Lonesome Traveler

by Jack Kerouac

  MILE POST 46.9 is San Jose scene of a hundred interested bums lounging in the weeds along the track with their packs of junk, their buddies, their private watertanks, their cans of water to make coffee or tea or soup with, and their bottle of tokay wine or usually muskatel.—The Muskat California is all around them, in the sky blue, tatteredly white clouds are being shoved across the top of the Santa Clara Valley from Bayshore where a high fogwind came and thru South City gaps too and the peace lies heavy in the sheltered valley where the bums have found a temporary rest.— Hot drowse in the dry weeds, just hollows of dry reed stick up and you walk against them crashing.— “Well boy, how’s about a shot of rum to Watsonville.” “This aintrum boy, this is a new kinda shit”—a colored hobo sitting on a shitty old newspaper of last year and’s been used by Rat Eye Jim of the Denver viaducts who came thru here last spring with a package of dates on his back—“Things aint been as bad as this since 1906!” Now it’s 1952 October and the dew is on the grain of this real ground. One of the boys picks up a piece of tin from the ground (that got bounced off a gon in a sudden sprrram of freights ramming together in the yard from the bucklin slack) (bowm!)—pieces of tin go flying off, fall in the weeds, outside track No. 1.— The hobo puts the tin on rocks over the fire and uses it to toast some bread but’s drinking tokay and talking to the other boys and toast burns just like in tile kitchen tragedies.— The bum comes curses angrily because he lost some bread, and kicks a rock, and says “Twenty eight years I spent inside the walls of Dannemora and I had my fill of excitin panoramas of the great actions like when drunken Canneman wrote me that letter fum minneapoly and it was jess about Chicago sponges—I turd him looka jock you caint—well I wrote im a letter ennyways.” Aint been a soul listening because no one listens to a bum all the other bums are blagdengabsting and you cant find nor finangilate yr way out of that—all talking at the same time and all of them confused. You have to go back to the railroad man to understand.— Like, say, you ask a man “Where’s track 109?”—nu—if it’s a bum he’ll say “Cart right over there dadday, and see if the old boy in the blue bandana knows, I’m Slim Holmes Hubbard from Ruston Louisiana and I got no time and got no knowledge to make me ways of knowin what where that track 109—only thing’s I got, is—I want a dime, if you can spare a dime I’ll go along my way peacefully—if you cant I’ll go along my way peacefully—ya cant win—ya cant lose—and from between here to Bismarck Idaho I got nothing but lost and lost and lost everything I ever had.” You’ve got to admit these bums into your soul when they talk like that—most of them rasp “Track 109 Chillicothe Ioway” thru the stubbles and spits of their beard—and wander off dragassing packs so huge, profound, heavy—dismembered bodies are in there you’d think—red eyes, wild wild hair, the railroad men look at them with amazement and at first sight then never look again—what would wives say?—If you ask a railroad man what track is 109, he stop, stop chewing his gum, shift his package his coatlamp or lunch and turn, and spit, and squint at the mountains to the east and roll his eyes very slowly in the private cavern of his eyebone between brow bone and cheek bone, and say, still deliberating and having deliberated “They call it track 109 but they should call it no, it’s right next to the ice platform you know the icehouse up there—” “Yeah—” “There it is, from track one on the main line here we start the numbers but the ice house make em jump they make a turn and you have to go across track 110 to get to 109—But you never have to go to 109 too often—so it’s just like 109 was jess missing from the yard … numbers, see …” “Yeah”—I know it for sure—“I know it for sure now.” “And there she is—” “Thanks—I gotta get there fast”—“That’s the trouble with the railroad, you always gotta get there fast—‘cause if you dont it’s like turning down a local on the phone and say you want to turn over and go to sleep (like Mike Ryan did last Monday)” he’s sayin to himself.— And we walk wave and are gone.

  This is the cricket in the reed. I sat down in the Pajaro riverbottoms and lit fires and slept with my coat on top of my brakeman’s lantern and considered the California life staring at the blue sky —

  The conductor is in there hanging around waiting for his train orders—when he gets them he’ll give the engineer the hiball sign, a little side to side wave of the palmed hand, and off we go—the old hoghead gives orders for steam, the young fireman complies, the hoghead kicks and pulls at his big lever throttle and sometimes jumps up to wrestle with it like hugely an angel in hell and pulls the whistle twice toot toot we’re leaving, and you hear the first chug of the engine—chug—a failure like—chug a lut—zoom—chug CHUG—the first movement—the train’s underway.—

