by Jack Kerouac
“Adieu, sweet Jack, the air of life is permeated with roses all the time.”
* * *
BUT IT WAS ONLY yesterday that Cody said to me and nobody’s said such a thing in over a year, “I love you, man, you’ve got to dig that; boy, you’ve got to know.” And I suddenly realized that women, those flesh embodiments of perfume, would love me too, a thing I had forgotten in all this darkness of the studious soul laboring in the undergrounds of knowledge with that little brakeman’s lantern of just-enough-light illuminating the clay endeavors beneath the Golden Spear of God. “Okay Cody” I said “I heard you, I sure do know it now.” It was the peyotl day, the day of judgment; I was coming down the stairs, as calm as an Indian, with my tenor horn round my neck, that is, depending from my neck strap; I was not only on my first day as tenorman but understanding all music as I lay either flat on my back or stood up aslump with my sweet old horn, learning the first modified woodshed rudiments of raw wild joy which is American jazz, the song, the great whistling song, whistling into your horn and holding your horn high, aware all the time of the mistakes you can make and at the same time realizing the dreariness of the moments it consumes to realize this and letting the song, the song pass you by; then raising your horn, horizontal like Lester and Lee Konitz, and blowing into it, whistling out of it, out of its iron, the perfect harmonic note in this moment of the tune, the pop tune, the song, the living American melodic symphony that rings in my brain continually and is the great chord of the key, the great hollow and echoing arrangements of wide-spaced octaves in which as upon the Pillar of the Arcades of Jazz, Modern Jazz, the conglomerating music of the world, the whole world, a song is hurled and not only, but in its perfect heartbreaking harmonic hint—just as love is a hint of God. I had been seeing how all music would merge into the great Abstraction that is coming—Abstract war (as now), Abstract art, Abstract classical-based modern symphonic music, Abstract advertising, Abstract baseball (television and other developments later), Abstract drama, and the Abstract novel, and Abstract modern jazz soft-sound tenor horns blowing, sweet, distant, rowel, up-going, go-baby-to-New-York in a rush of things. I have seen the tenorman’s sad pale face too, and in my own face, Stan Getz, Brew Moore, Gerry Mulligan, Jimmy Ford, the fairytale altos with red shirts like the one Cody and I saw in Chicago but I’ll get to that in a minute; Charlie Parker, Sonny Stitt, Lester Young, Joe Holliday, and the mysterious James Moody and his King Pleasure; names like the names of great English poets, like the names Googe, Smart, Cowley and Vaughan, Sidney and George Herbert; wasn’t Spenser’s cousin-in-law Robert Johnston who wrote those obscure and unknown fantastic hymns that he wove into choruses of strange vast five-act dramas replete with funny characters abstracted from Blakeian ravings he wrote in the streets and on the gallows at midnight when they caught him and put him in the clink for trespassing on the property of the Crown ? Who will know the fate of Brew Moore whom I have seen like a ghost on the sidewalk: he has huge hair and he walks with his arms knocking, you have to look again before you are frightened (ahem). What did Clyde Cockmaster the second base English poet look like, he who carried coals…but now there’s no time to lose. I was so intent on music as I came down those stairs that I didn’t remember Cody’s saying he loved me, till the, till a day later or so. No, Cody isn’t dead; Cody is the average man, Cody is the fellow who works for a living and has a wife and kids, and worries about Taxes in March, and listens intently to the catastrophic news of radios, also to every kind of wild jabberous crapule that comes from the minds of harrassed radio scriptwriters who can’t cash their checks while they’re writing Inner District Attorney. Cody is not dead. He is made of the same flesh and bone as (of course) you or me: he has a bloodstream, and veins, like you and me, and a system of nerves that inform him of the catastrophe or the roses be day as they May; he, why he listens to basketball games with his nerves, usually reading or talking and just hearing the reverberations of youngcunt excitement in wild play halls of juicy highschool days, not caring about the outcome of the game any more or any less than you or me, but like you or me missing not a jot of that sex need in his soul and letting it listen to the old basketball game the way it wants (sometimes