by Jack Kerouac
I played solitaire with Slim Buckle’s poor wife Helen, who at that time, after all her travails rounding him up in New Orleans, was waiting out another one of his grave madness voyages, this time to Maine, in the company of Tom Watson who’d now grown a hipster beard in his march among millions towards modernity. “Why they didn’t do anything but sit in the bathtub,” said Helen—actually, apparently, they went in there to blast; or whenever Slim took a bath Watson had the temerity to sit there and chat with him, that being a proper social arrangement in the Near East and among bathing beauties from pole to pole; but of course, her Greek—her hair streaming on the rug, Helen lost out on sitting in the bathroom herself with her Slim, and sh’ad every right to be mad. Also, she hated Cody anyhow, too. She’d castigate him, just before we left, before crowds of Dostoevskian heroes in the room; just the Johnsons, some children, a neighbor girlmother I got thrillingly close to (I remember), all in the parlor of Helen’s Mission district pad. “Cody how can—Cody you stand there like a damn fool, you’re the first idiot they ever made. You’re the louse they invented. Always fighting with your wife, asking pity when she throws you out, conning everybody, interested in your old dangling between legs and that’s all, abandoning little cozy children, running off with Jack. When are you going to straighten out and realize that you have to face the responsibilities of your life and your wife and home. This isn’t Communist Russia, this is America. What do you think this is, a harem? You want all the women of the United States to become whores? You’d like that, be pimp; number one; asshole—” for all I know she added tidbits and fillips better in simpering reviews before the mirror…. Sullen eyes were arranged on Cody’s face as he stood there in holy San Francisco, thumb up, sweating, a forehead throbbing, with red fire light, eyes blank, blue, grayblue, with a glint in the middle all mystery to me and anybody, listening to every one of her words as if hearing the music of her soul and all our souls and saying Yes! to every bit of it, one chorus, one solo after another, soft, sweet, harsh or high, the SAINT, THE GOOF…Cody had become, here among the remnant buddies of his Denver American raw youth in basements, junkheaps and lawns the great Idiot of us all…entirely irresponsible to the point of wild example and purgation for us to learn and not have to go through, like the pale criminal genius who kills our old suburban queen to show us it can be done and doesn’t have to be done, and Jesus crucified. “Ah poor Cody,” I thought, and spoke up; breaking my Frisco neutrality (there had been pictures taken of all of us, our shadows fell across grassplots; our children would revisit these photos in their brown old age and guess we were in our prime and clarifying adulthood then, our clear-bell decisive years, what a laugh if it’s really true). “Now wait a minute Helen….” But she had me over a barrel in the matter of English literature, she spoke out like a sadsack heroine, frosome, “You’ll find out for yourself too late what a no good person Cody can really be and is; how can you make him worse than he is, you of all people.”
“Evelyn threw him out, I didn’t—I mean, it’s none of my doing, but you can’t blame Cody for everything, think of your own shoddy cons,” I should have yelled out the window or at them or up in the air. By this time Cody was downstairs standing like a ghost in the tenement doorway waiting for us to make up our minds about TIME, rubbing his belly, sweating, fingering his balls, blowing Phew!, ready to go across the gleaming and groaning continent of America where his fathers had all got lost.
We started rolling at two o’clock in the afternoon, or something, noon; a Travel Bureau car to Denver, a Plymouth driven by a pansy, and a dull couple. A real pansy, one with the strange criminal face of complete nonentity among ordinary human identification-signs, you just couldn’t tell what he was, sadist or masochist and from which end and with whip, dress, or oyster pie, a fetishist hiding in a closet, he must have spent whole afternoons simpering in the bathroom. Arriving in Sacramento at nightfall, these dull people decided to sleep, the trip half started. All the way to Sacramento Cody and I had terrified them by talking as we did in the backseat, wild and crazy, just like we were both seeing red; in fact I was. The excitement between us was so immense and extraordinary, and we had so little recognition of the fact that these people were there or even in a car, that at one point we were rocking the car back and forth. “Hey you’re rocking the boat,” complained the husband from upfront where a conversation was going between the three of them, probably about us who were completely deaf to anything but ourselves. We were talking about the Great Scythes of our childhood, when I, riding in New England littleroads with boulders and posts and hills of vine all along, would, imaginary, cut it all down with my scythe as my father swept the car by; and he, Cody, in the tragic red roads of Sunday afternoon in Eastern Colorado, when blackhatted men grimly drive the children, swept alongside the car either on foot or wielding from inside the car a gigantically and intricately built Scythe that not only snipped the close posts and sage or wheat but extended itself in a monstrous dream to horizon with all the massiveness of unbelievable realities like the Oakland Bay Bridge or the skeletal Swiftian frame of the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia when they were raising the octagonal facewalls into place by longnecked celestial giraffe cranes, slow as the Bird of Paradisical Eternity raising the Great World Snake in its beak to the lost up, a scythe also so fantastic in its hinges that it could sweep over the flat plain, adjust itself to cut tablelands, rise a notch in the beyond and extend to horizons to cut mountain ranges entire while still managing in the little forefront blade to cut that bunchgrass into clouds of flying—We talked about this. “But not only that but I had—”
“But wait, me, I had—” Also “getting it” in jazz, finding the mystic or the music, yhr mydyiv gtrnxy og yhr eiyvhfovyot, “the mystic frenzy of the witchdoctor” sweating tenor holding everybody enrapt in a blow-blow-blow whaling jam session, or sweet vowels of an eloquent talking alto poem à la Charles Yardbird Parker the Only. “It hurts like hell to find you can blow your heart out and die, go hear him blow before he dies, they say.”
