by Jack Kerouac
In dealing with Cody I feel that the universe is solid faced, substantial jawed (sober-toed, not goblin-toed).
JACK. (thinking) Nothing smells more like piss than piss—I sit over its ammoniac horrors all day.—The colored people forgot their Dizzy Gillespie for Charlie Parker; the white people remembered Benny Goodman and forgot Artie Shaw
CODY. (breaking a thought) A frowsy-mouthed dame that cunt thinks she is as she stands sticklegged on the corner like a old harridan and lets the traffic ride by her Hannegan who’s—aff, well;—well he is, trouble with Jack is he—damn—he doesn’t finish what he started so I can’t stand there all day long, myack, like tonight in front of the Bakery and he’s talking to me big writer on the sidewalk and Geez what can—a guy—I says to, to himself—I can’t—Oh, yeah (yums and yawns); but Jack is—well he, that time in Chicago, but, he,—ah well; Jack looking at me wearing the old hat is thinkin I have great starlight in my eyes—I ain’t nothin but a simple honest pimp, I ain’t, fah, why, ap—I got me no roach pipe; I ain’t no Denny Dimwit, just like I ain’t no damn Cuban mountain and no bubblegum salesman, I’m Cody Pomeray. I ain’t got nothin to do with all that (ahem); I don’t fart around with that kind of shit; I’m not made to be played on a piccolo; I ain’t got no truck for that fuck, that lousy fuckin brother-in-law like in the movies and comics that never pays rent or food and complains all day in the house; that’s what he is, a fuckin brother-in-law; why, that louse; I got my words more than Sid Caesar, I got more—shit, wh’am I supposed to do to get out of this dilemena, dileminemina, dimmema, yair—that louse; that—(sighs); geez—(all this time Cody has been playacting what you’ve just read—as if I could start a book in the second person not the first person or the third person—so as to confound the ladies inside his thoughts, like a lackey wild old Tom Calabrese balancin teacups on his knee with a tennis ball in his ear, man I mean, a tennis ball in his, the original tennis ball, in his lap, sittin on a book, and makin wit all afternoon with the ladies and grandmothers of the clime; Cody has been thinking like an angry Irishman complaining in American bars just like the Frenchman Celine complaining and gesticulating in French bars but with so many more great words—Yaaak! cries his son Timmy Pomeray, usurping and erupting, slurping, bubbling at brims with the vitality of the clime. Now Cody returns to “serious and revealing” thoughts)
CODY. I ‘ll goof myself out at this rate—work’s too hard on this parking lot; but I’ve got to do something in between seasons as brakeman; everybody in the country knows that; ain’t no money no more. That cunt there all this time didn’t dare for one minute lift her pretty little leg for me to see when she got out of the lowseat of that Cadillac ‘Fifty-two with the fingertip steeringwheel and Fishtail Fries backward and forwards—Hup, a customer, yes sir? Why yes sir. No, he’s going t’other way, ain’t a customer it’s a bore. Dark day with nothing better to ask for; warm air; sun; rain in an hour. He wasn’t a customer, Jack would say, he was the Devil or Daniel Webster’s. Jack Dictionary would laugh to har me prank so—I thank so—anyho—Aaahyou! I yawn on void—Make way for the King, the Queen dropped dead, he’s come to see Poloniopolos, the Greek tragedian who was in that urn of shit they ate in Montaigne to prove something about the Classics and it was well proven. Well, I’ve got to read Montaigne on a mountain I guess all kidding aside I ain’t read, won’t read, have no time—well, wa, read’s read, let read read himself—damn, it makes no difference—what’s going on around here? where am I? O, the parking lot, this concrete was the crick and cold in my back, this world provided the wind for my breath as I my thoughts roved. That would be nice (with stately elan surveying the day). Ah Mrs. Murphy in up yonder tenemental window makes a up-swing of the rug, and calls Mrs. Tarantino and they exchange cans of spaghetti across the rosy void all day which is all lit up with the sunlight and (them little flies floppin) and has ripplin seas of washclothes to make angel wings for the general creamy white and golden atmosphere of housewife afternoons with a dark stranger sitting by the well watching it all, like Beethoven listening to the clatter of the washingwomen in the little European crick, or better and best, the one and only Omar Khayyám who relaxes in the shade seeing and knowing everything around and most of all enjoying the marijuanalike reverie of their, the housewives’, peace; better than Khayyám, the old blind prophet and beggar of the African, the Belgian African Congo town, who sits with stick and provenders them all day with the remarks that well up from his interminable meditations by the bamboo and in the pale, the Great Nigger of the World, Abraham, Adam, Jésu, rattling his beads with that reason for his own and he’s left alone; the two of us combibing, intermingling two minds now; the Khayyám.