too, like we did, in New York before I started out for May with my suitcase he, and I, listened, on misty nights in dark Manhattan parking lot in the shack, brownlit and dumb and unhappy like the shacks of his father so long ago that the memory crops and molders, comes to a cropping stop, dead in dirt, in hopes of staying alive there we’d be listening to the scream of basketball audiences and the mathematical music of a great athletic radio announcer (Marty Glickman), “Up-to-the-set-shot, swish,” “Back to the forecourt, pass,” “Down the center line, shoot,” “Out of bounds, resume play,” “Don De Short going to the free throw line,” Morton with the ball in right front court,” “Six minutes in the fourth and final quarter,” “This courtcast is coming to you—” “No good, taken off by Sesalush of Stamford, pass to Thorp, back to Sex, over to James and James s-s-s-s-s-set shots, long, oh, Wow, swish, zowie” (Screamcunts—“It was in and out and in again, most sensational!”)—But Cody isn’t great because he is average. I have seen the star of an Angel in his eye, the beauty of his brown and eye sidebones; also, I have noted the beauty of his children and his works in the arrangement of their lives; his son has the air of a Beethoven in his crib; his daughter Gaby and, the huge and serious childish sorrow of great saints and nuns; Emily is an Empress, she will be polluter of reigns, replacing the silken glove for the mailed fist—maybe; or she will weep, she’ll cry in the snow at night. Cody can’t possibly be average because I’ve never seen him before. I’ve never seen any of you before. I myself am a stranger to this “average” world. Well, we’ll all meet in hell and hatch another plot. Julien Lucifer, that’ll be the New Angel and Satan-Winged Blackamoor who’ll start the Infernal Revolution by the power of his tongue. In such a Revolution I can see Cody just standing there in the crowd and not even watching; on some afternoons he does the wash on the washing machine porch, without any expression on his face. Why should he be average? He is as mysterious as frost.
He believes in money, goes to work, spends it, and believes in money still—spending energy for spendingmoney, one thing eats another. By God, I believe in the Church; at—they rang me a bell once, free.
But the fact that any man has to say “I love you” when obviously he doesn’t have to (and also the fact he said it to me) makes me feel good; I will say it too, I will say it to the women I love and to the men (like Cody) I love. Only a few hours later we were cursing at each other in the car like two men about to fly out and fight on the sidewalk; it’s entirely possible in Cody, and I’m always ready for anything one way or the other. It would be extremely strange if I had a fight with Cody. I’d be on my toes for a killing. Yes, we could kill each other, me kill him or him kill me, whichever way the breaks went; that’s how strong he is and how much I used to fight and still might unless if I was strong enough and might still be able to hold him off laughing—but that’s out of the question, he’s no struggling babe, he’s a raging murderous man.
“My aunt’s got a hold
of you, O babe!
My aunt’s got a hold
of you, O babe!”
* * *
TRAGIC SATURDAY IN FRISCO. I’m coming home from work in dark of night, musing on my freepass-incoming-to-Frisco train, I’m thinkin about Cody, red neons, night, and instead, en route home, get few beers in the wildest bar in America, corner Third and Howard, paddy wagon’s there every hour, we just got to drink there you and me sometime man but anyway I get high drunk, drop money on floor, am panhandled, play Ruth Brown wildjump records among drunken alky whores colored, and colored men and white winos milling in a pissy drafty room with stains seeping down the wall, absolutely the wildest bar in America, but I’ve got my rake, brakeman’s lantern and rainsuit and feel fine and crazy, even though the cops, going in to arrest a few beat drunks, usually Alabama immigrants off reefers, s
