Desolation Angels

by Jack Kerouac

  In hot little flames.

  76

  I go out and hit the street crossing at Columbus and Kearney, by Barbary Coast, and a bum in a long bum overcoat sings out to me “When we cross streets in New York we cross em!—None a this waitin shit for me!” and both of us barrel across and walk among cars and shoot back and forth about New York—Then I get to the Cellar and jump down, steep wooden steps, in a broad cellar hall, right to the right is the room with the bar and the bandstand otay where now as I come Jack Minger is blowing on trumpet and behind him’s Bill the mad blond pianist scholar of music, on the drums that sad kid with the sweating handsome face who has such a desperate beat and strong wrists, and on bass I cant see him bobbing in the dark with beard—Some crazy Wigmo or other—but it’s not the session, it’s the regular group, too early, I’ll come back later, I’ve heard every one of Jack Minger’s ideas alone with the group, but first (as I’d just dropped into the bookstore to look around) (and a girl called Sonya had prettily come up to me, 17, and said “O do you know Raphael? He needs some money, he’s waiting at my place”) (Raphael being my old New York crony) (and more about Sonya later), I run in there and am about to turn around and swing out, when I see a cat looks like Raphael, wearing dark glasses, at the foot of the bandstand talking to a chick, so I run over (walking fast) (to avoid goofing the beat as the musicians play on) (some little tune like “All Too Soon”) I look right down to see if it’s Raphael, almost turning over, looking at him upsidedown, as he notices nothing talking to his girl, and I see it aint Raphael and cut out—So the trumpetplayer who’s playing his solo wonders what he sees, knowing me from before as always crazy, running in now to look upsidedown at someone then running out—I go running up to Chinatown to eat and come back to the session. Shrimp! Chicken! Spare ribs! I go down to Sun Heung Hung’s and sit there at their new bar drinking cold beers from an incredibly clean bartender who keeps mopping the bar and polishing glasses and even mops under my beer several times and I tell him “This is a nice clean bar” and he says “Brand new”—

  Meanwhile I watch for a booth to sit in—none—so I go upstairs and sit in a big curtained booth for families but they throw me outa there (“You cannot sit there, that’s for families, big parties”) (then they dont come and serve me as I wait) so I slonk back my chair and stomp downstairs fast on quiet feet and get a booth and tell the waiter “Dont let nobody sit with me, I like to eat alone” (in restaurants, naturally)—Shrimp in a brown sauce, curried chicken, and sweet and sour spare ribs, in a Chinese menu dinner, I eat it with another beer, it’s a terrific meal I can hardly finish—but I finish it clean, pay and cut out—To the now late afternoon park where the children are playing in sandboxes and swings, and old men are staring on benches—I come over and sit down.

  The little Chinese children are waging big dramas with sand—Meanwhile a father gathers up his three different little ones and heads them home—Cops are going into the jailhouse across the street. Sunday in San Francisco.

  A bearded point-bearded patriarch nods at me then sits near an old crony and they start talking loudly in Russian. I know olski-dolski when I hear it, nyet?

  Then I amble along in the gathering cool and do walk through Chinatown duskstreets like I said I would on Desolation, the wink of pretty neons, the faces in the stores, the festooned bulbs across Grant Street, the Pagodas.

  I go to my hotel room and rest awhile on the bed, smoking, listening to the sounds coming in the window from the Bell Hotel court, the noises of dishes and traffic and Chinese—It is all one big wailing world, all over, even in my own room there is sound, the intense roaring silence sound that swishes in my ear and swashes the diamond persepine—I let go and feel my astral body leave, and lay there completely in a trance, seeing through everything. It’s all white.

  77

  It’s a north beach tradition, Rob Donnelly had done it in a Broadway hotel and floated away and saw whole worlds and came back and woke up in his room on the bed, all dressed to go out—

  Like as not, too, Old Rob, wearing Mai Damlette’s sharp cap on the side of his head, would be in the Cellar even right now—

  By now the Cellar is waiting for the musicians, not a sound, nobody I know in there, I hang on the sidewalk and here comes Chuck Berman one way, and Bill Slivovitz the other, a poet, and we talk at a fender of a car—Chuck Berman looks tired, his eyes are all puffed, but he’s wearing soft smart shoes and looking so cool in the twilight—Bill Slivovitz doesnt care, he’s wearing a shabby sports coat and scuffed out shoes and carrying poems in his pocket—Chuck Berman is high, says he’s high, lingers a minute looking around, then cuts—He’ll be back—Bill Slivovitz the last time I saw him’d said “Where you goin?” and I’d yelled “Ah what’s the difference?” so now I apologize and explain I was hungover—We repair to The Place for a beer.

