Visions of Cody

by Jack Kerouac

  * * *

  To Cody, a body.

  * * *

  SALT LAKE LIES AT THE RIM of a once-great sea-like lake in the heights of the American plateau; great mountains like those that shelter the little farming town of Farmington, Utah with their snowy rilled hump bumps from the wild of the wind comes blowing from upper Saskatchewans and territorial Montanas; it’s amazing how the town is laid out neat and bright. First you see it, as we did then, across the dusk flats like shining jewelry on the water; that Salt Lake water always so mysterious at night because none of it laps on the shore, it’s bedded in a basin way in, no frogs, no lush, all dry, desert, salt, flat, and over the curve of the God damned or God blessed earth where that God-cloud showed itself to me, coming out, you can see the humpful disappearance of telegraph lines strung on marching poles to the infinite curvature. “It’s the thing you can’t see holds the world together,” I told Cody, “the curve.”

  “Wow,” said Cody, and I had just told him all about snakes under hills and castles with haunted bats, Monks, parapets and cribs upstairs, “never heard you talk so,” he said; he was pale, sweat, fever, wild, his bandage shuddered like a light in the dark rushing air, he fell asleep on my arm thumb up—like a duty. The bandage all gray, unwrapped, a thousand gravely miles back Evelyn had probably fixed it snowy neat new. Poor, poor Cody, I’m watching him sleep in the car, in front they say “Hang on to the wheel, he’ll wake, drive some more”; the husband: “Have no fear dear,” and the fag: “I’ve never seen anything so crazy, you’d think this world was made up of a hundred percent characters.” They have Louvres for his brooch at the diving baths, he with his asshole folds allinfinite…like an old lady in Cannes at three o’clock in the afternoon in a jewelry store, “Qu’elque chose pour la plage.”

  We enter Salt Lake City; the sun is gone, darkness falls; Cody wakes from his nap as they’re driving the car to a hospital on an eminence for sightseeing; Cody looks out the window, from a shelf of a dream, at Salt Lake City laid out in necklaces of geometrically patterned ahem light; he brushes back the bushy film in his eyes, he fixes a con on the town of his birth, levels of dreary time fly over the brows of the city hidden in the upward night. “This is the city where I was born,” he announced. Up in the front seat they hear but are talking about the interesting hospitals of Salt Lake City. On the teenage corner when the tourists are eating, Cody and I stand gawping in the stare glares, gawping in the city: earlier that afternoon, while the tourists made another meal on our time, we whiled it away playing talk-games over bad meatloaf and under green Tom Sawyer trees of Lovelock—‘twas Lovelock where I saw two little boys and a Negro pickaninny cottonmouth boy, also little, of ten, sittin on rails, whittlin, with a dog—damn, that was 1947, I believed in the world, I slept on the lawns of gas stations on my way to see Cody and Denver. The car rolls on. Between Salt Lake and Denver lies the mystery of the soul of Cody. Here he was born, there he was raised; the apex of the raw wild space between that nameless place with an eagle on a shrouded mineshaft pole, in the northwest corner, in raw pines, the thing there first was about Colorado, Utah territory, the great grayday of the wild West, the grim reminder like Russia, the powerful rugged earth and souls of Colorado, that land; Strawberry Pass, the wink of a big reservoir in the moonlit night among red sages; “That fool doesn’t know how to drive in the mountains,” Cody complained; but at Green River’s Vernal junction with a road, the road, they got tired and let Cody drive and slept all three in the backseat like chums (poor lost lambs in the Dillinger voids of cross-country, three floppydolls, or a cosmos, three dreams of ghosts, three pandemic therpitoids, reducible in their gender to a sex, the man who mistrusts men, his wife trusts only women, voila! the man-woman for their needs; I have here—Fah!). We had the car to ourselves all night long; we made Kremmling in a keen dawn; en route he pointed out a reform school in the peaks near Climax, one in which; mines, too, Polybdenum; at Kremmling adobe walls in the spank of morning air on the rooftop of America and where cactus had dew on it till noon, we lolled like cowboydolls; I felt I was coming closer to Cody’s mystery—Cody used to be a cowboy too; the mighty mountain wall Berthoud stood black and bleak in a Gibraltarean shroud in the clouds; a Gate. Uprushed that, we did; rolled on in, tongued a pass, dropped pines on our left (a mile) and scared clay on our right from protuberant roadcliffs, like the ones children draw in cartoons; the Rocky Mountains of Cody’s birth consequence and youthful girl-parties in hot cars in the bye and bye. It was suddenly hot Denver again, flat pancake in the seafloor plain. His growing up town, the Chicago of his despairs, in this town he made neons twinkle on themselves like they belonged to Toledo, he rendered Denver, he was the wildhaired Cody Pomeray of his own city—hurrying along the wall there, with a strange key in his hand and a girl waiting for him in a car.

