by Jack Kerouac
We come driving into Mexico City; (how do we know?).
Great excited soccer fields of dusk and windwhip first attracted our attentions; outside on the plains, outside town, where monasteries mix territories of agriculture with haciendas and wineries, we feel that wind for real, I blast on the plain under a roaring tree huge a hundred foot, with my eyes fixed on that pinkwalled creamy monastery across the way haunted by afternoon shapes in shrouds, bearing apples; now that wind that from vineyards got grained, blew blasting across the suburban Mexico City outlying factory soccer fields with huge commotions and settlements in between whaling like mad and the traffic refusing to halt. “Look at ’em kick!”
And oh the sad streets
in lost adobes,
Calle de Los Niños Perdidos.
“Dig this traffic man!” yells Cody—we just hit town—I see Cody’s in predicaments, traffics are slamming around him, we suddenly realize nobody has mufflers on their cars, the noise is clamorous. On a horizon is a bullring, el Cuarto Caminos, the Four Roads meet, a plain, on Sunday afternoons they slay the bull and over the stonewall across the field where the echo roars the primitive Aztecs still sit in their stone village on a filthy crick, stone bridges overtop it, the center of the stone worn down so’s you have to pick your way through a trough in the bridge a thousand years old. A car—stopped us—did we want whores? Lights, the first of the gray evening, turned on in the Metropolis ahead; we realized we’d been through a land.
In my dream of the Shrouded Stranger who pursued me across the desert and caught me at the gates of the Eternal City, he with his white eyes in the darkness of his rosy folds, his fire-feet in the dust, that smothered me to death in a dream, he’ll never catch me if he didn’t then, when we entered the gates of Mexico City, he came from that land and was going the same way, same hour of the day, bluefall, dusk…Too, there is a dream of a little golden road, a house, a treeshade, the which Shroudy inhabits in the disguise of my mother and then projects himself over to a shade across the shimmering heat coming after me; I ask my mother for a toy gun to shoot him with: he didn’t catch me in real life, or, if he did, and I’m caught now, I be dadblamed if I know what part-where—in what beautiful fiction of the dream he was spavined and—the golden moon resplendant over the village of the poor, has, by its imagery and fire, turned the sleepers of the roof to make sheets and shrouds in a madder ledge; old Art-Star, Jerusalem Shepherd, made into a drowsy moist eye of night, sheds sparklers and hot crackers on the town, midnight is dewy, the blue Baghdad sky of Reality is in the window, golden milken towers that rise, dependeth in the sky of night, make watch posts for thoughtful shepherds dozing for dawn and cowbells. This is the city the Shrouded Stranger denied me, he smothered me to death in his dress and I woke with the towers of the blue my last view. Ten dollars please, no more visits. Alright, so I places a bet on Blue Foam—Ting a ling.
* * *
MEXICO CITY was the bottom of and the end of the road, that ever-widening American road because it now can go no further, four lanes, five lanes, six lanes, poor road, there was so little beyond there that was “American,” “North American-o” that Cody didn’t ever think of driving beyond the City, say towards Cuernavaca, because, damn, instead he got involved in a rotary circle and—“Here comes an ambulance, I believe it’s an ambulance” I’m saying to myself as from the gray out-regions of some out-spoking from Reforma sub-boulevard comes the wild careening eyes of a—the Fellaheen Ambulance is coming! It is driven by barefooted interns, Indians, shirtless, slunk low at the wheel obese and insane, sneering along at the wheel, heroes of Pancho Villa and great Smokey wars in the cactus beyound, he’s driving an ambulance like a Mexico City Cody…. Here he comes! siren howling! seventy miles, eighty an hour in the city streets, people, traffic part, he careers without any of that kind of obstruction American and West European (including French) ambulance drivers are suffered to accept when they are reduced to darting and weaving in dense downtown Dubuque and McCook Main Streets of the gray tragic land which is now covered with white bungalows in the thrushing rain of 1952; an ambulance should be allowed to blow across town; the Indian just opens up like a cannonball and aims at his city: they, Indians all, accept his knowledge and wisdom and make way for him—disaster otherwise, he comes skittering on drunken crazy wheels in a frenzy of flight like a gull taking off from water, he sits greasy beneath the ikon in a green light, a gloom; the Fellaheen World Ambulance, it is liable to explode any minute, doctors, interns, patients and sympathetic handholders all in one sprowsh on crackglass sidewalks, skrunk, flerp. Val Hayes steps forth finger outheld—
CODY. Talk of that ambulance, here I have a rotary circle drive almost like the one we foolished inside of in Virginia that morning coming down to New Orleans where remember? this mad disc jockey is yellin at us over the air “Don’t WORRY ’bout nothin!”
