Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46

by Jack Kerouac

  These pictures, in the sunlight of the plaza of fieldstones in front of Low Memorial Library, Columbia University, show Claude and I leaning casually, one leg up on fountainside, smoking, frowning, tough guy seadogs. Another one is of Claude alone with arms hanging at sides with butt in hand, looking like a child of the rainbow, as Irwin later called him in a poem.

  Some rainbow.

  Claude and I later go down to the West End Bar to drink a few beers and discuss our next attempt at the union hall. He gets into a big metaphysical argument with Roy Plantagenet or somebody and I go home to sleep some more, or read, or take a shower. As I’m passing St Paul’s Chapel on the campus, and going down the old wood steps they had there, here comes Mueller boundering eagerly, bearded, in the gloom, up my way, sees me, says: ‘Where’s Claude?’

  ‘In the West End.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll see ya later!’ And I watch him rush off to his death.

  VIII

  Because at dawn I’m woke up from my sleep at the side of Johnnie, it’s been so hot we had to open the Claude sofa and spread it afar with wide sheets, in the breeze crossway of windows, and there’s Claude standing over me with his blond hair in his eyes, shaking me by the arm. But I’m not really asleep either. He says ‘Well I disposed of the old man last night.’ And I know exactly what he means. Not that I was Ivan Karamazov to his Smerdyakov but I knew. But I said:

  ‘Why’d you go and do that?’

  ‘No time for that now, I’ve still got the knife and his glasses covered with blood. Wanta come with me see what we can do to dump em?’

  ‘What in the hell didja go and do that for?’ I repeated, sighing, as tho someone’d woke me up with the news of a new leak in the cellar or in the kitchen sink there’s another cat turd, but I raise my weary bones like a seaman has to do another watch and I go shower, dress in chinos and T-shirt, and come back to see him standing in the window looking out on the alley bemused. ‘What’d you really do?’

  ‘I stabbed him in the heart twelve times with my boy scout knife.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘He jumped me. He said I love you and all that stuff, and couldnt live without me, and was going to kill me, kill both of us.’

  ‘Last I saw, you were with Plantagenet.’

  ‘Yeh, but he came in, we drank, went down to the Hudson River grass, had a bottle . . . I stripped off his white shirt, tore it into strips, tied rocks with the strips and tied the strips to his arms and legs, took all my clothes off and pushed him in. He wouldnt sink, that’s why I had to take my clothes off, after, I had to wade in to my chin level and give him a push. Then he floated off somewhere. Upside down. Then my clothes was there on the grass, dry, it’s hot as you know. I put it on, hailed a cab on Riverside Drive and went to ask Hubbard what to do.’

  ‘In the Village?’

  ‘He answered the door in his bathrobe and I handed him a bloody pack of Luckies and said “Have the last cigarette.” Like you he seemed to sense what happened, you might say. He put on his best Claude Rains manner and paced up and down. Flushed the Luckies down the toilet. Told me to plead self-defense which is what it was, for god’s sake, Jack, I’m going to get the hot seat anyway.’

  ‘No you aint.’

  ‘I’ve got this here knife, these eyeglasses of poor old Franz . . . all he kept sayin was “So this is how Franz Mueller ends.”’ He turned away like seamen turning away to cry but he didnt cry, he couldnt cry, I guess he’d cried enough already. ‘Then Hubbard told me to give myself up, call my grandmother and get a good New Orleans lawyer and give myself up. But I just wanted to see you, old boy, have a final drink with you.’

  ‘Okay,’ I says, ‘I’ve just picked up three bucks from Johnnie last night, how much you got? We’ll go out and get drunk.’

  ‘Hubbard gave me a fiver. Let’s go down to Harlem. On the way I can dump the glasses and the knife in the weeds down there in Morningside Park.’ In fact we were running down the six flights of stairs as we were saying this and suddenly I thought of poor Johnnie sleeping there, not knowing a thing, so when we hit the street I told Claude to wait a second and I rushed back up the stairs double time, two, three steps at a time, in all that heat, puffing, just to go in and plant a little un-waking kiss on her (that she remembered, she said later) then ran down again to Claude and we took off down 118th and down the stone steps of Morningside Park. All of the rooftops of Harlem and of the Bronx further you could see spewing up heat and smoke of August of 1944. A disgusting heat already in the early morning.

