Desolation Angels

by Jack Kerouac

  “Mais, ce jeune là.” She indicated Laz. “Il est un poète?”

  “Mais certainement, dans sa manière” (Irwin).

  “Et bien, et vous n’avez pas l’argent pour louer à cinq cents pesos?”

  “Comment?”

  “Five hundret pesos—cinquo ciente pesos.”

  “Ah,” says Irwin leaping into Spanish, “Sí, pero el departamiento n’est pas assez grande for the whole lot.”

  She understood all three languages and had to give in. Meanwhile, that settled, we all rushed out to dig Thieves’ Market downtown but as we emerged on the street some Mexican kids drinking Cokes gave out a long low whistle at us. I was enraged because not only I was subjected to this now in the company of my motley weirdy gang but I didnt think it was fair. Yet Irwin, that international hepcat, said “That’s not a whistle addressed at queers or anything you’re thinking in your paranoia—it’s a whistle of admiration.”

  “Admiration?”

  “Certainly” and several nights later sure enough the Mexicans rapped on our door with Mescals in their hands, wanting to drink and toast, a bunch of Mexican medical students in fact living two flights above us (more later).

  We started off down Orizaba Street on our first walk in Mexico City. I walked with Irwin and Simon in front, talking; Raphael (like Gaines) walked far to the side alone, along the curb, brooding; and Lazarus stomped along in his slow monster walk a half a block behind us, sometimes staring at the centavos in his hand and wondering where he could get an ice cream soda. Finally we turned around and found him stepping into a fish store. We all had to go back and get him. He stood there before giggling Mexican girls holding out his hand with the centavos in it saying “Ice crim suda, I wanta ice crim suda” in his funny New York accent, muttering at them, looking at them innocently.

  “Pero, señor, no comprendo.”

  “Ice crim suda.”

  When Irwin and Simon gently led him out, once again as we resumed our walk he fell behind half a block and (as Raphael now cried sadly) “Poor Lazarus—wondering about pesos!” “Lost in Mexico wondering about pesos! What will ever happen to poor Lazarus! So sad, so sad, life, life, who can ever stand it!”

  But Irwin and Simon walked gaily ahead to new adventures.

  12

  So my peacefulness in Mexico city was at an end tho I didnt mind too much because my writing was done for awhile but it was really too much the next morning when I was sleeping sweetly on my solitary roof Irwin bursting in “Get up! We’re going to Mexico City University!”

  “What do I care about Mexico City University, let me go sleep!” I was dreaming of a mysterious world mountain where everybody and everything was, why bother?

  “You fool,” said Irwin in one of the rare instances when he let slip what he really thought of me, “how can you sleep all day and never see anything, what’s the sense of being alive?”

  “You invisible bastard I can see right thru you.”

  “Can you really?” suddenly interested sitting on my bed. “What does it look like?”

  “It looks like a lot of little Gardens are going to travel prating to the grave, talking about wonders.” It was our old argument about Samsara vs. Nirvana tho the highest Buddhist thinking (well, Mahayana) stresses that there is no difference between Samsara (this world) and Nirvana (the no-world) and maybe they’re right. Heidegger and his “essents” and his “nothing.” “And so if that’s the case,” says I, “I’m going back to sleep.”

  “But Samsara is just the X-mystery mark on the surface of Nirvana—how can you reject this world, ignore it like you try, poorly really, when it is the surface of what you want and you should study it?”

  “So already I should go riding on bummy buses to a silly university with a heart-shaped stadium or something?”

  “But it’s a big international famous university full of ignus and anarchists with some of the students from Delhi and Moscow—”

  “So screw Moscow!”

  Meanwhile here comes Lazarus up on my roof carrying a chair and a big bundle of brand new books he’d had Simon buy for him yesterday (quite expensive) (books on drawing and art)—He sets up his chair near the roof’s edge, in the sun, as the washerwomen giggle, and starts reading. But even as Irwin and I are still arguing about Nirvana in the cell he gets up and goes back downstairs, leaving the chair and the books right there—and never looked at them again.

  “This is insane!” I yell. “I’ll go with you to show you the Pyramids of Teotihuacan or something interesting, but dont drag me to this silly excursion—” But I end up going anyway because I want to see what they’re all going to do next.