JACK. And I’m in the backseat—filled with the Gulf, it’s floating along our left windows, the Gulf of Mexico
CODY. That now we’ve crossed—in this rotary I’m spinning my brain at an occupation—there are six spokes around this square, six boulevards, converging, but a thousand yards square fill this enormous grass circle with its Mayan traceries and Rocks there and Maximilian Peccadildoes in stone up above, so vast the circle that I cannot help but be hung in time in the lull of the drive, of driving, and miss my spokes which I’ll have to had counted at decision-time, the dream resurrects you but you’re a menace asleep at a wheel, round you go, whoopetiwhoop, around the mulberry square, see? and forget all about your boulevard and go in a sweeping circle—
JACK. At the bottom of the road, at the bottom of the road
CODY. Did you see how that damn ambulance with his red ass tail diminished into his space funnel yonder into downtown moils not traffic-less and opened a gateway
JACK.—to Santa Maria of Mercy, the stone edifice in the—Wheel look at those cunts
Yes, at midnight we stood, Cody and I, in the middle of a narrow little street, a street so narrow the jukebox in the one-arm hotdog stuck out into the gutter, and along the wall across the street are forty beautiful Latin whores with Madonna eyes gleaming from the dark above the words they thought we’d like to hear. Cody is stonecold dead stiff upright in the street center, he’s transfixed by a spear that commences in the Perez Prado mambo booming in the juke in a flood of the street in sound and runs through his body to the lined-up whores in their orisons there. “Jack, that amazing Hedy Lamarr angel one in the third door from end (whoo! what was on that porch then, a dice game or what? men squatting!) has, to mar her otherwise beauty, great sad pockmarks of a childhood typhus that you can’t see in the dark but I looked again when she cast her shining eyes around, towards the light, making greasy reflection for her cheek, balmlike.”
There was a great smell of rotting vegetation in the air but which had risen from the jungles below the plateau, in the form of rain, and was older and more seaworthy and almost exhilarating; but in heavy rains, worms swim the sidewalks in their deluge…worms appear from stucco, voila; vegetable rains oil the sidewalks. Tile sweats back caterpillars. The Tropic of Cancer…. Not content just to be driving in circles at the bottom of the road, we also made the great American drinking night, playing night, in terms of complete and final perfect bars; we slung ropes over tenement porches, we dove down the street like seadogs, it was criminal what the little girls were charging for a dance in a crowded jukebox bar with an unused bandstand supporting the box, brawlings at bar, lovings in the mill, a penny a dance, a close squeeze and cunt to cock hug, a walking thigh to thigh, to mambo, dreamy, crazy, dissipated, in Mexico at last they’ve caught up with that mad Poughkeepsie crowd of ours, whoo! “Ooh that cunt—Eeyak!—Urk!” Cody was out of his mind, he darted between legs, he popped up like (a dervish doll—a dribblydoll—like) a pop cork from shoulders, he pleaded with my ear: “I’ve never, I never knew, anything like this!!!” The American Irish pioneer in him was mourning the loss of home, he realized he ne
ver had one…. “In Denver they have mass arrests if girls and boys get together in big hot crowds like this—whee!” His face fell stony and silent. He flew around like a raven, flapping in the streets; usually just Groucho-gliding and exploring imaginary—real alleys as he ducked along in a goof (one of so many lost in the gray void now) and Sherman and I strode along in back and laughed, we’d been laughing since Denver. We lost track of the car as we roamed sad suburban streets with interconnecting highgrass fields with paths, and empty lamp poles; a weird spot. I suddenly remembered we were in Mexico—I had thought—but what? but like Cody this was my first trip to a foreign land (innocents abroad), there couldn’t be another. A lost faced cow herd or sheep guardian