ays to me “You stayin here long?” meaning, scram, no place for you, but I stay, get drunk, make friends with friendly neat colored Frank, cut around corner to Little Harlem scene of the great jam sessions of ’48 and ’49, only girl I laid in town so far is in there, colored B-girl, gone woman, Marie, I hook up in there with her niece tall lissome black Lulu, call Cody feverish with excitement (he’s in bed fucking E) he rushed out, (“Come on Cody, let’s celebrate your birthday,” it’s his birthday, February 8th), came down, in middle night, station wagon, all pile in, rush to find four-foot connection Charley, he’s on street, wham, tea, first thing you know, in his room, strip poker starts, strip, and Lulu has to lose! In a dead giggling silence she began undressing before us—great tits, shoulders, legs, thighs, belly, bellybutton, perfect Betty Grable all over, but black—wham, and Charley who’s a four-foot sexfiend born raised in Panama where his father is numbers racket and four-foot too, has eyes on her, Cody is saying “Sh-H7h7h7it,” whatever, and I’m watching, and whoo, her girlfriend’s watchin, fresh out of reform school she is (name I fergit), told us about conditions there, how when girls go fruit they put ’em in cottages alone, all girls go fruit, black girls go fruit for Mexican girls, Cody spends entire rainy days hiding from his wife listening to these stories from the five colored sisters and cousins hangin around Marie’s housing project shack pad, with lazy men around, Cody sits on bed blasting and giggling with the girls all day—Lulu gets embarrassed and dresses, re-dressed; from then on, disaster, Cody runs off to get tea from wife and also from guilt for running out, she waiting in night, now sobs, I, drunk, bring two girls into Cody’s dark house, we stand breathless by baby sleep crib of Little Timmy Pomeray as Evelyn sobs and everything and throws us out, and off we go, two girls and Cody, and I, bleary, driving into woods of California for orgy, but one girl cops out (Carol), Lulu stay with me, but Lulu pass out, and (joined by another girl with Joe Louis face) we spend whole day driving aimlessly and with that vague-jawed but tremendous rocky fatalistic and tragic obstinacy of Cody and his fathers and the great raw hobos and hardy winos of death and experience in the world, Cody just drives and drives having switched to old ’32 Pontiac tragic jalopy of the mist, we go up and down unbelievable shakespeare cute hills of California countryside, warm day, hawaiian shirts, forests, we take girls back to housing project, a brother comes to carry Lulu out, pays no attention, off they go, Saturday late afternoon, the red sun falls on everything, night’s coming, wild whooping Saturday night frisco and Lulu’s already drunk and ruined her coat; well, Cody and I return to house, crestfallen, to wife rocking baby hysterically in dark. Cody makes up after days of sorrowful house silence, see?
(On the gallows,) JACK. I wanted to tell about—but the calluses, the—
Tonight don’t sing me “Hoods of the Moon”
Don’t sing tonight the “Hoods of the Moon”
Golden Boy, go be a princess in a tower
Gamin of Gold be instead princess of a tower,
Dreaming melancholic about our poor love
Or be blond cabinboy up on mast.
(C-R-O-W-S-H, he’s hanged)
* * *
PEYOTL FANTASY, at one point on peyotl I didn’t know I was smoking a cigarette, it felt like a strange little vegetable the way it flipped and fluttered in my hand, an ear of cabbage, but it was only because Cody had rolled the joint so wrong and it was inverting in the hand. I think I understood everything at last, I must have, ever since I’ve been unable to get high on T any more because nothing has the quality of surprise after the knowledges of the cactus plant. Cody was just standing there. “Nuthin happens,” he sez to me—“Crise Cody waddaya mean? I never got so stewed and stoned since I took heroin and Dilaudid and all the big ass drugs of long ago before the harmless leaf.” “Harmless you say?” winks my mother with her face that I can never forget. And Peyotl twice as worse! “Cody! this is the end of the heart, these green crabapples in your belly have a toxin in their tree”—it didn’t occur to me cactus was poison and shoulda looked at those needles closer, cactus with his big lizard hide and poison hole buttons with wild hair, grooking in the desert to eat our hearts alive, ack—“This shit’ll kill you, this is no ordinary shit, the Indians who eat this haven’t long to live, this thing is the realization of suicide, your mind tells you how you can die, take your pick; I see,” I told Evelyn “how I can go out tonight and blow this horn at the top of my lungs with all my might all night I could die, I would die.”
“Would you know just before?” she asks me.
“No—yes—I think so—oh sure, but this stuff is so horribly powerful that you’d do it if you just felt like it. This’s what John Parkman did, committed suicide on Peyotl, the new sleeping pill, from Tragic Carol to Sad Hip John, wow—” I’m telling her anything, everything, and all of it is true and ringing in the air just like now with you and me, and Evelyn’s a little skeptical—“Say, I wanta eat,” Cody says to Ed (who turned us on); “No,” says Ed, “nobody eats till I say so.”