“Who?”
“That Johnny that blew in the Blue Geek.” The Scythes made me sweat, I was damp. Cody kept yelling “Yes!” as I blew my own great chorus on the subject clutching anxiously at his T-shirt as if that tattered rag could hold him to hear words. He rocked back and forth with his yesses. “I hear every one of your words!” I talked faster and faster, he had me hypnotized like a mad dream; I kept recalling my life. It was so far; I rolled my eyes at the roof to draw breath, just like that kickin tenor in Little Harlem had hauled off to blow with a wild thinking look at ceiling cracks, boom, the IT (is right there, to give it to you, it lurks in the frizzly dust of ceilings as well as in that rose-perfected air of Cody’s)—
Just like in the garden, Cody’s Gethsemane over there, by the cable car mountain, I hung on his every return word as if I was going to die right on it and it’s the last I’m to hear: frenzy. Meanwhile the grave automobile, and the sensible pervert, carried us over the green hills of Vallejo to old Sacramento. That night the gangbelly broke loose between Cody and the skinny skeleton, sick: Cody thrashed him on rugs in the dark, monstrous huge fuck, Olympian perversities, slambanging big sodomies that made me sick, subsided with him for money; the money never came. He’d treated the boy like a girl! “You can’t trust these people when you give them (exactly) what they want.” I sat in the castrated toilet listening and peeking, at one point it appeared Cody had thrown him over legs in the air like a dead hen: it swallowed me back, gad I was horrified, it was murder, I have my good reasons now for not succumbing to any of these Arabian pleasures especially with a blackamoor—what, he was really an Irishman called O’Sello?—“It’s not in my line,” said Céline in Africa.
But enough, it wasn’t characteristic of Cody as he is now in his workingman’s life and marriage.
Tragic coffee drunk at dawn, all five of us re-met now: then on over Donner Pass, Cody driving, smoothly stern, paying no attention, swinging the Pass like he done Tehach
api and Sierra Madre Oriental grades, rhythmical, according to the flow of engineers who built it, playing the bankings and swoop-dedoop curves—in a piney bright morn—slam across Nevady, fast, unwounding, unrolling a state in an afternoon…Reno, Battle Mountain, Elko, Great Salt Flats by dark.
Just like girlie magazines, we represented to these goonish normals in the front seat the vicious novelties of America. We were dirty faced and pimply like moronic dirt-kneed teenage mountain girls hauled by the law for turning tricks in the backalleys of mountain communities. They hated our guts; we cut them down the middle.
* * *
“WHY, H-WHAT? WHY? what have I done? why this hostility against me? Did you say Irish Barbers in the West?”
“Irish Barbers In the West.”
“This old Pomeray was, I swear and upon me proved.”
“Your testimony is insufficient.”
“And the fate of my benjamin brother benedicts in crime?”
“You have dealt unfairly with the meaning of the law; you have transcribed the letter too; you are sentenced to ten years’ hard labor in prison. Have you anything to say?”
“Thank you, your honor.”
“Ironic tones won’t get you far. My father had the same sass—the court is proved, the case is closed. All judges, attendants of judges, coat-wipers, and pissorial funeral urnmakers in raggedy goon cloth tuxes please step forth and cast a parting glance at the prisoner in the dock, the cock on the clock, say Cuckoo prettyboy.”
“Cuckoo.”
“Now all you have to do is write an apologetic letter not only to the King of England but your old gym instructors, they’ve sweated all these years worrying about your body and your soul, they murk in steambaths drooling with tears of sweat.”