  In the bushes down near the bottom I said ‘I’ll pretend I’m taking a leak here, look around real anxious, to draw attention to anybody watching, and you just bury the glasses and the knife.’ By God I had the right instinct, in a previous lifetime it must have been where I learned this, I certainly didnt learn it in this one, but anyway he did just that, kicked some clods, dropped the glasses, kicked clods back over them (rimless, sad) and some leafy twigs and we walked on, hands-a-pockets, wearing just T-shirts and alone the two of us towards the bars of Harlem.

  In front of a bar on 125th Street I said ‘There, look, a good subway grate, that’s where money keeps falling down and little kids put bubblegum on the ends of long sticks and gum it up. Drop the knife down in there and let’s go in this cool zebrastriped lounge and have a cold beer.’ Which he did, but instead of hiding now, in full view of everybody, he dramatically knelt at the grate and let the knife drop from his stiff fingers very dramatically, as tho this was one thing he really didnt want to hide, but it fell, hit the grate, stuck there, he kicked it, and it fell down 6 feet to the gum wrappers and junk below. Nobody who saw him cared anyway. The knife, the boy scout knife I s’pose he had when he was fourteen and joined the boy scouts to learn woodcraft but only ran into the Marquis de Sade scoutmaster, lay there now probably among a stash of dropped heroin, marijuana, other knives, cundroms, what-all. We went into the air-conditioned bar and sat at cool swivel stools and ordered cold beers.

  ‘I’ll get the hot seat for sure. I’ll burn in Sing Sing. Sing you sinners, boy.’

  ‘Ah come on, Will’s right, it’s just a question of defending your whole goddamn life from —’

  ‘—’ member that movie we saw last week with Cecily and Johnnie, Les Grandes Illusions, Jean Gabin is the peasant soldier, Claude Lebris de la Merde or whatever his name was who wears white gloves, they escape from the German prison camp together? You’re Gabin, you’re the peasant, and me, my white gloves are starting to chafe.’

  ‘Get off that, my ancestors were Breton barons.’

  ‘You’re fulla you know what, I wouldnt look it up even if it was true because I do know they musta been peasantish barons.’ But he said it all so kindly, in soft voice, and it didnt matter. ‘What we gotta do today is get drunk, borrow some money even, then I’ll give myself up in the evening. I’ll go home to Mater’s sister, as prophesied. I’ll get the chair for sure, I’ll burn. He died in my arms. So that’s the story of Franz Mueller, he kept saying, so that’s how it ends, so that’s what happened to me. “Happened” mind you, like it already happened before. I shoulda stayed in England where I was born. I stabbed him in the heart, that section here, twelve times. I pushed him in the river with all those rocks. He went off floating with his feet upside down. His head’s down below. All those ships goin by. We missed that damned ship in Brooklyn. I knew something would go wrong when we missed that damned ship. That damned first mate with the red hair looked like Mueller.’

  ‘Let’s take a subway downtown go see a movie or something.’

  ‘No, let’s take a cab go see my psychiatrist. I’ll borrow a five from him.’ And we went out in the street, hailed a cab immediately hove in sight, rode down to Park Avenue and went into a fancy foyer, up in an elevator, and I waited outside while he went in and confessed to his psychiatrist. He came out with a five-dollar bill and said ‘Let�
�s go, he washes his hands. Let’s go fast, around the corner and down to Lex. He probably doesnt believe me.’

  We kept walking and came to Third Avenue where we saw the movie Four Feathers announced on a marquee. ‘Let’s go in there.’ We came in there just about in time for the beginning of J. Arthur Rank’s production of said Four Feathers in which there is a fellow called Hubbard in the story. We both wince to hear the name in the dialogue. The picture is Technicolor. Suddenly thousands of Fuzzy Wuzzies and English soldiers are hacking and massacring on all sides in the Battle of the Nile near Khartoum.

  ‘They can murder em by the thousands,’ says Claude in the dark show.