  After all, the only reason for life or a story is “What Happened Next?”

  13

  It was a mess in their apartment below. Irwin and Simon slept in the doublebed in the only bedroom, Lazarus slept on a thin couch in the livingroom (in his usual manner, with just one white sheet drawn up and completely around and over him like a mummy), and Raphael across the room on a shorter couch, curled up with all his clothes on in a little sad dignified heap.

  And the kitchen was already littered with all the mangoes, bananas, oranges, garbanzos, apples, cabbages and pots we’d bought yesterday in the markets of Mexico.

  I always sat there with a beer in my hand watching them. Whenever I rolled a joint of pot they all smoked at it without a word, though.

  “I want roastbeef!” yelled Raphael waking up on his couch. “Where’s the meat around here? Is it all Mexico death meat?”

  “We’re going to the university first!”

  “I want meat first! I want garlic!”

  “Raphael,” I yell, “when we come back from Irwin’s university I’ll take you to Kuku’s where you can eat a huge T-bone steak and throw the bones over your shoulder like Alexander the Great!”

  “I want a banana,” says Lazarus.

  “You ate em all last night, ya maniac” says Simon to his brother yet arranging his bed neatly and tucking in the sheet.

  “Ah, charming,” says Irwin emerging from the bedroom with Raphael’s notebook. He quotes out loud: “‘Heap of fire, haylike universe sprinting towards the gaudy eradication of Swindleresque ink?’ Wow, how great that is—do you realize how fine that is? The universe is on fire and a big swindler like Melville’s confidence man is writing the history of it on inflammable gauze or something but in self eradicating ink on top of all that, a big hype fooling everybody, like magicians making worlds and letting them disappear by themselves.”

  “Do they teach that at the university?” I say. But we go anyway. We take a bus and go out for miles and nothing happens. We wander around a big Aztec campus talking. The only thing I clearly remember is my reading an article by Cocteau in a Paris newspaper in the reading room. The only thing that really happens therefore is that self eradicating magician of gauze.

  Back in town I lead the boys to Kuku’s restaurant and bar on Coahuila and Insurgentes. This restaurant had been recommended to me by Hubbard years ago (Hubbard up ahead in the story) as being a fairly interesting Viennese restaurant (in all the Indian city) run by a Viennese fellow of great vigor and ambition. They had a great 5-peso soup full of everything that could feed you for an entire day, and of course the enormous T-bone steaks with all the trimmings for 80 cents American money. You ate these huge steaks in candlelit dimness and drank mugs of good barrel beer. And at the time I’m writing about, the Viennese blond proprietor did indeed rush around eagerly and energetically to see that everything was just right. But only last night (now, in 1961) I went back there and he was asleep in a chair in the kitchen, my waiter spat in a corner of the diningroom, and there was no water in the restaurant bathroom. And they brought me an old sick steak badly cooked, with potato chips all over it—but in those days the steaks were still good and the boys dove in trying to cut them up with butter knives. I said “Like I say, like Alexander the Great, eat that steak with your hands” so after a few furtive looks around in the
half darkness they all grabbed their steaks and tore at them with ronching teeth. Yet they all looked so humble because they were in a restaurant!

  That night, back at their apartment, rain splattering in the courtyard, suddenly Laz had a fever and went to bed—Old Bull Gaines came over for his daily evening visit wearing his best stolen tweed jacket. Laz was suffering from a weird virus that many American tourists get when they come to Mexico, not exactly dysentery either but something undetermined. “Only one sure cure,” says Bull, “a good shot of morphine.” So Irwin and Simon discussed it anxiously and decided to try it, Laz was in misery. Sweat, cramps, nausea. Gaines sat on the edge of the sheeted bed and tied up his arm and popped a sixteenth of a grain in, and in the morning Lazarus jumped up completely well after a long sleep and rushed out to find an ice cream soda. Which makes you realize the restrictions on drugs (or, medicine) in America comes from doctors who dont want people to heal themselves—

  Amen, Anslinger—

  14

  And that was the really great day when we all went to the Pyramids of Teotihuacan—First we had our picture taken by a photographer in the park downtown, the Prado—We all stand there proud, me and Irwin and Simon standing (today I’m amazed to see I had broad shoulders then), and Raphael and Laz kneeling in front of us, like a Team.