“If the court, please, I have something to say in defense of myself: I, Jack Duluoz, have not been the same since my brother Gerard died, when I was four. I sincerely plead—
CODY POMERAY. (stepping up in his furlined weatherproof work jacket with dungarees, key snap ring, switch key, wallet bulge, GI work-shoes, carrying a rainwork suit on the way to work, but clean in his pockets) Sirs, the defendant is an impostor French-Canadian from New England; in any case he deserves punishment—(in fact Julien, Irwin and I have often wondered what he would do, how he’d squeal with pain, if the court could torture him in a cold tank, nekkid)
JACK. I can’t allow—succumb—it’s too much—anybody squeals—
JUDGE CODY. (sitting in the rostrum with his pince nez camp set out, performing it) A hanging is already in progress at Blackmoor, I hear—so if you’n Judge Bean come closer—I likes a good hangin—me and old Bull lotsa times—(to Jack) Things happen, man; thing happen; you’ve got to expect it sometime, the bad news, the worst. No use kiddin yourself
JACK. What am I losing?
CODY. None of us know
JACK. So goes
CODY. Be careful, Jack be careful—Hang him, men
(On the gallows,) JACK. I wanted to tell about—but the calluses, the—(hanged)
* * *
SOMETHING INTERESTING there is in Cody’s ability to make me, or his wife, sad, and even friends I watched: is he showing the sadism of the big powerful face he had bucking through the Montana storms of earth, when I, with him, was faced by the wild dismalities of a universe so severe the only thing is to grimly bear and buck it. Tenderness has no room; tenderness has no sadness. Cody is sad. He makes us sad. There is nothing inexpressibly sadder than that old photo of his father’s 1928 house-built-on-a-truck he rattled from West Virginia to West Dakota in, for no reason whatever; baby Cody is in the picture, pudgy, swaddled in a wicker swing, beaming on the world, a sun shining in the pale of the daguerrotype brown, the roof of the housetruck protruding into the tragic trees like a disappearing wigwam in old miningtown Indian prints, lost, sad, endless—Eternity standing with her hands behind her back…. In this Clark Gable mustachio old Civil War photo Cody would sit there, bushed and be-derbied, askew, whiskered, flatulent, mighty hands a-rest, with his high cheekbones mystifying back his eyes and deeply glinting with Indian mysteries and the past: this is the enigmatic Cody, the sad one, the one who said hello to tragedy in a womb, and heads now for his raving grave and greedy sleep.
“Mistress of the night,” he addressed it, “make me sleep” (bouncing from home Iowa to L. A. in 1926 in that dewy jalopy of the night). And the rocky road rushed on outside. “Mater, matter, flyswatter….”
Realizing to stop, his father let him be dunged on the lip of the earth in that Salt Lake ward…a golden boy baby, a sad protuberant spoon from his side lips, gold of Ebon. But ’twas a county sheriff slapped that plank on his father’s heels in the flatcar outside Grand Island Nebrasky. A clay spoon, a clay spear. That poor picture….
Well, Cody is always interested in himself: from behind his iron bars he’s always talking and conning somebody all day. Like the lyrics of popular songs you can’t believe a word of it. I hear him from far away; his voice urgent, anxious, high-pitched, explanatory, full of rapine; he’s on the bed convincing her, who’s turned her head away in disgust, for now, that she need worry about nothing, he didn’t drown the kittens at all, they fell down the drain by themselves, or it wasn’t because he wanted to see Jimmy he was late but because (she having made no issue about lateness) in passing the bakery it reminded him she had mentioned that very morning she was sick and tired of store bread and so he went right to the store and bought some, twenty-two cents…something like that. For years I’ve listened to him con women; supreme; first Joanna the lost lovely blond of his early and first passions under those bleak electric neons by hotel windows in the wind-whip of Wyoming born, first her; then Evelyn; finally that horrible Diane who has everybody frightened with her lawsuits and quiddities. That first con in Harlem, make the breakfast, was followed by…Damn Cody, I’m tired of him and I’m going; my benefactor whispers his wife to me in the dark.