but also highschool soft bus stop saint who happened to be wandering in the 4 A.M. of his neighborhood for no reason and with a playstick but also probably a stick of weed too, grand for him and his history teacher…. A Fellaheen Suburban Ghost, a Sebastian of sorrows in another rain; maybe the buddy of that mambo peasant in the hip alleys downtown selling crucifix and weed and dodging crooked connections and mystical cops with four arms and eight hands (Mayan) in the Chinese moil of corners ducking into bars, everybody’s a cat down there: the mambo kid is at Las Brujas playing for the whore dancers, a tuck a tick a tee, a tuck a tick a tee (same beat, Conga is the drum son of Congo the River in a Spanish philological pseudo-morphosis carried through the cane by torchy sweating anguished confused messengers). The lonely lampposts remind Cody and Dave of Denver, remind me of Pawtucketville; the kid says he’s going to church, we don’t disbelieve it; beyond the lamp post glare I imagine I see American white bungalows of old-time side streets of home like in Truckee, Eau Claire, elsewhere, Buffalo, Shuffalo, but it’s ‘dobe Mexican tragic sleeping cells of night. In downtown streets beggar families lie in segments; I see that Jesus-like poor dog in the beard and bright eyes blowing the flute at his infant sister and all radiant and saved because she cackles, his bony arms, only the strawhat ruins that Khartoum effect, the whole world fooled me, the Indians are older than music, the Greeks stole their laments from an Indian wail in the Mongolian Sweeps. They came down over Bering Strait: to quote Bull Hubbard “Mexico is an oriental country;” meanwhile the first dark Indians of the Sink shot a loop northward that later so lost itself from the Bering Strait elderly arm that it became Gnothic, the Teuton, West Europa, the French Cabinet, Eisenhower, an apartment house in Santa Barbara. At the thumb of Korea the movement ceased and found its easternmost knock at the westernmost line which is in that mid-Pacific Polynesian somewhere. Cody is therefore an offshoot of the Celtic rebel redskin with his chalk buffaloes in a cave, lost his oriental guile tr—in an Irish cave. The Fellaheen World is at silence. This has absolutely no effect on the stolidity of Cody’s upthrust face as he gazes at the airport pokers of Mexico City, raving up there in the Fellaheen Night with the dingbats and jungle air. Cody is Cody—you couldn’t scratch him off an etching gargoyle, dingbat; the King of all my friends.
“You see, there’s nothing we can do about it. I told you I was—everything is all right in other words—that’s why we don’t talk as of yore, we’ve said it, seen it, the effort is awful, we have knowledge though, I recognize you, I know you more or less recognize whatever in me—in other words, the world is fine, we do have a certain amount of responsibility but it’s very light and not deserved really, we complain (cough)—hem, (like my father), “it’s a damn shame”—and shaking his poor philosophical head at the floor, Cody who’s been through everything and suffered it all. It was in Mexico that I think—he couldn’t go much further, nobody could, find an answer, the time pressed in—inside seven days he said “I’m going back to New York, I’m going back to California too, I’m going back to United States.”
“What?” I cried, looking up from my mail, from my grandee dark-polished desk…in the sunlight that stabbed in from the open shutter, “What?” adjusting my pen quill—“going off are you? back to—” He was going back to his present New York woman, marry her, and then go back to his second (and at present being divorced and most suffering of all) wife…. I saw sullenness coming into Cody’s face like a calm.
“False nonsense.”—Acheson, 1952
“You’ve got to legalize the Fellaheen,”—Duluoz, 1952
The last I see of him, he’s in the kitchen like an anxious old grandma seedin his weed in Mexican beer trays, “cerveza”—with his bony ruinous faceball bent over other skulls and uselessness.
He begged me to be a complete idiot with him; now he’s begging me to go to work with him.