  This was when Cody stole those cars and raised Cain with dust and idiots, that—

  We got hungup in Denver and had to move on for various reasons, and in the unimaginable bedlam of events I came out (screaming over the telephone at men and women who were accusing me of breaking up homes and harboring criminals) with a fifth of Old Granddad, pull out the tongue and set up the rolltop special, just dust, no rocks. We drank at that thing in a livingroom (just like his now-kitchen) full of children, comic books, syrup and dogs with litters; pillows, confusion, telephone; a friend’s house; in a livingroom illuminated you might say by the moon, it hung outside haunting our madness. We got so drunk—we were on our way to New York—from Frisco—every way, any way—Cody disappeared—came back—Wham, he was trying to throw pebbles in a girl’s window (that I’d known), she had nice goose pimples on her knees), her mother rushed out with a shotgun over her arm, called a highschool gang on the corner in an old car, threatened to call her husband who was at work, and there’s her and Cody wrangling in the moonlit dusty road about it: as sullen a scene—Cody wouldn’t quit; I had to take over as “elder” advisor; Cody and I stomped back to the house over alfalfa rows, whooping, (“I don’t care,” said Cody), just like old times. Old Grand Dad. All this is out on the skirts of Denver, West Alameda, the dark wild night there…dogs bark in an ink; the tar melts on your evening Western star when you imagine you can still see it hanging even at midnight between the Berthoud Walls with an old cowpoke-ghost-rider-in-the-sky bluedark behind advertising night over deserts, damn that country…. Out we go with a woman, Frankie Johnnie herself, somewhat Okie-like, cussin and goodnatured, drove coal trucks in winter for her kids, rode horseback in summer with buddy ladies one of them a red-haired old circus queen with a snowy Pal-o-mine sensation that struts as in a bed of sawdust down the hardcut roads licketysplit along the highway towards Golden and them places—why—that kind of gal, with her kiddies but one fourteen-year-old dotter that Cody and me had to watch each other for, I did most of the worrying; with the mother we go out, in a cab, called, to a roadhouse, stomping down beers. Place is full of hammers and gashes of the crazy guitar Colorada Columbine whoopee night of roadhouses and wronks, you’d think sometimes they rushed out and tied somebody to a post and whacked him with sticks for no reason, crazy Arkies on the edge of the Plains, the knuckles of the Mountains, beetfarmers. Also an idiot just got married that day—Why do I say idiot?—he was a paralytic, the poor bastard, he only was clutched to act like an idiot by enraged muscles; he was drunk at the bar, moaning and lolling, young, about twenty, extraordinarily handsome as young men go. He staggered to Cody on scarecrow feet, knock-kneed, and they buddied up after awhile of—CODY:—Yes! and HIM:—Thash wha I toll ’em, I haff to get mawwied to-day-y-y? (squeal, laugh, yuck, the fluttering finger, the anguished lookaway jerking the tortured saintly face away into its own beauty and vacuity beyond the—) “Yes!” Cody keeps yelling to this poor fool, he’ll excite him unbearably, unmitigatably—His moans—Music is whang-whanging and twanging all right—cobwebs on the screen, August night, the Great Plains, High on the Hill of the Western Night, Coors beer, Friday, Phillip Morrises, change, beer-ring
s, damp floor in the john head—Cody goes out, I see him pushing into the darkness with an eager swing of his bare arms, he’s got a plan: earlier that night the last of his relatives gave him a dirty deal—concerning his father—“We don’t consider him a father to anyone—before he stays in county jail or the nuthouse wards for winos for good we want you and him to sign a paper” (his long dead sad mother’s people from Iowa), after which we spent an hour walking in a carnival, Cody, for some reason, wearing jeans for the first time since Joanna days (for me), in the starry night strolling, among hobbledehoys and carrousels, the pretty lips of Mexican girls too young, the boys in the tent shrouds smoking over motorcycles, the sawdust, candy apples, apple wombs, socket machines, giraffes, hurt ladies of the circus, flap walls of Teeny Weeny shows, and the prize, the last stale sandwich, the elephants are hauling off the wagon houses, a dustcloud obscures the stars, a great knife comes sighing from the dark to pierce the heart of Cody (twenty-five blocks from my Welton & 23rd sorrows) who is hung on the pretty four-foot Mexican midget beauty in the motel yard across the road from the carny’s last stake (littlekid place, rubbers place). “Damn, Wow, Shoot!” Cody has his hand under his T-shirt, his other on himself, rubbing, he looks awful; he did this on Main Street, Rocky Mount North Carolina and Testament, Virginia, it’s terrible, what must people think of him. So now we’re drunk—He takes a ride in some poor drinker’s car, he comes back with the car, wham, he steals another in the driveway, goes off, right under the noses of cops and discussing-groups whose attention was called earlier—He’s going mad, he wants the idiot to go riding with him—“Come on, come on!” he pleads but idiot says no, suddenly fears him and backs away; I’m saying “No stolen cars for me,” she is too; Cody goes off disappointed, sweaty, redfaced, mean, steals another car, drives around the downtown streets of his old boyhood—there it all is, Larimer Street with its bright huge glitter and swarming bums, the barbershop (Gaga’s), B-movie, the buffet bars; the pawnshops; and the rails, and Champa, Arapahoe; Curtis Street all red and boppy now like South Main in L.A., things have changed, grown more hep, and somehow grown more cold; he drives by the poolhall, Tom might be in there right now; what has been the meaning of his life? Who can say? And he drives around, and returns to the bar—he rushes off after us in the cab, overtakes the cab, scares, wait.

