Visions of Cody

by Jack Kerouac

  I get semi-drunk on a lonely backseat pint while they drive on down to Dilley, Cochinal and Laredo. Hotter and hotter the night; I wake up stupid in the great heat of Laredo at 2 A.M. in June. Bugs are slamming the lunchcart screen, it’s disgusting, it’s a heat wave, it’s the utter lost-bottom of old Tex-ass, take it away. We eat disinterested sandwiches among border rats and disappointed cops. Off we go into Mexican guards at the border ramp, thinking nothing of it.

  * * *

  I HAD THE GREAT CHIMERA of Vaughn Monroe in the ghostly sky of the Western herd—O mournful cry!—I have heard train whistles howling at the gates of distant great cities, seen the swarm of white horses thundering across the horizon of America in the Night, saw music in trees, the dream in the river, the moon glistening in a young girl’s eye in bed—This explains my Cody Pomeray, “I saw him rising.” in the top of the West.

  We came into Mexico on tiptoe. As the officials checked we saw that across the road, where they said Mexico began, Mexico did begin, with the late sitters of the night, some of them on chairs and it’s 3 A.M., one cabaret chili joint is open, beer’s there, etc., we see that Mexico is the land of night. There are young men as well as old men standing in the hot sleeping street there at night…closed shutters…Nuevo Laredo; there are disinterested sullen eatings at smoking counters of the valley summernight. White is the predominant color of the dollmen in doorways, they also wear floppy strawhats and any old shoes. “What?” says Cody who didn’t expect it either, “Is that what these cats do at night—Man, we go by there and be with those fellows, we go dig the world.” In no time at all Cody and I realized the Indians…we discovered our own Indian in the Pancho of American border lore. “These guys, these women are Indians with high cheekbones—” and beautiful too—We saw little girls standing in jungle clearings with machetes in their father’s hand as he by the road goops to watch a car on the Pan American Highway. But jungle comes lower down—beyond Nuevo Laredo and our beer over delighted outstretched palms holding Mexican currencies—the desert only, gray flats of dawn, sand, yucca, the sun coming up over the Gulf of Mexico in a big red ball from Africa, far ahead the clouds of the Sierra Madre, the mysterious plateau of high airs and mountain joy that is Mexico, the top of the world, desolate, Indian, beautiful, bigger than dreams—“Say pardner” I tell Cody “this must be the road the old outlaws rode when they spoke of Old Monterrey, here they’d come lopin on ghost horses to exile, talk of your South Africas.”

  “Dig way in there”—Cody—“at the ‘dobe hut where that farmer and kids must live—set out there, with one animal, a Mexican mule, a burro, and the harsh inhospitable earth that doesn’t even have the country light of North Carolina at night, just pitch-black in the nigger stars. Shucks, talk of your Arkansaws, this is rough and thorny country.”

  We came to the first town in a dewy morn—Sabinas Hidalgo, the goat herds, the shepherds and the girls with ground on their knees smeared in.

  “Allo daddy,” said the bestlooking babe as in our beat Ford we slowly bounced at five per into town—Cody so madded by the magic that he’s looking at the insides of ‘dobe homes: “Look, the mother’s gettin tequila breakfast ready with her pancakes on the stove—the little kids are all sleeping in the same bed—behind the blind there’s an angel, must be. Dang, what a fine country.”

  “Let’s turn around and pick up those girls.”

  “Look at the old handlebar mustache with his goatstick cuttin off into the shade of the hills for the day—”

  “The tulip day—and those revolutionaries in big black bourgeois sombreros joking at the gas pump containing nationally owned oil, their attendants and squires are waiting by the goats and dust cracked Depression Buicks.” It was all there, all these things. In our tourist guidebook it said Sabinas Hidalgo was an agricultural town. “Read slowly and clearly as I drive,” instructs Cody. We’re headed for the jungles of the cockatoo: “It says colors run riot in the dense vegetation.”

  “Whooee, let’s go, let’s have a ball, some cunts in the hay, some Tahitian misses in disguise, pay for the father and run off with the house and kick the dog, make the brothers mad, ruin Mexico for Americans forever.”