  Ah sad. Like the old photographs all brown now of my mother’s father and his gang posing erect in 1890 New Hampshire—Their mustaches, the light on their heads—or like the old photographs you find in abandoned Connecticut farmhouse attics showing an 1860 child in a crib, and he’s already dead, and you’re really already dead—The old light of 1860 Connecticut enough to make Tom Wolfe cry shining on the little baby’s proud be-bustled brown lost mother—But our picture really resembles the old Civil War Buddy Photographs of Thomas Brady, the proud captured Confederates glaring at the Yankees but so sweet there’s hardly any anger there, just the old Whitman sweetness that made Whitman cry and be a nurse—

  We hop a bus and go rattling to the Pyramids, about 30, 20 miles, the fields of pulque flash by—Lazarus stares at strange Mexican Lazaruses staring at him with the same divine innocence, but with brown eyes instead of blue.

  When we reach there we start walking to the pyramids in the same straggling way, Irwin and Simon and me in front talking, Raphael off to the side musing, and Laz 50 yards behind clomping like Frankenstein. We start climbing the stone steps of the Pyramid of the Sun.

  All fireworshipers worshiped the sun, and if they gave a person to the sun and ate the person’s heart, they ate the Sun. This was the Pyramid of horrors where they bent the victim back over a stone sink and cut his beating heart out with one or two movements of a heart-clipper, raised the heart to the sun, and ate it. Monstrous priests not even hep to effigy. (Today in modern Mexico children eat candy hearts and skulls at Halloween.)

  Your Indiana scarecrow is an old Thuringian phantasy …

  When we got to the top of the Pyramid I lit up a marijuana cigarette so we could all examine our instincts about the place. Lazarus reached out his arms to the sun, straight up, altho we hadnt told him what it was up there, or what to do. Altho he looked goofy doing this I realized he knew more than any one of us.

  Not to mention your Easter bunny …

  He reached up his arms straight and actually clawed for the sun for thirty seconds. Me thinkin I’m beyond all this but a big Buddha sit crosslegged at the top, put my hand down, and immediately feel a biting sting. “My God I been bit by a scorpion at last!” but I look down at my bleeding hand and it’s only tourist broken glass. So I wrap the hand up in my red neckerchief.

  But sitting up there high and thoughtful I began to see something about Mexican history I’d never find in books. The runners come panting that all Texcoco is in warlike rouge again. You can see all Lake Texcoco like a warning glittering on the horizon south, and west of that the huddled monster hint of a greater kingdom inside the crater:—the Kingdom of Azteca. Ow. The Teotihuacan priests propitiate gods by the millions and invent them as they go along. Two monstrous empires only 30 miles away visible to the naked eye from the top of their own flimsy funeral pyre. They therefore in dread turn their eyes north to the perfect smooth mountain behind the pyramids with its perfect grassy top where no doubt (as I sat there realizing) lived in a hut an aged sage, the actual King of Teotihuacan. They climbed to his hut in the evening for advice. He waved a feather as tho the world meant nothing and said “Oh,” or more likely “Oops!”

  I told this to Raphael who thereupon framed his eyes with far seeing general’s hand and looked at the blink of the Lake. “By God you’re right, they musta shit in their pants up here.” Then I told him of the mountain in back and that Sage but he said “Some goatherd eccentric Oedipus.” Meanwhile Lazarus was still trying to grab the sun.

  Little kids came up to sell us what they said were genuine relics found under the ground: little stone heads and bodies. Some craftsmen were making perfect raggedy looking imitations in the village below where, at dusk’s obscura, boys played sad basketball. (Gee, just like Durrell and Lowry!)

  “Let’s investigate the caves!” yells Simon. Meanwhile an American tourist woman arrives at the top and tells us to sit still while she takes color photographs of us. I’m sitting cross-legged with a bandaged hand turning to look at waving Irwin and grinning others as she snaps it: she later sends the picture to us (address given) from Guadalajara.

