh Air Taxicab in the apple tree (wood from boyhood ideal trees looks old and dusty in a mature-ity desk); see that dung hotten in the lull, while old men weep on cadaverous leprous piles, by their own worms eaten full of holes, on nails, symbolic nails; seeing that and also the particular essence of joy and righteousness in all the world at peace that comes from the scent of hot rails at noon when the Hottentot sun blasts down to melt the tar that beds them; paranoia preceding reality, reality flirting with paranoia, paranoia blooming in fresh aridities, flowering in the vale, paranoia’s not a cow palace, paranoia’s a possibility remotely to be wished or avoided, let it go, till it proves it was right all the time when you die, allowing his mind to make its own fertilizer estimations, or rather estimations by mental radio, the steer-nerve secret in the hole of the brain, the place, for him to decide what it is happening in the warm world that can also be cold outside his eyeballs, that will send back to him, by impulses of electric mystery, the vision, or the insanity, or the actual imp
ulse that everything is happening exactly as you see it, and that is a heinous happenstance there, it bodes no good, the mind doing this, then letting the soul rebound softly and say “No, no, everything is really alright, that was paranoia, that was just a vision.” Cody allowed himself the conviction that in the darkness old men lay in wait, which was proved later when he himself lay in the darkness of the straw, the paranoia, the vision, having been just an expression of the truth of things, not the silly-ass moment! of things! of things! “Eliot’s put the ball up in the air and it’s good.” Eliot plays right for-ward for Santa Clara, it’s a radio basketball.
Inside the secret of the dung, and the flit-flies in the drowsiness, Cody saw the possibility that he might have taken that wet cowflap and thus ripened it like an autumn…he rolled his hoop past his thought. But there was nothing ridiculous, there were no images immediately and sensationally ridiculous; it was just a matter of believing in his own soul; it’s just a matter of loving your own life, loving the story of your own life, loving the dreams in your sleep as parts of your life, as little children do and Cody did, loving the soul of man (which I have seen in the smoke), lilting in your own breaks to make them good and bad according to the geography of the day which included (for him) those Santa Fe drive junkyards not far from the overpass surmounting the rooftops of Denver Mexicotown. “But we came,” said Cody, “to the garage at twelve o’clock just like Old Bull Balloon had told us, and there he was, old Bull, upstairs with all those guys and his hatbands all laid out crazy on his arm, and we said, well, wup, well, but the fact of the matter was”—(thinking as the clock ticks)—“that dung you talked about, that dung, in fact, yes, and I also used to listen to Amos ’n’ Andy—”