* * *
BEFORE THE GATES of San Antonio, on our way down, that hot sultry valleynight when we eased up at a gas station, and drank a few cold beers from an icebox next to pumps, various Mexicans doing same in their peregrinating on the sidewalk so green, I thought, in all that wild delight and tropic love, a pity I should be seeing the wildest and most Fellaheen town in America so late in my years—San Antone was just about the only wahoo town I’d missed—But after Mexico City this San Antone of yours seemed—duller than the United States—the faces of red Texans in oil sitting in white flannel in air conditioned hotel lobbies while their long face grantwood wives hang a spike on their ears in a blue symphonic silo—reading newspapers—Mexico City gassed me. It so gassed Cody he never recovered; in a month, blow, he made the final decision of his life he had seen so much in that brief traumatic time (ahem; aided by his blasting a full ten cans in a week or two to alleviate the gaspings of his direction-leaping conscience: he flew back across the U.S. in the airplane night (his first ride) comtemplating the tragic mistake of his lands below. With Evelyn it was now going to be do or die; Cody was now trying to really adjust himself for the last time to an irrevocable Time-spanning eternity-flirting embroiled vivacious sobbing-globbing pow’ful marriage…. After all those jungle nights and mad fantasies of Mexico City, especially that last scene I’ll tell here, you’d think he would look like a dead man upon arriving in Frisco—instead…but wait for that too. It was, in the park, a terrible scene between our two souls, I don’t really know what happened, I was so surfeit with Mexico, he too, we—sat there at a rail in a Maximilian Park Coke plaza, over water with lillies and Mexican oarsmen with their Japanese dolls of the ‘dobe tenements, balloons of children sunning in the biggest balloon of them all, trees rising in cricket hollow hall sides with vine, wild red cockflowers, the Tropic of Cancer park, more like jungle, with sudden Indian picnicker families squatting in a vale like a lost arm, the walls of the Aztec temple and the French tearful monarch with his dreadful chin-moled Flaubertian beauty bedazzling and drooling at his side, that park, Chapultepec, (“Chapupec,” as Bull’s kid Willie called it, in a pet) (when we never made it in a picnic)—we’re having the national drink, Mission Orange, we’re in the sun, successful arrivers on tourist roads, but suddenly more or less—“Say Cody what about that story you were going—not story but what happened in Victoria in the back of the lockers and whore-rooms, there,” when Prado blasted our ears off off that magnificent super booming jukebox of the Indian proprietor afternoon in dives and sales de bailes—asking Cody about what he did while I myself was engaged with a bouncing senorita—instead of answering me he says, “Makes no difference, Jack.”
“’Bout what? No difference?”
“About…things, remembrances, the machinic of recall and rehash, communication and closeness and all that foldebawble—”
“Not my words.”
Cody doesn’t realize how much I love him.
“— or be concerned, not, or that—but now there’s no use, damn it”—with a distant look in his eyes suddenly there he is remembering Dave’s delighted “Son of a bitch, god damn!” with the knee-slap Denver glee but instead Cody, vacantly from alleys of the past, draws it out in the forge of his own uses all twisted and ash caked, “Son of a bitch god damn!!” with heavy sullen awe, saying, his new tune, “I get more hung up! I get more hung up!” It was tragic the way he hit himself thinking those things an
d their reason over, terrible—“I’d ask what is it Cody but it’s too late.”
“It’s nothing,” says Cody not listening. From far away the curse comes, clouding his eyes—I’m powerless in front of such loneliness and imprisoned despair, I’m there teetering and afraid to talk—“What are you gonna do?” Nothing. In a few weeks—less than that—after one of our many bawdy nights and bordellos and wines and fillettes, why, Cody sat at kitchen table in the Mexican Indian Night Gloom and packed to go. I had a fever that night from dysentery and only vaguely noticed him departing for New York three thousand miles away and in the poor Ford. “All that again?” I say to Cody hearing of his departure…. meaning all that land and driving. But he left—“Got things to do”—at night now drove back, north, right out Insurgentes the way we come in, Ferrocarril Mexicano haunting his left hubcaps, in the dark, across the holy biblical plains by the first starlight the wise men made. Far across the dewy cacti the coyote crowed his oats with a long dog grin, a burly sack hung from a nail, an ikon flickered in the tree, the wines of repentance flowed in the stream. Bent over his wheel like a madman, shirtless, hat-less, the moon leering on his shoulder, the apex of the night sweeping back in a fast shroud, he unrolled his old Ford joint by cracking the door over the humps and billdales of the Pan American Hiway through the Fold and Void of Earth Old…poor Crafeen, he made his mew in a churchyard marble pew. The bowl of Old Okiah, flung from northern lips of stars, caromed from the baldy temple of the Lazy King; they brought news of a tune. Feverish in his middles, here he goes crackowing across the desert and back to Texas up; alone now and in inky night he redone the mountains and the passes, he passed the parapets and crevasse dwellers in their apron of night. Did he see any lights?
