Visions of Cody

by Jack Kerouac

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  IN VICTORIA Cody Pomeray, his headlights pointed to the corner of a yard as he waited for his boy Victor who went in for a minute to find out if his sister knew his wherabouts whether fiesta dance or pulque saloon or mambo dive in peanut and Sunkist counter back by Tequila Square; waiting, Cody saw and heard a bunch of nervous children giggling about him and now the headlights were revealing them to the hide and seek gang in the other Mexico post suppertime alley, but, so, when Cody eventually swung car around, Victor returned, and hits flush on children at fence instead of just part on them, they ain’t there at all because they never existed, he had a hallucination.

  And the moment he’s back in California—after the Ford broke down in Lake Charles, La. and he flew on in to marry Diane in Newark, and then re-crossed old hump to the Coast, he looks (you’d have thought dead) in a foto with Evelyn on newhoneymooning Market sidewalks of romantic boygirl Frisco the two of them cutting along like ads for the future—bright, neat, Cody his hair ruffled in the wind and over his forehead, a T-shirt, clean as snow now, inside a tweed cheap suity sports coat, trousers pressed, rippling and folding in the walk sun, his shoes amazing by the sad gray sidewalk, his hands holding Evelyn’s, his arms folded, half grinning, an Irish youth almost pretty and certainly handsome and boyish, and her a regular doll of course with blond upfluffed braids of gold hair and chic suit and high-heels and handbag (a suede jacket, by God, with a suede cord belt), tweed and casual corduroy her-ringboning down the after—This is the picture of Cody in the first days of his reformed marriage. He’s an institution by himself. He has the strength of the bourgeois and the lumpenproletariat all at once, he Out-Marxes Marx, he’s a lad…. Shortly after this he unpacked his battered poor old pissass huge bungtrunk that I remember one time in Ozone Park, struggling with on a hipster New Year’s, 1949; trunk I first saw with half-familiar socks and appurtenances of shirts sticking out all gray and dismal in the traveled emptiness. It was at my house—my mother—but that’s the picture—Our, his children will look at that and say “My daddy was a strapping young man in 1950, he strutted down the street as cute as can be and for all a few troubles he had that Irish fortitude and strength—ah coffin! eatest thou old strength for thy meal, and throw worms?”

  How can the tragic children tell what it is their fathers killed, enjoyed and what joyed in and killed them to make them crop open like vegetable windfalls in a bin…poor manure, man.

  “How could he then—and as they say, after a grueling series of voyages overland in old cars and with—and the nights, fights, tears, reconciliations, packing, sewing up, in fact he got married just before that picture and that clear across the land—so there he smiles in his youth, my father, my Cody—and now what fodder, what box thing—” Te Deum, the children will imagine gods for their fathers and myths for the forgotten mistakes of anonymity by glooms: no hope whatever of gleaning the secret from our ancestral he-doers and she-makers. He doeth, she maketh it: in the corn they sing. Blessed be the Lord, the Meek, the Union of these two souls amen. Let us pray in the great dark rains of a carnage…ask for knowledge…find a backrest for our doubt.

  “Tutta tua vision fa manifesta, e lascia pur grattar.” These lines are the foundations of a great design.

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  THE MAD ROAD, lonely, leading around the bend into the openings of space towards the horizon Wasatch snows promised us in the vision of the West, spine heights at the world’s end, coast of blue Pacific starry night—nobone half banana moons sloping in the tangled night sky, the torments of great formations in mist, the huddled invisible insect in the car racing onwards, illuminate.—The raw cut, the drag, the butte, the star, the draw, the sunflower in the grass—orangebutted west lands of Arcadia, forlorn sands of the isolate earth, dewy exposures to infinity in black space, home of the rattlesnake and the gopher…the level of the world, low and flat: the charging restless mute unvoiced road keening in a seizure of tarpaulin power into the route, fabulous plots of landowners in green unexpecteds, ditches by the side of the road, as I look from here to Elko along the level of this pin parallel to telephone poles I can see a bug playing in the hot sun—swush, hitch yourself a ride beyond the fastest freighttrain, beat the smoke, find the thighs, spend the shiny, throw the shroud, kiss the morning star in the morning glass—madroad driving men ahead. Pencil traceries of our faintest wish in the travel of the horizon merged, nosey cloud obfusks in a drabble of speechless distance, the black sheep clouds cling a parallel above the steams of the CBQ—serried Little Missouri rocks haunt the badlands, harsh dry brown fields roll in the moonlight with a shiny cow’s ass, telephone poles toothpick time, “dotting immensity” the crazed voyager of the lone automobile presses forth his eager insignificance in noseplates and licenses into the vast promise of life…the choice of tragic wives, moons. Drain your basins in old Ohio and the Indian and the Illini plains, bring your big muddy rivers through Kansas and the mudlands, Yellowstone in the frozen North, punch lake holes in Florida and L.A., raise your cities in the white plain, cast your mountains up, bedawze the west, bedight the West with brave hedgerow cliffs rising to Promethean heights and fame—plant your prisons in the basin of the Utah moon—nudge Canadian groping lands that end in arctic bays, purl your Mexican ribneck, America.