  SAN JOSE—because the soul of the railroad is the chain gang run, the long freight train you see snaking down the track with a puff puff en jyne pulling is the traveler the winner the arterial moody mainline maker of the rail—San Jose is 50 miles south of Frisco and is the center of the Coast Division chain gang or long road run activity, known as the horn because the pivot point for rails going down from Frisco toward Santa Barbara and L.A. and rails going and shining back to Oakland via Newark and Niles on sub lines that also cross the mighty main line of the Fresno bound Valley Division.— San Jose is where I should have been living instead of Third Street Frisco, for these reasons: 4 o’clock in the morning, in San Jose, comes a call on the phone it is the Chief Dispatcher calling from 4th and Townsend in the Sad Frisco, “Keroowayyyy? it’s deadhead on 112 to San Jose for a drag east with Conductor Degnan got that?” “Yeh deadahead 112 drag east right,” meaning, go back to bed and rise again around 9, you’re being paid all this time and boy dont worry about a durg and doo-gaddm things, at 9 all’s you gotta do is get ups and you already done made how many dollars? anyways in your sleep and put on your gig clothes and cut out and take a little bus and go down to the San Jose yard office down by the airport there and in the yard office are hundreds of interested railroad men and tackings of tickers and telegraph and the engines are being lined up and numbered and markered out there, and new engines keep rushing up from the roundhouse, & everywhere in the gray air tremendous excitements of movement of rolling stocks and the making of great wages.— You go down there, find your conductor who’ll just be some old baggy-pants circus comedian with a turned up hatbrim and red face and red handkerchief and grimy waybills and switchlists in his hand and far from carrying a student big brakeman lantern like you’s got his little old 10 year old tiny lantern from some old boomer bought and the batteries of which he has to keep buying at Davegas instead of like the student getting free at the yard office, because after 20 years on the rr you gotta find some way to be different and also t’lighten the burdens you carry around with yourself, he’s there, leaning, by spittoons, with others, you go up hat over eyes, say “Conductor Degnan?” “I’m Degnan, well it doesnt look like anything’ll bevore noon so just take it easy and be around” so you go into the blue room they call it, where blue flies buzz and hum around old zawful dirty couch tops stretched on benches with the stuffing coming out and attracting and probably breeding further flies, and there you lie down if it ain’t already full of sleeping brakemen and you turn your shoetops up to the dirty old brown sad ceiling of time there, haunted by the clack of telegraphs and the chug of engines outdoors enough to make you go in your pants, and turns your hatbrim over yr eyes, and go ahead and sleep.— Since 4 in the morning, since 6 in the morning when still the sleep was on yr eyes in that dark dream house you’ve been getting 1.90 per hour and it is now 10 A M and the train aint even made up and “not before noon” says Degnan so that by noon you’ll already have been working (because counting from time of 112, deadhead time) six hours and so you’ll leave San Jose with your train around noon or maybe further at one and not get to the terminal great chaingang town of Watsonville where everything’s going (L.A. ward) till 3 in the afternoon and with happy mishaps 4 or 5, nightfall, when down there waiting for the herder’s sign enginemen and trainmen see the long red sad sun of waning day fa
lling on the lovely old landmark milepost 98.2 farm and day’s done, run’s done, they been being paid since down dawn of that day and only traveled about 50 miles.— This will be so, so sleep in the blue room, dream of 1.90 per hour and also of your dead father and your dead love and the mouldering in your bones and the eventual Fall of you—the train wont be made up till noon and no one wants to bother you till—lucky child and railroad angel softly in your steel propositioned sleep.

  So much more to Jan Jose.

  So if you live in San Jose you have the advantage of 3 hours of extra sleep at home not counting the further sleep on the blue room rot puff leather couch—nevertheless I was using the 50 mile ride from 3rd Street as my library, bringing books and papers in a little tattered black bag already 10 years old which I’d originally bought on a pristine morning in Lowell in 1942 to go to sea with, arriving in Greenland that summer, and so a bag so bad a brakeman seeing me with it in the San Jose yard coffee shop said whooping loud “A railroad loot bag if I ever saw one!” and I didnt even smile or acknowledge and that was the beginning middle and extent of my social rapport on the railroad with the good old boys who worked it, thereafter becoming known as Kerouaayyy the Indian with the phony name and everytime we went by the Porno Indians working sectionhand tracks, gandy dancers with greasy black hair I waved and smiled and was the only man on the S.P. who did so except old hogheads always do wave and smile and sectionhand bosses who are old white bespectacled respectable old toppers and topers of time and everybody respects, but the dark Indian and the eastern Negro, with sledgehammers and dirtypants to them I waved and shortly thereafter I read a book and found out that the Porno Indian battle cry is Ya Ya Henna, which I thought once of yelling as the engine crashboomed by but what would I be starting but derailments of my own self and engineer.— All the railroad opening up and vaster and vaster until finally when I did quit it a year later I saw it again but now over the waves of the sea, the entire Coast Division winding down along the dun walls of bleak headland balboa amerikay, from a ship, and so the railroad opens up on the waves that are Chinese and on the orient shroud and sea.— It runs ragged to the plateau clouds and Pucalpas and lost Andean heights far below the world rim, it also bores a deep hole in the mind of man and freights a lot of interesting cargo in and out the holes precipitate and otherwise hidingplaces and imitative cauchemar of eternity, as you’ll see.