And saying to the world, Peace has come; they’ve come with the golden oars and sprung the floods of god on us, we’re all ready to fly into the wind with seabags of moneybags, it’s a gasser—the witch doctor trails off, the ladies wait, the witch doctor picks up again—Saying, He that is Ranified in the Banshee’s Hide May Not the Toga Boast and Crow in this Moredroga. Hollow flutes announce the King, he comes to contest this latest prediction of the prophet, he swings his big be-feathered lance; Old Witchdoctor Remus Khayyám Duluoz, he just sits and lets go another blast at the government. “War is the health of the State.” “War is Obsolete.” “War is Existentialist.” “War is Nowhere.” Well blow, baby, blow! blow, world, blow! go! Yaah—shee-it!—Sh’cago, that’s no town—it’s th’apple, man, it’s th’ apple, it’s scrapple from the apple, it’s down. And meanwhile Miles Davis, like the sun; or the sun, like Miles Davis, blows on with his raw little horn; the prettiest trumpet tone since Hackett and McPartland and at the same time, to flesh some of its fine raw sound, some wild abstract new ideas developed around a growing theme that started off like a tree and became a structure of iron on which tremendous phrases can be strung and hung and long pauses goofed, kicked along, whaled, touched with hidden and active meanings; to come in, then, like a sweet tenor and blow the superfinest, is mowd enow. I love Miles Davis because, send in your penny postcard. “Goof the people,” Little Zagg used to say, serious as hill, “just go along and upset the people,” hill’s bills, it’s a damn shame, and him walking down the street at night and here’s this line of drugstore standers, 2 A.M. Manhatnut, and Zagg says “Watch how we (him and Hindenburg the last of the Dalton boys, Dalton being his pseudoname) upset these cats along the window glass of this here Whelan’s. They won’t know what hit them.” And little Zagg and Bob Hindenburg are walkin along and go cuttin right in there “in fronts of those guy,” as a French-Canook would say, and there’s this gabardine beret and gabardine topcoat on both of them, and Little Zagg he’s real small, and big Bob looks tough, and Zagg looks cunning, and on they go, but, all the time diggin the guys on the corner to see the effect of the clothes they’re wearing; and nobody knows what to think, it’s a real goof. “Sure, I knew her in Oregon,” that guy is sayin over there by the gas pump; with his mustache and salesman bags and lightin a Camel and waiting for his De Soto convertible and nothing to worry about but some gossip about somebody he knew in Oregon—did he say woman? He must have meant cunt. At least I do. Mean. Cunt. Or. Me. Means. Pah—bah—fan—fow—fo—fum, I smell the dog of an English blood!—round the engines, we’re heading for the Arapahoe Rootly tooty Jamboree-ee in old D-Town, Denver, colow, shit
* * *
BROKEN THOUGHT, CODY Always working on a parking lot, damn. Always working, worked from here to Chimexico, Alabama and McCook, Nebraska. Yow!—there…she…goes…now! The cunt of them all, the legs a mile wide, I mean long; ah well, the bus swallered her whole, hole, her whole hole from sight of my eyeballs as I lean in this gastrous doorway all disastered and torn to die for love of Milady. Jesus I hate that—well actually, it’s a good face but I don’t like the feeling you get from seeing his throat that he is (cunning, now; no time for exile or silence, silence or exile)—a man hanged, standing there, a big hangmark in his neck, old Faustus bones, but fat and ugly and has broken white fl
esh of whitecollar workers of America when they really deteriorate and looks awful, and here he is waitin for his car, and tellin the boss I’m a piece of shit, or too old, or too young or whatever, and I was gonna say I hated his face.
Ah what a hassle over a man in the morning—there he stands, accept him. He’s a pillar to my post. I won’t begrudge him a cent of tribute. I always did say a dollar borrowed is a buck owned; and a quarter of the fiscal tax is equal to a fifth of a finance loan divided two and a third by the mutual co-benefiting subsidiary Chinese policies of the Kraft Memorial Industry of Insurances with central main branch offices in the middle of the parking district.