  Cody’s going home, going home.

  Here are some of the letters prepared under the moon and mailed in love through these immensities and impossibilities of the land of his birth, “Dear Cody, No, it makes no difference now” (“Lester Young’s chorus of “You Can Count On Me,” 1938)—Yes, Lester used to blow like a sonofabitch, it’s time to say so, as, in Chicago we saw the children of the modern jazz night blowing their horns and instruments with belief; it was Lester started it all, the gloomy saintly serious goof who is behind the history of modern jazz and this generation like Louis his, Bird his to come and be—his fame and his smoothness as lost as Maurice Chevalier in a stagedoor poster—his drape, his drooping melancholy disposition in the sidewalk, in the door, his porkpie hat (“At sessions all over the country from Kansas City to the apple and back to L.A. they called him Porkpie because he’d wear that gone hat and blow in it”)—what doorstanding influence has Cody gained from this cultural master of his generation? what mysteries as well as masteries? what styles, sorrows, collars, the removal of collars, the removal of lapels, the crepe-sole shoes, the beauty goof, the—one night I saw Lester, in a reverie on the stand, make such faces in his thoughts as the audience of watchers (that)—the sneer, the twitch, that Billie Holliday has too, that compassion for the dead; those poor little musicians in Chicago, their love of Lester, early heroisms in a room, records of Lester, early Count, suits hanging in the closet, tanned evenings at ballrooms, the great tenor solo in the shoeshine jukebox, you can hear Lester blow from L.A. to Boston, Frisco to New York, Seattle to Philly, Kansas City, Kansas to Kansas City, Missouri, 1935, ’40, Lester has a hold of the generation, in New York, swank apartment, Lionel droops by a twenty-story French window with a listen to his Lester clarinet early solo on “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans” (other side), sunk to hear, an Englishman discovering the greatness of America in a single Negro musician—Lester is just like the river, the river starts in near Butte, Montana in frozen snow caps (Three Forks) and meanders on down across states and entire territorial areas of dun bleak land with hawthorn crackling in the sleet, picks up rivers at Bismarck, Omaha and St. Louis just north, another at Kay-ro, another in Arkansas, Tennessee, comes deluging on New Orleans with muddy news from the land and a roar of subterranean excitement that is like the vibration of the entire land sucked of its gut in mad midnight, fevered, hot, the big mudhole rank clawpole old frogular pawed-soul titanic Mississippi from the North, full of wires, cold wood and horn.

  So Lester, began holding his horn high in nigger chickenshacks back-street basie kaycee wearing greasy smeared corduroy bigpants and in torn flap smoking jacket without straw, scuffle-up shoes all sloppy Mother Hubbard, soft, pudding, and key-ring
, early handkerchiefs, hands up, arms up, horn horizontal, shining dul in woodbrown shit-house with ammoniac piss from broken gut bottles around shitty pukey bowl and a whore sprawled in it legs spread in brown cotton stockings, bleeding at belted mouth, moaning “Yes” as Lester, horn placed, has started blowing, “blow for me you old motherfucker blow,” 1938, it’s 1938, Miles is still on his daddy’s checkered knee, Louis’s only got twenty years behind him, and Lester blows all Kansas City to ecstasy and now Americans from coast to coast go mad, and fall by, and everybody’s picking up—what? This had no effect on Cody? he who stood beside me listening to Lester’s Children in Chicago, he who—hung in a doorway waiting for his connection (with me dragged millionaires to hear Lester). “Dig him,” Cody says with a sneer when we see Lester, just after Chicago, just before Mexico City, at Birdland, and Lester sneers at him from bandstand; this is the mark of the hip generation, “I’m hip, man, I’m hip.”