  IX

  We come out of there and idle down Fifth Avenue to the Museum of Modern Art where Claude comes to a meditative stop before a portrait by Amedeo Modigliani, for some reason his favorite modern painter. A queer is standing in the back watching Claude intently, drifting around, coming around again to get another look at him. Claude either does or doesnt notice but I do. We stop in front of Tchelitchew’s famous painting ‘Cache Cache’ and delight in all the little touches, of little wombs, little foetuses (foeti?), sperm coming out of blossoms, that marvelous painting that was damaged by fire decades later, or decade and a half. We then go down thru Times Square and down to the NMU Hall just for nostalgia’s sake, I guess. Claude says ‘That Sabbas of yours used to moon around the streets of New York and Lowell with you, with all his poems, about “Hello Out There” and “We’ll Go No More A-Roaming”, wish I’d have met him.’

  X

  We eat hotdogs, have to eat, walk around, come back up Third Avenue, inching back towards his aunt’s house at 57th Street thereby, stop in a bar and two sailors accost us asking to know where they can find girls for hire. I tell them the Letters-to-Your-Son Hotel. (At the time, that was right.) Then Claude says ‘See this vest I’m wearing, it was Franz’, it’s also covered with blood. What I do with it?’

  ‘When we leave the bar just drop it in the gutter, I guess.’

  ‘These white gloves are chafing. You want them, peasant?’

  ‘Okay, hand em over.’ He goes through the routine of imaginarily handing me them white gloves, ‘in a gesture’ as Genet would say, but with me it’s just dumb show and he dont know what to do. Allow me grammatical lapses as well laid on clearly in every bar from here to St Petersburg.

  XI

  So in the Third Avenue late afternoon he just drops the vest (sorta leather) in the gutter, nobody cares, and says: ‘Now I go up two blocks alone turn right to Fifty-Seventh Street, tell my aunt, she calls lawyers on Wall Street, as we’ve got connections you know, and I dont ever see you anymore.’

  ‘Yes you will.’

  ‘In any case, I’m off now. It’s been a grand day, old boy.’ And head down he plunges on up the street, fists in pockets, and does that right turn, and just then a big truck saying RUBY SOUTH CAROLINA rumbles and thunders by and I think of hopping it yelling ‘Ha haaaa’ and getting out of town to go see my South again. But first I gotta see Johnnie.

  But of course the New York police are faster than that. I go see Johnnie, dont tell her anything, but in the evening the door knocks and in saunters real casual-like two plainclothesmen who begin to look in drawers and turn books over. Johnnie yells ‘What the hell is this?’

  ‘Claude has confessed he killed Franz last night on the river.’

  ‘Killed Franz? How? Why didnt you tell me? Is that why you kissed me when you left with him this morning? Tell these guys I think Mueller deserved it!’

  ‘Easy young lady. Anything around here?’ asks the cop, looking at me with frank blue eyes.

  ‘Just a simple case of self-defense. Nothin to hide.’

  ‘You’re coming with us, you know that dont you?’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Material witness. Dont you know that when someone confesses a homicide to you, you’re supposed to tell the police right off? And where is the murder weapon?’

  ‘We dropped it in a grate in Harlem.’

  ‘Well there you are, you’re an accessory after the fact. We’ll take you down to the local precinct, but wait a coupla fifteen minutes or so, there’s some photographers down there waiting to take your picture.’

  ‘Picture? Why?’

  ‘They took Claude’s picture already, boy. I’m tellin you, just sit easy. As long . . . hey, Charley, okay, see you down at the precinct.’ Charley leaves and after a half hour of sitting we go off, in his car, to the precinct down around 98th Street and I’m ushered into a cell with a board for a bed, no windows, who cares, and I curl up and try to sleep. But there’s noise all night. Jailer comes to my bars at midnight and says:

  ‘You’re lucky, kid, there was a big bunch of photographers from the New York papers waitin for you here for a half hour.’

  XII

  So in the morning I like my arresting officer, who thought of that half hour, and he comes back, quiet, burps saying he had a heavy breakfast, says ‘Come on,’ has blue eyes, is Jewish plainclothesman, and we go downtown to the DA’s office for all the paper work and interrogation.

  He drives placidly down West Side Highway, slowly and saying, ‘Nice day,’ for some reason he realizes I am not a dangerous prisoner.