  We go down to investigate the caves, the alleys under the Pyramid, me and Simon hide in one dead-end cave giggling and when Irwin and Raphael come groping by we yell “Whoo!” Lazarus, tho, he’s in his element stomping up and down silently. You couldnt scare him with a ten-foot sail in his bathroom. The last time I’d played ghosts was during the war at sea off the coast of Iceland.

  We then emerge from the caves and cross a field near the Pyramid of the Moon that has hundreds of big ant villages each one clearly defined by a heap and a heap of activity all around it, Raphael deposits a small twig in one of the Spartas and all the warriors rush up and carry it away so’s not to disturb the Senator and his broken bench. We put still another bigger twig and those crazy ants carry it away. For a whole hour, smoking pot, we lean over and examine these ant villages. We dont hurt one citizen. “Look that guy hurrying from the edge of town carrying that piece of dead scorpion meat to the hole—” Down the hole he goes for meat’s winter. “Sposin we had a jar of honey, would they think it was Armageddon?”

  “They’d have big Mormon prayers before doves.”

  “And build tabernacles and sprinkle em with ant piss.”

  “Really Jack—maybe they’d just store the honey and forget all about you” (Irwin).

  “Are there ant hospitals underneath the mound?” The five of us leaned over the ant village wondering. When we built little mounds the ants immediately started the great state tax-paid task of removing them. “You could squash the whole village, make assemblies rage and pale! just with your foot!”

  “While the Teo priests goofed up there these ants were just beginning to dig a real underground super market.”

  “It must be great by now.”

  “We could take a shovel and investigate all their corridors—What pity God must have not to step on them” but no sooner said than done, Lazarus in walking away from us back to the caves has left his monstrous shoe tracks in a straight absent-minded line across half a dozen earnest Roman villages.

  We follow Lazarus walking around the ant villages carefully. I say: “Irwin, didnt Laz hear what we said about the ants—for an hour?”

  “Oh yah,” gaily, “but now he’s thinking about something else.”

  “But he’s walking right thru, right on their villages and heads—”

  “Oh yah—”

  “With his big huge shoes!”

  “Yah, but he’s thinking about something or other.”

  “What?”

  “I dont know—if he had a bicycle it’d be worse.”

  We watched
Laz stomping straight across the Moon Field to his goal, which was a rock to sit on.

  “He’s a monster!” I cried.

  “Well you’re a monster yourself when you eat meat—think of all the little happy bacterias have to take a gruesome trip thru the cave of your acid entrails.”

  “And they all turn into hairy knots!” adds Simon.

  15

  So, as Lazarus walks through villages, so God walks thru our lives, and like the workers and the warriors we worry like worrywarts to straighten up the damage as fast as we can, tho the whole thing’s hopeless in the end. For God has a bigger foot than Lazarus and all the Texcocos and Texacos and Mañanas of tomorrow. We end up watching a dusk basketball game among Indian boys near the bus stop. We stand under an old tree at the dirtroad crossing, receiving dust as it’s blown by the plains wind of the High Plateau of Mexico the likes of which none bleaker maybe than in Wyoming in October, late October …

  p.s. The last time I was in Teotihuacan, Hubbard said to me “Wanta see a scorpion, boy?” and lifted up a rock—There sat a female scorpion beside the skeleton of its mate, which it had eaten—Yelling “Yaaaah!” Hubbard lifted a huge rock and smashed it down on the whole scene (and tho I’m not like Hubbard, I had to agree with him that time).

  16

  How unbelievably bleak the actual world really is after you’ve dreamed of gay whore streets and gay dancing nightclubs but you end up as Irwin and Simon and I did, the one night we went out alone, staring among the cold and bony rubbles of the night—Tho there may be a neon at the end of the alley the alley is incredibly sad, in fact impossible—We’d started out in more or less sports attire, with Raphael in tow, to go dancing at the Club Bombay but the moment broody Raphael smelled those dead dog streets and saw the soiled uniforms of beat mariachi singers, heard the whine of the mess of insane horror which is your modern city street night he went home in a cab alone, saying “Shit on all this, I want Eurydice and Persephone’s horn—I dont wanta go mudtrampling thru all this sickness—”