  Huge clouds ahead: they have the transparency and cold film of mountain ridge clouds, they’re blowing. We start climbing a great pass. “Viva Aleman!” it’s whitewashed on rock. Mad. It’s clear and cold like New Hampshire—we’ve left the Mexican desert, we’re crawling up a cavity of the plateau, better things and higher levels of world-wonder ahead.

  * * *

  CODY DRIVES ON, he never rests much—by the time we’ve been through the whorehouses of intervening cities, and hurried through Monterrey, through jungles south of Victoria, through mountain chains and over cloud-sneering passes he’s still intently driving with a bleak jawbone. At Monterrey he had a flat tire or fixed something, I looked up from an attempted nap and saw the twin peaks of Saddle Mountain all crazy and jagged in the altitude, I never; it was one hell of a goose at heaven, like Diamond Point, Oregon and the needle of Cleopatra, but twisted, pommel like, a goof of a mountain.

  I drove for awhile, there was something sad in the car. Cody and I weren’t speaking much, Dave slept. Great trips are like that. Sadness is inexplicable and creative. We flew down the land. The old car managed nicely. We began getting high to misprove our vision. In the first set of tropical mountains, high above the great yellow ribbon of the river, Rio Moctezuma that dug its canyon forever, near Tamazunchale the brown and fetid foothill town, we stopped on a mountain ledge off the road to think and talk. To me the great verdant valleys rising on both sides in mad slopes covered with aerial agricultures of the mountain planting tribe, yellow bananas gracing the mountaintops, was all small and green and funny like a child dream I was so high: the hugeness of the world became a joke in my mind, I thought these mountains were all in one quiet and massive room; I told this but they didn’t understand: but Times Square too is in one livingroom of Time. At a little town to which we descended I saw a corner ‘dobe two-story apartment or tenement and as clearly as a bell it was true, to me, that was the house where I’d been born, they took me to the sunny front a long time ago. Mexico drove me mad. Cody was in ecstasies sweating over it. We were innocent.

  We slept in the jungle, a ghostly white horse came trotting out of the jungle woods in the pitch of night, Cody was on the sand road in a blanket, the horse phosphorescent and aflame in the dark came, meek longfaced ghost, tippy-toe past Cody’s sleeping head, pursued by mangy jungledogs barking, continuing on across town (the humble little Limon town of shacks, store lit Main Street with its one oil lamp store, and bananas and flies and barefoot kidsisters in the happy gloom of Fellaheen Eternal Country Life). I slept on top of the car, it was too hot below—soft showers of infinitesimal million-mothed bugs fell on my upturned eyes, it was like a film from the stars, I had never known God’s original Eden jungle could be so soft and sweet, my face was so safe; for the first time I resigned to insupportable heat, and almost enjoyed it thanks to the sensation and crushed bleeding of bugs and mosquitoes all over me, the casualness of our trip. “Start the car Cody, blow some air,” I complained at dawn; he did; up ahead over swamps shines the Mantes radio antenna, red lights, as if we were in Nebraska; it’s a leprous dawn spreads in the sky. At a jungle gas station that would make a good Atlantic Whiteflash man go pale, they’ve got a concrete ramp at dawn after unspeakable indulgences and orgies of blood in the night a million bugs of every hue and prick crawling insensate around my poor shoes. I leap into the car to escape the horror; Cody and Dave drink Mission Orange at the icebox, they’re lost in a sea of bugs, they don’t care. Beyond them is Tropic of Cancer swamp—The goddamn attendant, he’s barefooted…. Why they’ve got caterpillars, beetles, dragonwings with a mile long, black stickers, every kind—there’s no air; when Cody pushes the hot Ford out we get gusts of deadbug junglerot breeze against the caked blood and sweat of our bitten skins. Pleasant! It’s like Daddy Eroshka in the Tolstoy fa
ble of the Cossack marshes, (enjoy the burning bleeding sensation of the jungle raw, be natural man). Talk of your insides of a baker’s oven in New Orleans on a July night, the Tropic of Cancer July is best to climb out of.