  I am ushered into the District Attorney’s office, it’s Jacob Grumet at the time, little moustache, Jewish too, pacing swiftly up and down, papers flying, and he says to me ‘First off, kid, there’s a letter we received this morning from the YMCA on Thirty-Fourth Street. Here. Sit down.’ I read this letter, in pencil, saying:

  ‘I told you Claude was bad and that he would kill. When we met in the El Gaucho that night and I told you, hah! you wouldnt believe. He is a rat. I’ve always told you so, ever since I met you in 1934.’ And so on. I look up at Grumet and say:

  ‘This is a fraud.’

  ‘Okay,’ filing it. ‘Every homicide case of this kind some letters like this show up. Why particularly is this letter a fraud?’

  ‘Because,’ laughing, I, ‘in 1934 I was twelve years old and I never heard of the El Gaucho and I dont know a soul in the Thirty-Fourth Street YMCA.’

  ‘God bless your soul,’ says the DA, ‘and now, kiddo, here’s Detective Sergeant O’Toole who’s going to take you in the outer office and ask you a further question.’

  Me and O’Toole go in the other room, he says: ‘Sitdown, smoke?’ cigarette, I light, look out the window at the pigeons and the heat and suddenly O’Toole (a big Irishman with a gat on his chest under the coat): ‘What would you do if a queer made a grab at your cock?’

  ‘Why I’d k-norck him,’ I answered straightaway looking right at him because suddenly that’s what I thought he was going to do. (Note: ‘K-norck’ is Times Square expression for ‘knock’, sometimes known, then, as ‘Kneezorck’.) But anyway O’Toole immediately takes me back to the DA’s office and DA says ‘Well?’ and O’Toole yawns and says ‘O he’s okay, he’s a swordsman.’

  Well, that was no Cornish lie.

  Then the DA said to me ‘You’re very close to having become an accessory after the fact of this homicide because of your assistance, nay, advice, to the accused, in burying and concealing the weapon and evidence, but we understand that most people dont know the law, that is, a material witness is a witness after the fact who’s been apprised of the fact by the accused but doesnt bring it to the attention of the law. Or before the fact. You went out and got drunk with the accused, you helped him bury and dump the evidence, we understand that not only you dont, or didnt, know this aspect of the law, but most guys would act the same way in the same circumstances with, as you might say, their buddies, or friends, who are not habitual criminals. But you’re not out of hot water yet. Either as accessory after the fact, or as a guest in the Bronx Jail, which we call the Bronx Opera House, where pigeons sing arias, and you’re never going to be out of hot wate
r if we find this kid guilty of murder instead of manslaughter. Now, the Daily News is calling this an “honor slaying”, which means the kid was defending his honor from a known homosexual, who was, also, by the way, much bigger. We’ve got the record here of how the guy followed him around the country from one school to another getting him in trouble and getting him expelled. The case hinges on whether Claude de Maubris is a homosexual. We’re trying to establish whether he is, you are, or whatever. O’Toole thinks you’re not a homo. Are you?’

  ‘I told O’Toole I wasnt.’

  ‘Is Claude?’

  ‘No, not in the least. If he was, he’d have tried to make me.’

  ‘Now we have this other material witness, Hubbard, whose father just flew in from out west with five grand in cash and bailed him out. Is he a homo?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘Allright . . . I believe you. You might be lucky and then again you may not. Your wife is down the hall if you want to go see her.’

  ‘She’s not married to me.’

  ‘That’s what she told us, among other things. She’s pregnant aint she?’ (grinning).

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Well, go down and see her and wait there. I’ve got to talk to de Maubris now.’

  I go down into the hall with O’Toole, they bring Johnnie, we talk and cry in an office, and like in Jimmy Cagney movies when time’s up they tell us it’s time, she cries, hugs me, holds me, she wants to be dragged away like in the movies? I see Claude being led down the hall by two guards. They bring me a Daily News showing pictures of Claude on the river grass pointing to where he dumped Franz. Headlines say HONOR SLAYING and call him a SCION OF A EUROPEAN FAMILY. I mean it, headlines in the New York Daily News, I must say they musta been starved for news in those days, I guess they were sick of Patton’s tanks busting on the German front and wanted a little spicy scandal.