  * * *

  BREATHING MY SOUL (in a baggage car.) The night workers know the night. I have sick stomach. I am not their equal. This is California. America’s last hope. Bring on the Mexican heroes. One for all, all for one. I am the blood brother of a Negro Hero. Saved! And so all the fellows are workers. In the night they jabber of pay. Nothing’s doing, I’ve worked with the wretches; it takes an intelligent American boy to be high nowadays: that’s because the workers have become so intelligent. (The tractor driver Tony the Mex, I know him well, I’ll ask him his real full name, I’m a reporter for United Press. But he loves me; I don’t have to be U.P.)

  Working in the beautiful night with aged cyclists and young railroad Tom Sawyers with their shroudhats on their backheads, drinking brews across the street at lunch hour, one, two, three blocks from the Little Harlem of old madnesses and imaginary useless reveries. The hide of an elephant, a cock and a goat’s eye.

  Dark Laughter has come again!

  I’ve pressed up girls in Asheville saloons, danced with them in road-houses where mad heroes stomp one another to death in tragic driveways by the moon: I’ve laid whores on the strip of grass runs along a cornfield outside Durham, North Carolina, and applied bay rum in the highway lights; I’ve thrown empty whiskey bottles clear over the trees in Maryland copses on soft nights when Roosevelt was President; I’ve knocked down fifths in trans-state trucks as the Wyo. road unreeled; I’ve jammed home shots of whiskey on Sixth Avenue, in Frisco, in the Londons of the prime, in Florida, in L.A. I’ve made soup my chaser in forty-seven states; I’ve passed off the back of cabooses, Mexican buses and bows of ships in midwinter tempests (piss to you); I’ve laid women on coalpiles, in the snow, on fences, in beds and up against suburban garage walls from Massachusetts to the tip of San Joaquin. Cody me no Codys about America, I’ve drunk with his brother in a thousand bars, I’ve had hangovers with old sewing machine whores that were twice his mother twleve years ago when his heart was dewy. I learned how to smoke cigars in madhouses; and hopped boxcars in NOrleans; I’ve driven on Sunday afternoon across the lemon fields with Indians and their sisters; and I sat at the inauguration of. Tennessee me no Tennessees, Memphis; aim me no Montanas, Three Forks; I’ll still sock me a North Atlantic Territory in the free. That’s how I feel. I’ve heard guitars tinkling sadly across hillbilly hollows in the mist of the Great Smokies of night long ago:

  Man of the broad mysterious

  Smoky

  Mountain

  night.