  Flying back across the fantastic land thus did Cody in his climaxes and, in the night time traveling, worried, look-ahead, gnawing, climactic, dolorous, thus did Cody—he is connected with Lester, all our horns came down. Tragic muling cat! on screechy hincty fence by cotton cloth and pin—In his ripest period Lester had let his horn half down and his head, consequently, because he didn’t adjust mouthpiece, fell over ninety degrees in sadness; then finally, in his Baroque late hornings in the open void of American Nightclub, he’d let the horn fall all the way, adjusted the mouthpiece only in relation to the first fall, and hangs there, ninety degrees, largefaced, sad, blowing clichés in a masterful and cool manner, his hair long, his forearm busted, his shoes thick and crimson rich now (like chemical milk foam plastic rubber couches) instead of those old galoshes of his cartoon Born-thirty-years-too-soon youngmanhood in shacks, O Lester! Great name!

  “I, much like him, incline, and do fall, I’ve given up just about like Lester you’d say but of course, but yes, that’s apt—he sure could blow—of course it’s just music—I don’t get frantic about music anymore of course, only the criticism in my mind.” Cody talking, stern boned in a fixity pose, solid rock, the canny Scot, old Yeats, a future Dostoevsky of inflexible tragic convictions and irritabilities. Some generation. Some nigger. And that big void over the beloved bending head of the earth, God bless us all.

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  CHARLES ATKINSON, a singer in incomparable prose, the basis of modern prose his roughest outlines, the precursor to Neurotica and Time-Life and all crazy styles, the translator of Spengler’s poem Decline of the West—a laurel wreath no less dylan, a poet of the cold bedewdrop’t mornings in gray Ars Scotia! Hoil!

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  SHORT OF ONE TRIP Cody took to New York and the East Coast as if he wanted to see for the last time if there was any fame worthwhile and decided not so, he came among us for no reason and without warning; successfully married down with Evelyn for the past entire six months now what was it brought him again over that huge distance and incomprehensible-almost America, Cody—riding on free passes four thousand miles a southern route; sitting up in daycars blowing his piccolo flute—his stockings off, crossing the dark land, the day land, five days and five nights coming: Evelyn drove him to the yards, watched him cross those old rails shining so clean in their sooty blackbed, his bag, struggling eastward again—“Now darling, I’ll bring Jack back as we agreed; I’ll see her—” (She was having her baby, Cody’s third then in all) “— and I’ll be back.”

  “But why are you going?” poor Evelyn asked. Cody had no idea and all his answers were unsatisfying—but he came, and fluted overland like a Zenzi witch King in his dragoon, and arrived in New York for exactly the third time in his life. How far this was from that first dewy trip with rosy Joanna in 1946!—those bus dreams they’d shared, the innocence of American kids; far even from the time we returned together from that Cadillac ride, when, at least, Cody hoped to use New York as a port to Italy and Europe or anything and so’d come crushing in as he did, got married so fast, exploded so soon again, was now returned blind and blank. His chief message now was, “Can’t talk no more,” he stuttered, just, or fumbled, made no attempt to make sense when he spoke and with the same logical pertinacity that previously he’d spoken in immense coy logics with structures like the statute books and even the Corinthian pillars outside: he played his flute (that flute had really started in summer 1949, in fact the very almost day we got back and who do we hook up with in New York, up at 116th Street, Slim Buckle and Tom Watson re-arriving from their trip to Maine, their psychosomatic nightmare in the land just like “me and Cody,” all brothers under the skin, sitting in a Riverside Park bench all longfaced, western hombre travel types occupying benches in the city of New York a minute, to hear the bird of dusk in a dreamy new known park: Cody played the flute instead of screwing Vicki the Chinese girl (another Vicki altogether), it was a sordid evening, Irwin accused the whole lot of being cruel to girls on purpose, me included, there also was Rhoda, she suffered, Big Slim, Tom, old poolhall saint Tom now older and bearded and big blue eyes but distant and no longer Cody’s mentor but merely watcher of Cody’s boy Slim, subsidiary sorrows and heading for a personal levelous grave in redder, more broken years—so all of us, we’re never young enough, thirty’ll do, forty’ll do, fifty’ll do, sixty, seventy, eighty’ll do, no more—but that night, nothing, a flute) (and strangely now Cody less and less plays the flute, fact is the children have swallowed the mouthpiece in their toys)—