  The Place is a brown lovely bar made of wood, with sawdust, barrel beer in glass mugs, an old piano for anybody to bang on, and an upstairs balcony with little wood tables—who care? the cat sleeps on the bench. The bartenders are usually friends of mine except today, now—I let Bill get the beers and we talk at a little round table about Samuel Beckett and prose and poetry. Bill thinks Beckett is the end, he talks about it all over, his glasses glint in my eyesight, he has a long serious face, I cant believe he’s serious about death but he must be—“I’m dead,” he says, “I wrote some poems about death”—

  “Well where are they?”

  “They’re not finished, man.”

  “Let’s go to the Cellar and hear the jazz,” so we cut around the corner and just as we walk in the streetdoor I hear them baying down there, a full group of tenors and altos and trumpets riding in for the first chorus—Boom, we walk in just in time for the break, bang, a tenor is taking the solo, the tune is simply “Georgia Brown”—the tenor rides it big and heavy with a big tone—They’ve come from Fillmore in cars, with their girls or without, the cool colored cats of Sunday San Fran in incredibly beautiful neat sports attire, to knock your eyes out, shoes, lapels, ties, no-ties, studs—They’ve brought their horns in taxis and in their own cars, pouring down into the Cellar to really give it some class and jazz now, the Negro people who will be the salvation of America—I can see it because the last time I was in the Cellar it was full of surly whites waiting around a desultory jam session to start a fight and finally they did, with my boy Rainey who was knocked out when he wasn’t looking by a big mean brutal 250-pound seaman who was famous for getting drunk with Dylan Thomas and Jimmy the Greek in New York—Now everything is too cool for a fight, now it’s jazz, the place is roaring, all beautiful girls in there, one mad brunette at the bar drunk with her boys—One strange chick I remember from somewhere, wearing a simple skirt with pockets, her hands in there, short haircut, slouched, talking to everybody—Up and down the stairs they come—The bartenders are the regular band of Jack, and the heavenly drummer who looks up in the sky with blue eyes, with a beard, is wailing beer-caps of bottles and jamming on the cash register and everything is going to the beat—It’s the beat generation, it’s béat, it’s the beat to keep, it’s the beat of the heart, it’s being beat and down in the world and like oldtime lowdown and like in ancient civilizations the slave boatmen rowing galleys to a beat and servants spinning pottery to a beat—The faces! There’s no face to compare with Jack Minger’s who’s up on the bandstand now with a colored trumpeter who outblows him wild and Dizzy but Jack’s face overlooking all the heads and smoke—He has a face that looks like everybody you’ve ever known and seen on the street in your generation, a sweet face—Hard to describe—sad eyes, cruel lips, expectant gleam, swaying to the beat, tall, majestical—waiting in front of the drugstore—A face like Huck’s in New York (Huck whom you’ll see on Times Square, somnolent and alert, sad-sweet, dark, beat, just out of jail, martyred, tortured by sidewalks, starved for sex and companionship, open to anything, ready to introduce new worlds with a shrug)—The colored big tenor with the big tone would like to be
blowing Sunny Stitts clear out of Kansas City roadhouses, clear, heavy, somewhat dull and unmusical ideas which nevertheless never leave the music, always there, far out, the harmony too complicated for the motley bums (of music-understanding) in there—but the musicians hear—The drummer is a sensational 12-year-old Negro boy who’s not allowed to drink but can play, tremendous, a little lithe childlike Miles Davis kid, like early Fats Navarro fans you used to see in Espan Harlem, hep, small—he thunders at the drums with a beat which is described to me by a near-standing Negro connoisseur with beret as a “fabulous beat”—On piano is Blondey Bill, good enough to drive any group—Jack Minger blows out and over his head with these angels from Fillmore, I dig him—It’s terrific—