Damn. How much time passed then? Only a few seconds, and by the clock, and my job lags and drags and rolls on wearily, wearily, I don’t want to work, I want to goof—it’s a goof. O once there were saints on windowsills and pigeons in the idealistic dawn of Denver, when Irwin in Mahatma robes of sorrow hid in that dank cellar in Grant Street and pounded nails into his hands upon the table; bent his head, went down, died—to live again and come forth fifteen times strong as Job so that today he is a big respectable young poet in New York, nobody knows about him but his name is Jewish and means Tribe of the Mountain Son of the Golden Finger, he has said, “I looked into the mirror/to check my worst fears./ My face is dark but handsome./ It has not loved for years./” Also he has written: “I came home from the movies/ with nothing on my mind, Trudging up 8th avenue/ to fifteenth almost blind,/ Waiting for a passenger ship” (and this reminds me exactly of a dream about a big passenger ship lined up along a beach near a tenement resort that has broken glass in the sand beyond the washlines and the girl who said to me “But I can cut my feet in that sand, hey,” and one might, Pow!, the offshore pirates in big old heavy cruisers open’d up on our lines of defense and let us have flush in the ass and face, we all collapsed in the sand on better days, with parasols and a few parakeets and paratrooper’s wives crowning us with ivy leaves of laurel victory all poison and southern, now what the hell was I saying—no, on the other hand, that was the beach, I caught myself running then just as Jack caught me running on the machine, but the sand was, and is, quite…tragic, or whatever, and so: but that dream was strange, dear Chad) “/ship to go to seas. I lived in a roominghouse attic/ near the PortAuthority/ An enormous city warehouse/ Slowly turning brown/ Across from which old brownstone’s/ fire escapes hung down/ On a street which should be Russia/ outside the Golden Gates/ or Back in the middle ages,/ not in United States/.”
And that/ sir/ is poetry/
nothing but/ nothing else/
nothing/ sir / but/ sir / nothing/
but/ sir/ altogether sir.
“In a street which should be Russia” expresses exactly the longing of a former idealistic young Jewish boy looking out a window in the Manhattan of his disillusions; it is also a statement close to madness and so close as to induce hyposthobia, or, swinging on a trapeze above death, in a street which should be Russia, outside the Golden Gates (the golden knobs on the Kremlin, the furls; the Golden Gate of Russian Hill Frisco;) or back in the Middle Ages, not in United States…what is this “in United States” if it isn’t the expression of a clever shallow mind gripped in the fear of madness; then you come, no but now listen but you do, to “Two books on top the bedspread, Jack Woodford and Paul de Kock. I sat down at the table to read a holy book,/ about a super city/ whereon I cannot look” and you have the utterances of a mighty poet, “I sat down at the table to read a holy book,/ about a super city/ whereon I cannot look,” “About a super city,” “Whereon I cannot look.” “Whereon.” The use of Superman terms mixed with clay nouns like table, book, etc. and the capper, the mighty “whereon” of poetic exactitude and also direction pointer to meaning, and stately splendor of. “Then I heard great musicians/ playing the Mahogany Hall.” he goes on, later, elsewhere, this gem is in my possession, we’re having a new succession of Daudets and Baroques of all sorts—kinds—specialties—sizes—bust—measurement—the gray time, the gay, gay time—the small hotel time, the time, time is of it—time, go time, go—Cody walked in, sat on the stove, “Oh but I’m tired this strange old night; Oh but this is a tired night, I worked all day on those truck tires and all last night switchin”)—and stands there in the doorway thinking that old broken thought, and here’s what it was, “That sticklegged old bat who’s standing on the corner and her Hannegan’s gone by, that’s his name, we park his Chrysler in here, he’s the only guy who gives a tip, him and that Texas millyoil man; her Hannegan, she calls him, old cunt, her story she’s puttin down, but fine, I like her fine, I’d like to try her sometime. How long ago did she leave that step?”