We’re all sittin around, upstairs, downstairs, in the basement, in the attic, quiet respectable Friday afternoon; Ed is reading Irwin Garden’s poetry out loud, without a leer, idealistically, seriously, with those Frisco telegraph wires I see behind him in my reveries of him Frisco native born, like Sebastian reading poetry like in Boston long ago, man, up in the gray mist Frisco Cisco Attic; Cody is quietly considering his stomach, patting, saying, “Urp, well, I guess I won’t throw up now; should be able to eat soon. I’m not high, are you?”
* * *
MEANWHILE I’m sittin there on the bed I sleep on, with the horn around my neck, and a stick a tea in my mouth, thinkin about girls, girls, looking at dirty pictures, feeling nauseated, holding myself up, my stomach atremble, my heart beating out of control, my mind quivering from the activity of the soul below, that pragmatic flesh in your regions of the heart and belly (and afraid to lie still and see visions,) my eyes shifting planes of ceiling on me, I commented only once, my hair hanging in strands with square edges backhead like an Indian, Cody repeatedly saying that I look like an Indian and I tell them my Iroquois grandmamama in the North Gaspé, 1700, I being of the race of the Indian who was pushed out of every place in the western hemisphere New World except America, ha ha—The children are utterly amazed at us all day long, they don’t dare speak a word, or touch, as if we was cactus and we’re stoned to the bone goopin at the moon on the couch side by side with arms hangin and tongues hung.
“I’m real relaxed,” I says—
“Damn, so am I,” admits Cody with a mild and conciliatory air; no, he’s not high, he’s like Irwin Garden.
“Damn, I know all the secrets of high, har me?—it can’t miss, nosiree—” because Cody is not listening, only suddenly the peyotl makes him say, “What was that you said Jack?” And I can’t remember; but on peyotl all I gotta do is look back in my mind, like I look back on this page, to know what it was I said. “I know all the secrets about how to get hi and stay hi and understand everything all the time, and they say that’s to be crazy, and I’m crazy now, I know I’m crazy now. But I made a speech, didn’t I Cody?”
“Yes, you did,” he nods Irishly, that is, like a simple young Irish kid like the ones I used to know on the wooden fences Saturday mornings down the blue sky alley that’s just like the ones in either Denver or Lowell, when that smoke, that joy, transpired in the holiday air and piping clean morn of the oldfashioned clime: there’s me Cody, sittin next to me; his wife is sendin me messages of joy through the Western Union because this peyotl didn’t make him go mad but instead he sat by his wife like a vegetable sex organ all day, and at night rolled his bones grimly and manlily to work a hunnerd fifty miles away, midnight (that’s my brother). “Yessir, I done made a speech, s’about how to stay high and how crazy I am,” and I’m imitating colored dialect to add variety to a feat of memory, the peyotl is so potent, so all-giving, so nervewrackingly beautiful and sometimes so nauseating. “Some people get high on nausea,” I h
eard once, from Bull Hubbard I think, in the days when we lay side by side in twin beds with the shades drawn at midnight, and we’re fully dressed and have Syrettes of morphine stuck in our arms, relaxin and me thinkin I’m going to die and then I settle down to watching the Technicolor movie in my brain and the music and dancinggerls and Masonic gilt churches for backdrops, with a Vermont red mill in the pond, and the ocean the way I first seen it all warm and I’m floating over it on my back to Glenn Miller saxophone sections and Sarah Vaughan, bah, talking to rabbits, invoking God, bending double to find the vagina, deciding poems, planning essays, rearranging prophetic Dostoevskian abstract novels with characters so strange that Lionel Trilling said “The use of only their first names, and without nicknames or anything, and the ‘imaginary city,’ renders the whole thing unreal;” running my tongue along the edge of my mouth and wondering where all my wives of eaves and gables were gone, where my old buddy Mike, what’s the score in the ninth inning. And there’s Bull, saying, “Some people get high on nausea.” He was reading myths then—he found ’em everywhere, he had Persian rugs, long before the so-called swank Atlantic Beach Club compared. “Get high and stay and understand everything all the time, I’m saying.” So much for peyotl, in another epoch it’ll get you high again. Peyotl is legal at this time, (February 1952) unless the law intervenes and makes it famous by giving it publicity and so everybody starts growing cactus on their back porches and poisoning themselves. But they’ve got to learn.