  I just stand in the outside hall against the wall, no beer necessary, with collections of in-and-out listeners, with Sliv, and now here returns Chuck Berman (who is a colored kid from West Indies who barged into my party six months earlier high with Cody and the gang and I had a Chet Baker record on and we hoofed at each other in the room, tremendous, the perfect grace of his dancing, casual, like Joe Louis casually hoofing)—He comes now in dancing like that, glad—Everybody looks everywhere, it’s a jazz-joint and beat generation madtrick, you see someone, “Hi,” then you look away elsewhere, for something someone else, it’s all insane, then you look back, you look away, around, everything is coming in from everywhere in the sound of the jazz—“Hi”—“Hey”—

  Bang, the little drummer takes a solo, reaching his young hands all over traps and kettles and cymbals and foot-peddle BOOM in a fantastic crash of sound—12 years old—what will happen?

  Me’n Sliv stand bouncing to the beat and finally the girl in the skirt comes talk to us, it’s Gia Valencia, the daughter of the mad Spanish anthropologist sage who’d lived with the Pomo and Pit River Indians of California, famous old man, whom I’d read and revered only three years ago while working the railroad outa San Luis Obispo—“Bug, give me back my shadow!” he yelled on a recorded tape before he died, showing how the Indians made it at brooks in old California pre-history before San Fran and Clark Gable and Al Jolson and Rose Wise Lazuli and the jazz of the mixed generations—Out there’s all that sun and shade as same as old doodlebug time, but the Indians are gone, and old Valencia is gone, and all’s left is his charming erudite daughter with her hands in her pockets digging the jazz—She’s also talking to all the goodlooking men, black and white, she likes em all—They like her—To me she suddenly says “Arent you going to call Irwin Garden?”

  “Sure I just got into town!”

  “You’re Jack Duluoz arent you!”

  “And yeah, you’re—”

  “Gia”

  “Ah a Latin name”

  “Oh you frightening man,” she says seriously, suddenly meaning my impenetrable of myself way of talking to a woman, my glare, my eyebrows, my big lined angry yet crazy eye-gleaming bony face—She really means it—I feel it—Often frighten myself in the mirror—But for some tender chicken to look into my mirror of all-the-woes-you-know … it’s worse!

  She talks to Sliv, he doesn’t frighten her, he’s sympathetic and sad and serious and she stands there I watch her, the little thin body just faintly feminine and the low pitch of her voice, the charm, the veritable elegant oldworld way she comes on, completely out of place in the Cellar—Should be at Katherine Porter’s cocktail—should be exchanging duet-os of art talk in Venice and Fiorenza with Truman Capote, Gore Vidal and Compton-Burnett—should be in Hawthorne’s novels—I really like her, I feel her charm, I go over and talk some more—

  Alternately bang bang the jazz crashes in to my consciousness and I forget everything and just close my eyes and listen to the ideas—I feel like yelling “Play A Fool Am I!” which would be a great tune—But now they’re on some other jam—whatever they feel like, the downbeat, the piano chord, off—

  “How can I call Irwin?” I ask her—Then I remember I’ve got Raphael’s phone number (from sweet Sonya in the bookshop) and I slip into the booth with my dime and dial, typical jazz joint stuff, like the time I’d slipped into the booth at Bird-land in New York and in the comparative silence suddenly heard Stan Getz, who was in the toilet nearby, blowing his saxophone quietly to the music of Lennie Tristano’s group out front, when I realized he could do anything—(Warne Marsh me no Warne Marsh! his music said)—I call Raphael who answers “Yes?”

  “Raphael? This is Jack—Jack Duluoz!”

  “Jack! Where are you?”

  “The Cellar—come on down!”

  “I cant, I have no money!”

  “Cant you walk?”

  “Walk?”

  “I’ll call and get Irwin and we’ll come over get you in a cab—Call you back half hour!”