  “But Cody,” I say: “I’d a gone back with you immediate if you’d showed up like you said in seven weeks—I ain’t got that money saved, I can’t buy no truck now.” (“I cain’t build no new truck with what yore daddy left me last fall, yummer, so ease over sometime if you can and show me how to rig up this new Sears and Roebuck taint I ordered up, gives me an idea for a housetruck or some such silly ideee—”)

  “Wal,” says Cody, “I’ll go back alone then?” It appeared so, strange—but he was only in New York three days, I saw (in fact) little of him, was busy; he hooked up in other activities…already we weren’t on speaking terms any more, old buddies of the night grown sad, just like once exuberant basketball quintets meeting in sad maturity hotel lobbies with their shamefaced wives (in Worcester). He had brought his heavy topcoat to New York winter, we walked by the tracks under clouds of perfect white steam and he said “Whoo! I’d forgot how cold the East is, cold as a son-umbitch, damn. I’m going back to California there.”

  “Back to Evelyn, huh?”

  “Whatelse, boy? Diane won’t have me; I tried my best, I pleaded with her seven hours straight, live at the end of Watsonville chain gang; I’ll be in most every morning, get hers, one night with one, one with the other; women just don’t understand.” So he went back to his wife and daughters.

  “Don’t know why I came,” he finally admitted cheerfully; he was through with New York, though; it wasn’t made for Cody Pomeray. It takes a raw wild young town—if any exist, if Frisco, I mean San Francisco, d—We clapped hands in a gloom—we posed for a picture in a gray square; Cody’s all stern and hardjaw, his hand’s inserted in his Levi pocket like the upside down hand of a Napoleon and like a Gay Nineties banker and like a long lumberjack in a rangy mountain town, fingers board in, thumbs at ease out, his big hardbelt, workshirt severe and even military, and big square mountainous determination and simplicity face (like a dumb Canook), already raveled frowns in his head, concerns, lines, worries, the might of muscular righteous agreement with the self…that’s Cody.

  “‘You Can Depend on Me,’ man, that’s the name of the record,” said Lionel, “when Lester was really blowing and generated this excitement which was so tremendous, I’ve never known anything like it here in the United States—except perhaps, maybe, man, you know, when Cody, on his last trip, when he came for no reason, and went back, remember? and we all got high at that Deni party with Danny and Irwin and got in the cab in one fell gang and were at the peak, Cody was blowing, crazy, he was talking incessantly and with absolutely i
nsanely excited agreement, an incredible speech and babble that had us all gassed…the vibration in the cab as the driver drove up Seventh Avenue was so tremendous I thought—I didn’t think what the cabdriver could think—what next—explosion—Cody whaling like ten men with gestures and excitements, he’s saying ‘Now listen fellas, ah, knowing full well’ (and laughing that crazy laff, like as, an utter maniac!) ‘but, and, if, ah, yes, you, but, ork, off,’ you know Cody—”

  “Yes,” I said; saw Lionel that same night slumped against the wall of the apartment, exhausted, his face at one point during that night so Englishy and delightful grew so rosy in the middle of a Cody spiel, (playing tick-tack-toe Cody Lionel Danny Richman and me at a Deni Bleu party with rosy faces and that unmistakable golden davenport of a driving T-high), now depleted, Cody’s just vanished in a flare of heels to get Joesphine, Lionel’s saying, dumbly like losing his father, “Where’s Cody? Where’s Cody? Where’d he go?” and we had to explain and console him on the floor.

  “America’s real mad,” he always said, “Lester myboy Lester.” He’s proud of that name, stood on winter sidewalks with him. “And guys like C-o-d-y,” pronouncing the name with his teeth, relishing it, “guys like C-o-d-y in America. Crazy.”

  “Cody,” he said before he sailed for England, “things like Cody and you, my buddy my dear friend Jack, and Lester, makes me want to come back to America and stay, yessir, hmph,” adjusting his umbrella and going to London again, stooped, like Alistair Sims, another book.

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