  Blowing fogs wham across the bush at the top of the great altitude cool pass—golden airs are being propelled in a height—we can’t see below the parapet, it’s too white and misty, just a yellow ribbon and a green valley like a sea below it, dwellings in between like eyries.

  All the Indians along the road want something from us. We wouldn’t be on the road if we had it.

  * * *

  OUR OLD THIRTIES upgoing Ford, so-called with the noses and soiled with the mess of our fathers, year-cracked, haunted, tinny heap of the American movement into the round West: covered wagons brought crudities, the Ford brought traveling salesman and blonds, brought Sears catalog, Jack Benny on the radio. The Indians with hands outstretched expect us three galoots goofing in an old V-8 to come over and give them dollars; they don’t know we discovered the atom bomb yet, they only vaguely heard about it. We’ll give it to them, alright…. Unshaven, Cody, hands in pants, surveys the mountains. “What they want has already crumbled in a rubbish heap—they want banks.”

  Cody gave a little girl his wristwatch in exchange for “the smallest and most perfect crystal she’s picked from the mountain just for me”; as a rule those went for five cents or less. “Damn, I wish I had something to give them,” muses Cody. “Isn’t there anything I can give them?” he might as well shout at the mountains; no answer. We receive pineapples for fractions of a penny: no fair exchange at all. The Indians are lounging against alpine stonewalls on the ledges of light, hatbrims down, draped, shrouded in dark and dusty vestments. Biblical patriarchs bless herds and convene with crowds in the deserted dusty ghost town market-squares of late afternoon; women flow along the fields with flax in their arms, striding, talking; from out the wild Judean earth showers the wild maguey pulque octopus of cactus, ready to stab and suck. Jeremiacal hobos lounge, shepherds by trade, under groves of dark trees in the white desert, comes the soft footfall of the water boy coming from the kine…. Above roll the world clouds, salmon, the high plateau is still. I can see the hand of God. The future’s in Fellaheen. At Actopan this Biblical plateau begins—it’s reached by the mountains of faith only. I know that I will someday live in a land like this—I did long ago.

  * * *

  (BUT OH WHEN I WAS in Colorado they sang sad songs about Columbine—at night, over the radio as we drove past the Okie outskirts and the corrals, “Little Colorado Columbine”—never again, Oh never again. This flower grew for long-ago Codys too…as it does now for the children of respectable Okie car mechanics living on rose covered little sideroads out Alameda, down Broadway, in past East Colfax…sad world that tortures its own hearts…never again the dream of Colorado, the sunny Sunday afternoon, the roadhouse, the great wheatfield, the white mountains beyond.)

  Cody saw angels of heaven through everything, in Mexico. Hour after hour, sick with repugnant life he drove on and yet endured. At Actopan, or Ixmiquilpan, or Zacualtipan, I don’t know which, where we passed, there was a crowd of Indians in robes standing in the sun under great trees that cast their shade in the other direction, with dogs, children, baskets, everything gleaming golden in the sun the air is so blue and cool and keen, the fields so mellow; women with lowered Virgin Mary faces hiding in their earthy dressinggowns made of flax and hands and by time dyed; just like a woman with her left leg up on daddy’s hip where he sits, her right one down, open to his up-aimed rutabaga, her breast planted in his mouth, just like that dame looking to the moon as she enjoys what’s going on below, Cody was, when I said “Hey Cody look at all the shepherds of the Bible in the sun of antiquity,” he takes one look out of a red-eyed nap, says “Oah” and looks at the torn ceiling of the old Ford like that, as if to goop the loop. Across from that rocky village with its cactus foundations is an earth of the young Jesus; they’re bringing the goats home, long-stepping Pantrio comes fumilgating along the maguey rows, his son gave him up a month ago to walk barefoot to Mexico City with a home-made mambo drum, his wife gathers blossoms and flax for his embroideries and kingdoms, the young inquisitive carpenters of the village quaff pulque from urns in the goateries and shelli-meeli-mahim of Mohammedan Worldwide Fellaheen dusk and nightfall, Ali Babe be blessed. Did Cody see that?—Later he said he recalled all that, but as if it had been a dream when he looked (out the window).