  I try to call Irwin, it wont do, he’s nowhere—Everybody in the Cellar is goofing, now the bartenders are beginning to whip at beers themselves and get flushed and high and drunk—The drunken brunette falls off her stool, her cat carries her to the ladies’ room—Fresh gangs roam in—It’s mad—And finally to cap everything (O Desolation Me Silent Me) here comes Richard de Chili the insane Richard de Chili who wanders around Frisco at night in long fast strides, all alone, examining the examples of architecture, strange hodgepodge notions and bay windows and garden walls, giggling, alone in the night, doesnt drink, hoards funny soapy candy bars and bits of string in his pockets and half out combs and half toothbrushes and when he comes to sleep at any of our pads he’ll burn toothbrushes at the stove jet, or stay in the bathroom hours running water, and brush his hair with assorted brushes, completely homeless, always sleeping on someone’s couch and yet once a month he goes to the bank (the night watchman vault) and there’s his monthly income waiting for him (the daytime bank’s embarrassed), just enough money to live on, left to him by some mysterious unknown elegant family he never talks about—No teeth in the front of his mouth whatever—Crazy clothes, like a scarf around his neck and jeans and a silly jacket he found somewhere with paint on it, and offers you a peppermint candy and it tastes like soap—Richard de Chili, the Mysterious, who was for a long time out of sight (six months earlier) and finally as we’re driving down the street we see him striding into a supermarket “There’s Richard!” and all jump out to follow him and there he is in the store lifting candybars and cans of peanuts on the sly and not only that he’s seen by the Okie storeman and we have to pay his way out and he comes with us with his incomprehensible low-spoken remarks, like, “The moon is a piece of tea,” looking up at it in the rumble seat—Whom finally I welcomed to my 6-month-earlier shack in Mill Valley to stay a few days and he takes all the sleepingbags and slings them (except mine, hidden in the grass) over the window, where they tear, so the last time I see my Mill Valley shack as I start hitch hiking for Desolation Peak there’s Richard de Chili sleeping in a great roomful of duck feathers, an incredible sight—a typical sight—with his underarm paper bags full of strange esoteric books (one of the most intelligent persons I know in the world) and his soaps and candles and giblets of junk, O my, the catalogue is out of my memory—Who finally took me on a long walk around Frisco one drizzly night to go peek through the street window of an apartment occupied by two homosexual midgets (who werent there)—Richard comes in and stands by me and as usual and in the roar I cant hear what he’s saying and it doesnt matter anyway—He too goofing nervously, looking around everywhere, everybody reaching for that next kick and there’s no next-kick …

  “What are we gonna do?” I say—

  Nobody knows—Sliv, Gia, Richard, the others, they all just stand shuffling around in the Cellar of Time waiting, waiting, like so many Samuel Beckett heroes in the Abyss—Me, I’ve got to do something, go somewhere, establish a rapport, get the talk and the action going, I fidget and shuffle with them—

  The beautiful brunette is even worse—Clad so beautifully in a tightfitting black silk dress exhibiting all her perfect dusky charms she comes out of the toilet and falls down again—Crazy characters are milling around—I
nsane conversations I cant remember anymore, it’s too mad!

  “I’ll give up, I’ll go sleep, tomorrow I’ll find the gang”

  A man and a woman ask us to move over please so they can study the map of San Francisco on the hall wall—“Tourists from Boston, hey?” says Richard, with his witless grin—

  I get on the phone again and cant find Irwin so I’ll go home to my room in the Bell Hotel and sleep—Like sleep on the mountain, the generations are too mad—

  Yet Sliv and Richard dont want me to leave, everytime I edge off they follow me, shuffling, we’re all shuffling and waiting for nothing, it gets on my nerves—It takes all my willpower and sad regret to say so long to them and cut out into the night—

  “Cody’ll be at my place at eleven tomorrow,” shouts Chuck Berman so I’ll make that scene—

  At the corner of Broadway and Columbus, in the famous little open eatery, I call Raphael to tell him to meet me in the morning at Chuck’s—“Okay—but listen! While I was waiting for you I wrote a poem! A terrific poem! It’s all about you! I address it to you! Can I read it to you over the phone?”

  “Go ahead”

  “Spit on Bosatsu!” he yells. “Spit on Bosatsu!”

  “Oo,” I say, “that’s beautiful”

  “The poem is called ‘To Jack Duluoz, Buddha-fish’—Here’s the way it goes—” And reads me this long insane poem over the phone as I stand there against the counter of hamburgs, as he yells and reads (and I take in every word, every meaning of this Lower Eastside New York Italian genius reborn from the Renaissance) I think “O God, how sad!—I have poet friends who yell me their poems in cities—it’s just as I predicted on the mount, it’s celebrating in cities upsidedown—

  “Sweet, Raphael, great, you’re a greater poet than ever—you’re really going now—great—dont stop—remember to write without stopping, without thinking, just go, I wanta hear what’s in the bottom of your mind.”