  —When Pa Gant returned from California. I’ve stood outside musical doorways in a thousand misty heroisms across the sad big land.

  I’m writing this book because we’re all going to die—In the loneliness of my life, my father dead, my brother dead, my mother faraway, my sister and my wife far away, nothing here but my own tragic hands that once were guarded by a world, a sweet attention, that now are left to guide and disappear their own way into the common dark of all our death, sleeping in me raw bed, alone and stupid: with just this one pride and consolation: my heart broke in the general despair and opened up inwards to the Lord, I made a supplication in this dream.

  * * *

  110, HE PASSED US IN THE CAB, tooting, got the—he—he sat alone bullnecked in that littlen stolen coupe and shot on ahead of us into the night of the mountains straight ahead. “Damn, who’s that?” cabbie said; “Just a friend of mine,” I say; awe in his—how cold my knee is—(I’m naked, in dawn, it’s time to go to bed)—And I saw him going off into his destiny at last, there was the sad flick of red exhaust across his red pipe, he flew for the raw night on three wheels—he was going to lead the posse a merry chase, the actual police in patrol cars, up and down the mountains of the midnight mist. Somewhere out in those hills they have a herd of buffalo drowsing in a kept kennel—Cody was going to drive right by them. But buffaloes aren’t interesting in themselves. Absolutely crazy man—even today he eats with rage, he raves at the table spurting jam up on the ceiling, you’ve never seen a madder toastmaker (in the oven, fullblast), he jerks like a puppet above his bacon and eggs with a wild and stupid anxiety.

  CODY. (thinking) Yes, I stole that coupe, passed them honkin in the cab, turned in at her road and left—came out in my shorts at near dawn to stash it, Jack’s anxious—I drive it whomp te whomp over those alfalfa rows, discover it’s a cop’s car, time to move on from Denver. We get that Travel Bureau ride…driving 1947 Cadillac limousine

  JACK. (thinking) Cody’s runoff with the Cadillac the moment the owner relinquishes it to our care…“just get it to Chicago, pay your own gas,” wow, Cody picks up Beverly the waitress he conned earlier in the morning when I took a nap on the church lawn of middlewestern Lutheran music and birdy trees all exhausted from that lastnight’s car stealing and idiots and Old Granddad and yelling over the phone—Life is so harsh. Cody parks the Cadillac in an empty lot, talks her into it, screws her between the legs, casts off handkerchief, starts car, drives back, drops her off with promise to marry him in the East (she’ll follow, just like Joanna), and he’s back, picks up passengers, two Bonaventura Jesuit Irishmen on a lark in the summer, eastward we fly…all’s behind us, Frisco, fag, Salt Lake, and that poor episode we had when I thought he was insulting my age warning me about my kidneys and right there in men’s room I yelled angry words at him, buttoning my fly, (“Don’t stop and aim at other urinals, for your beat park days as old man it will be bad for your kidneys, there’s nothing worse”), just like when Pa and me took a leak in the Chinese restaurant john and he was always an angry, a hating man (“Toutes les Duluoz son malade,” all the Duluozes are sick), and Cody couldn’t figure why I was sore and burned to cry or bus
t or whatever when we raised an argument from roast beef sandwiches that ordinarily would have stilled our fret, Cody cried on the sidewalk sort of, I really couldn’t see and everything important died yesterday, yet he was really crying, the loneliness of his eager hands that would someday be quiet inside the dirt had got hold of him. I was too stupid to consider him and bless him. But we had that successfully behind us, heading East—

  CODY. (thinking) Into the soft sweet East we go, I’m ballin that Jack ’cause I got-a make Chicago by next nightfall as promised but at same time—