His sad face permeates the mere mention of Sioux City; if he says it himself, and wasn’t ever there, I know it’s an American city. A true, real American is a mystery to us, to U.S., somewhere and somehow he became like Cody and stands here among us. In my romance I have traveled far to find a cousin to the Greek. And in my romance I have traveled far to see an American, one that reminded me of the Civil War soldier in the old photo who stands by a pile of lumber in a drizzle, waiting for arrest, back-grounded by pine brush bottoms all wet and dismal in an Alabama afternoon in the wilderness of hoar. Beside him is a superior officer, Rebel Colonel or Captain, Confederate Wildcat, teeth bared, coat over arm, defiant to the very wind. “Ho! don’t forget those two prisoners by the lumber,” shouts the Yankee captain perceiving the prisoners but not the camera, and old Johnny Youngpants who looks like Cody just stands there beside his rosehog Confederacy wildboar and waits for tomorrows of capture with that implacable sad and slightly gaunted look of the Sioux Cities of the mind, the one I mean, his father had it, and has it in that photo, that teary, dreary look of old torment and of old mists, that hangjaw ancientness and goodhearted tragicness of the old entire; a piss-ass poor agrarian whore “Why do I stop in my grains?” couldn’t look worse in a cornfield with her legs spread, or honester. (Splat, or as B. O. Plenty says, Ptoo.) But sadness, sadism, all, let’s hear what my French-Canadian side has to say about him. Now we’re conning nature.
* * *
“Si tu veux parlez apropos d’Cody pourquoi tu’l fa—tu m’a arretez avant j’ai eu une chance de continuez, ben arrete donc. Écoute, j’va t’dire—lit bien. Il faut t’u te prend soin—attend?—donne moi une chance—tu pense j’ai pas d’art moi français?—ca?—idiot—crapule—tas’d marde—enfant shiene—batard—cochon—buffon—bouche de marde, granguele, face laite, shienculotte, morceau d’marde, susseu, gros fou, envi d’chien en culotte, ca c’est pire—en face!—fam toi!.—crashe!—varge!—frappe!—mange!—foure!—foure moi’l Gabin!’—envalle Céline, mange l’e rond ton Genêt, Rabelais? El terra essuyer l’coup au derriere. Ma
is assez, c’est pas interessant. C’est pas interessant l’maudit Francais. Écoute, Cody ye plein d’marde; les lé allez; il est ton ami, les le songée; yé pas ton frere, yé pas ton pere, yé pas ton ti Saint Michel, yé un gas, ye marriez, il travaille, v’as t’couchez l’autre bord du monde, v’a pensant dans la grand nuit Europeene. Je t’l’ explique, ma maniêre, pas la tienne, enfant, chien—écoutes:—va trouvez ton âme, vas sentir le vent, vas loin—La vie est d’ hommage. Ferme le livre, vas—n’ écrit plus sur l’mur, sa lune, au chien, dans la mer au fond neigant, un petit poême. Va trouvez Dieu dans les nuits. Les nuées aussi. Quantesse s’a peut arrêtez s’grand tour au cerveux de Cody; il ya des hommes, des affaires en dehors a faire, des grosses tombeaux d’activité dans les désert d’l’Afrique du coeur, les anges noires, les femmes couchée avec leur beaux bras ourvert pour toi dans leur jennesse, d’la tendresse enfermez dans l’meme lit, les gros nuees de nouveaux continents, le pied fatiguee dans de climes mystêres, descend pas le côté de l’autre bord de ta vie (30) pour rien.
A Cody, un corp.
“If you want to talk about Cody why do you do it—you stopped me before I had a chance to continue, stop won’t you! Listen, I’m going to tell you—read well: you have to take care of yourself, hear it?—give me a chance—you think I’ve no art me French?—eh?—idiot—crapule—piece of shit—sonofabitch—bastard—pig—clown—shitmouth—long mouth—ugly face, shitpants, piece of shit, sucktongue, big fool, wantashitpants, that’s worse—right in the face!—shut up!—spit!—hit it! (varge!)—hit! (frappe)—eat it!—fuck!—scram me Gavin!—swallow Céline, eat him raw your Genêt, Rabelais? He woulda wiped your neck on his ass. But enough, it’s not interesting. It’s not interesting goddamn French. Listen, Cody is full of shit; let him go; he is your friend, let him dream; he’s not your brother, he’s not your father, he’s not your Saint Michael, he’s a guy, he’s married, he works, go sleeping on the other side of the world, go thinking in the great European night. I’m explaining him to you, my way, not yours, child, dog—listen:—go find your soul, go smell the wind—go far—Life is a pity. Close the book, go on—write no more on the wall, on the moon, at the dog’s, in the sea in the snowing bottom, a little poem. Go find God in the nights. The clouds too. When can it stop this big tour at the skull of Cody; there are men, things outside to do, great huge tombs of activity in the desert of Africa of the heart, the black angels, the women in bed with the beautiful arms open for you in their youth, some tenderness shrouded in the same bed, the big clouds of new continents, the foot tired in climes so mysterious, don’t go down the hill of the other side of your life (30) for nothing.