* * *
I HAVE SEEN THE RED SUN fall on Cody’s clothes on the floor of the attic; his workgloves, dungarees, chino pants, shirts, socks, shoetrees, cardboards, white shirts piled, on top of ancient leather belts, ancient railroad overtime papers now stomped with the dust of shoes, the wild phosphorescent inner linings of jackets or scarves, a whistle, a, an official railroad pay calculator and time book, put out by Crown overalls, showing a sad red-ink railroad man (in this red sun attic) standing in his architectural even riveted Crown coveralls pointing with a proud shy smile lost in red ink and absences of red ink in the oval reserved for his face, at an ad for Crown coveralls whereby a testing company, having put them (U.S. Testing Company) through a crash tour in stock cars (or something) and there you have the certificate of laboratory testing: “We regularly test Crown shrunk coveralls and certify them to be of high quality, strong—” signed, with a signature, “a new pair FREE if they shrink” and me thinking: “Did Cody dream on this too in this sad red attic of his maturity’s home, this house in which he is suddenly raising three children for the world.” Inside a thousand and one figures showing, under engine numbers, train numbers, time lefts, amounts, overtimes, mileses, all useless phantasmagoria in a page where he keeps—but it is there, he really fills out these columns, so voilà, “Date, Sept. 23, (from SJ to Tracy, train no. X-2781, on duty 1:30 P.M., tie up 5:30, miles, a hundred; $13.40 earned, no overtime; conductor, Webbington of New Zealand”—all filled out, in his poor dumb scrawl with which however he has written the following words too:
“Cake upon cake the perspiring years pile on, just like a dissheveled U P desk with papers sittin on last week’s foundations”—or—“It was with considerable regret (this is more like it) that my old man at this time was not able to discern the meaning of certain words currently becoming popular in use on theater marquees, and so we walked in the shadow of our ignorance. A childly courtesy that once marked his most redeeming feature, in matters like this one of the gay marquee that used to light up ‘grand,’ now was followed by a just-as-redeeming curiosity and just as childlike when I asked him what ‘slay’ meant.
“‘Well,’ he said, ‘it means you kill somebody with a spear.’
“‘Er somethin,’ he added a minute later, as we picked our teeth on a fender of a Ford parked in front of Haymaker’s Café. ‘Er somethin, Cody old boy, er something.’”—this being an example of how Cody would write if he wrote about these things. His poor clothes piled in the sad attic of Frisco joyous hamburg-zizzling suppertime dusks of summer and manual labor; good Cody; a man who works is good, this is a maxim among the old people and one that you can’t gainsay—and the book, the book, it’s got a 1935 date on it, what is it doing, like that old green jalopy hungup in this attic, this town so far from its cra—“But in the afternoon, especially late, around four, how the red sun illuminates these dusty objects of Cody’s life, how mutely and yet eloquently they lie there, unattended, left and thrown there, still-life geometrical images of Cody’s poor attempt to stay alive and strong beneath the skies of catastrophe.”
* * *
ONCE CODY raged in a park like this, was amazing—rosy afterlights of the Pacific sunfall, vast silences, Mexical rainclouds mixing with the thin diving bird and the yukkle bird’s cry in the wet bush—shudderings and thrashings in the b
ush—and mixed with rosebrown clouds blown by a fogbank far away—the bird of the first spring evening and first flipflop hardy wintered tragicbug—the dusk of the park, the benches, the sad walk, the gathering darkness, the hollow shell of Cody haunting this gloom and these Mexican monuments and fountains like the ones we saw in Chapultepec Park at the bottom of the road—Cody is dead.
The tortured clawtrees making their ugly frazzle in the geometric center of the afterglow, a downtrodden pine, the drip-drip of a faroff bay launch crawling among the great mountains of San Pablo Bay; the wet grass, the green madness of the world, the mud of children who played, the hedge (transparent and full of streetlights); the chained garbage cans of the socialistic park; the tufts of spruce—the awful sadness of the death of Cody. In a sunny day he once cavorted here with the mystery and the grace of a Shakespearean garden hero—this is the part of the forest he mystified—this is where, by the death of the light I discovered him in, he now’s a ghost pacing on the tulip and tips of hedges, morose, secretive, grown old—no more “Now Jack just as we passed that hedge, and felt a tulip, I was going along in the assumption within my own thoughts, those concerning your beatitude sayings, and not—won’t hang you up on a detail—as we and as I saw, while you looked at the gathering stormclouds over there at the magic side of the park, my infant self arising, I’m playing in this park with all the kicks I ever found inside my mind and everything I have to make myself a living organism cabbaging and ticking and swinging like mad towards the darkness of our common death in this skeletal earth and billion particled gray moth void and empty huge horror and glory isn’t it awful making enormous bands in all directions like the flight of the prophetic swallow who comes from the other side of the cable car mountain.