  SO ONE MORNING they called me at 3rd Street at about 4 A M and I took the early morning train to San Jose, arriving there 7:30 was told not to worry about anything till about 10 so I went out in my inconceivably bum’s existence went looking for pieces of wire that I could bend in such a way over my hotplate so they would support little raisin breads to make toast and also looking if possible for better than that a chickenwire arrangement on which I could sit pots to heat water and pans to fry eggs since the hotplate was so powerful it often burned and blackcaked the bottom of my eggs if by chance I’d overlook the possibility while busy peeling my potatoes or otherwise involved—I’d walk around, San Jose had a junk yard across the track, I went in there and lookt around, stuff in there so useless the proprietor never came out, I who was earning 600 a month made off with a piece of chicken wire for my hotplate.— Here it was 11 and still no train made up, gray, gloomy, wonderful day—I wandered down the little street of cottages to the big boulevard of Jose and had Carnation ice cream and coffee in the morning, whole bevies and classrooms of girls came in with tightfitting and sloosesucking sweaters and everything on earth on, it was some academy of dames suddenly come to gossip coffee and I was there in my baseball hat black slick oiled and rusted jacket weather jacket with fur collar that I had used to lean my head on in the sands of Watsonville riverbottoms and grits of Sunnyvale across from Westinghouse near Schukl’s student days ground where my first great moment of the railroad had taken place over by Del Monte’s when I kicked my first car and Whitey said “You’re the boss do it pull the pin with a will put your hand in there and pull ‘cause you’re the boss” and it was October night, dark, clean, clear, dry, piles of leaves by the track in the sweet scented dark and beyond them crates of the Del Monte fruit and workers going around in crate wagons with under reaching stuckers and—never will forget Whitey saying that.— By same reminiscence of doubt, in spite and because of, wanted to save all me money for Mexico, I also refused to spend 75 cents or even 35 cents less for a pair of workgloves, instead, after initial losing of my first bought workglove while setting out that sweet San Mateo flower car on Sunday morning with the Sherman local I resolved to get all my other gloves from the ground and so went for weeks with my black hand clutching sticky cold iron of engines in the dewy cold night, till I finally found the first glove outside the San Jose yard office, a brown cloth glove with red Mephistophelean lining, picking it up limp and damp from the ground and smashed it on my knee and let it dry and wore it.— Final other glove found outside Watsonville yard office, a little leather imitation outside glove with inside warm lining and cut with scissors or razor at the wrist to facilitate putting it on and obviate yanking and yunking.— These were my gloves, I’d lost as I say my first glove in San Mateo, the second with Conductor Degnan while waiting for the all clear signal from the pot (working rear because of his fear) by the track at Lick, the long curve, the traffic on 101 making it difficult to hear and in fact it was the old conductor who in the dark of that Saturday night did finally hear, I heard nothing, I ran to the caboose as it leapt ahead with the slack and got on counting my red lamps gloves fusees and whatnots and realizing with horror as the train pulled along I had dropped one of my gloves at Lick, damn!—now I had two new gloves from off the ground pickied.— At noon of that day the engine still wasnt on, the old hoghead hadnt left home yet where he’d picked up his kid on a sunny sidewalk with open arms and kissed him the late red john time of afternoon before, so I was there sleeping on the horrible old couch when by god in some way or other and after I’d gone out several times to check and climb around the pot which was now tied on and the conductor and rear man having coffee in the shop and even the fireman and then I went back for further musings or nappings on the seat cover expecting them to call me, when in my dreams I hear a double toot toot and hear a great anxiety engine taking off and it’s my engine but I dont realize it right away, I think it’s some slomming woeful old blacktrackpot whack cracking along in a dream or dream reality when suddenly I wake up to the fact they didnt know I was sleeping in the blue room, and they got their orders, and gave the hiball, and there they go to Watsonville leaving the head man behind—as tradition goes, fireman and engineer if they dont see the head man on the engine and they’ve gotten the sign, off they go, they have nothing to do with these sleepy trainmen.— I leap up grab lamp and in the gray day and running precisely over the spot where I’d found that brown glove with red lining and thinking of it in the fury of my worry and as I dash I see the engine way down the line 50 years picking up and chufgffouffing and the whole train’s rumbling after and cars waiting at the crossing for the event, it’s MY TRAIN!—Off I go loping and running fast over the glove place, and over the road, and over the corner of the junk field where I’d searched for tin also that lazy morning, amazied mouth-gagaped railroad men about five of them are watching this crazy student running after his engine as it leaves for Watsonville—is he going to make it? Inside 30 seconds I was abreast with the iron ladder and shifting lantern t’other hand to grab holt of and get on and climb, and anyway the whole shebang restopped again at a red to allow old I think 71 get through the station yards, it was I think by now almost 3 o’clock I’d slept and earned or started to earn incredible overtimes and this nightmare transpiring.— So they got the red and stopped anyway and I had my train made and sat on the sand box to catch my breath, no comment whatever in the world on the bleak jawbones and cold blue okie eyes of that engineer and fireman they must have been holding some protocol with the iron railroad in their hearts for all they cared about this softheaded kid who’d run down the
cinders to his late lost work