  But not so sick with repugnant life, cheesy Cody in his beat down Ford rottin on up the fard, with Mexican saints and peons watching him. What a land!—We rose for the plateau whereon Mexico City sits; it was gradual, those Biblical levels in between, those sweet lands terminated, just a step up, by monasteries, like the progress of the history of the church, and the town and the city, till we reach the San Juan Letran chapels and cathedrals of the great city night. There is a stupid blur in my memory of the trip; I think Cody remembers absolutely nothing—either that or all.

  * * *

  CODY HAD ONE MOTHER, but she had seven sons. And, like me, he sinned against his father; he left him flat in Ogden, I left my father flat in New Haven.

  There’s a picture of Cody’s mother and one of his father’s friends, they’re standing in front of a keenly etched old automobile in the modern bright print of the Thirties camera, bless it; we see the sheen of stove-polish on the fenders of this venerable jalopy, it’s got a canvas roof, it’s just a few years older than our Mexico Ford (a ’25 Chandler or Reo or Buick); Cody’s mother is wearing overalls, coveralls, a man’s white shirt, sleeves rolled, collar open; her hair is swept back and tied; she has a long gaunt face, she’s forty-five or fifty, has had many children (“These damn Okies!” Cody yelled furiously when Frankie Johnnie refused to buy a jalopy for Cody’s temporary use while we waited in Denver for the Cadillac ride)—It must be a piney Sunday afternoon in that old photo; they went driving, a Thirties Sunday-driver picnic, with beer, brawling beers in roadhouse crossroads with other families who even bring children to drowse and scratch at the tavern back screen where the flies flip over the garbage; now someone’s suggested a picture be taken, maybe old Cody, or some brother, Jim, Joe, Jack, his shadow (or hers) (is in the grass at the foot)—she’s posing with a Depression baker in a California S.I.U. skid row hat all snow white, wearing chinos khaki or wino pants with a shirt, beat cuffs rolled, beat shoes in the weeds, one arm on hip (where’s his joy now?). Poor old Colorado with the red sun sinking…on California.

  This picture was taken in the days when Denver began to imitate L.A. and spread for miles—and Cody spread all the way to California. There are blossoms on the weeds at the bottom of the picture…tragic Columbine of the soft green fields in their ripple winds and rushing irrigation ditches, irriditches: Colorado where Cody began, now not the railyards, but the outlying woods, Denver—Just like the Green Clunker in its lonesome stand along the boxcars in a Frisco Xmas, this clunker is lost in the space and mastery of Actuality which there reddens and reflects off the faces of the woman in overalls and the smiler from Larimer Street—Smiley I believe his name was, Smiley Moultrie that bought groceries on Saturday afternoons and then suffered them to wait in the car for the evening movie while he played cards with the fellows in Curtis Street poolbacks, later a drink in a nugget saloon full of cowboys and local freightyard clerks and hotrod boys and winos in a mad mess; driving home from the movie at night Smiley Moultrie’s little boy Red snoozed in the lull of wishes and hopes gratified, his arm against his Pa, timidly learning, believing: but that Smiley was a nogood ornery no account horn toad, they felled him in a bush after the snapshot and took all his money. He died of paresis cursing against the jewth, in Texas or in Maine.

  In no time at all, Cody himself has grown from a little barefoot lad of five (1931) in this picture where he stands in the hot sun on the cement steps, in little chubby overalls made smooth and wrinkly and sweet by grasses and pisses in the day, a lawn behind him, a ro
se arbor, the Denver afternoon where those immortal clouds ever roam to their mountains. Nothing has changed in the skies over Colorado since 1931—But now Cody is grown big and rocky and gaunt and manly in his doom. Hope expresses itself in the composition of flowers, light and leaf in the background of Cody at eleven, his arms are folded complacently but with expectancy, he grins for camera, his hair is brushed to one neat schoolboy side, he has suspenders and bicycle boy stripes on his long pants, a clean white shirt is folded in a square at the elbow—In his eyes all this human belief, at eleven there’s belief (1937) which is gone and instead should have ripened. Has it not ripened?