Desolation Angels

by Jack Kerouac

  39

  I foresaw a new dreariness in all this literary success. That night I called a cab to take me to the bus station and downed half a bottle of Jack Daniels while waiting, sitting on a kitchen stool sketching the pretty older daughter who was on her way to Sarah Lawrence college to learn all about Erich Fromm in the pots and pans. I gave her the sketch, rather accurate, thinking she’d keep it forever like Raphael’s Michelangelo. But when we were both back in New York a month later a big package came containing all our paintings and sketches and stray T-shirts, with no explanation, meaning “Thank God you’ve gone.” And I dont blame them, I still feel ashamed about that uninvited visit and havent done such a thing since and never will.

  I got down to the bus station with my rucksack and foolishly (high on Jack Daniels) began talking to some sailors who then got a guy with a car to drive out to the back streets of Washington in search of an afterhours bottle. A Negro connection was dickering with us when up walked a Negro cop who wanted to search us all, but was outnumbered. I simply walked away with my rucksack on my back, to the station, got on the bus and fell asleep with the pack by the driver’s well. When I woke up in Roanoke Rapids at dawn it was gone. Somebody had taken it off at Richmond. I let my head fall on the seat in that harsh glare nowhere worse in the world than in America with a stupid guilty hangover. A whole new novel (Angels of Desolation), a whole book of poetry, and the finishing chapters of another novel (about Tristessa), together with all the paintings not to mention the only gear I had in the world (sleepingbag, poncho, sweater of holy favor, perfect simple equipments the result of years’ thinking), gone, all gone. I started to cry. And I looked up and saw the bleak pines by the bleak mills of Roanoke Rapids with one final despair, like the despair of a man who has nothing left to do but leave the earth forever. Soldiers waited for the bus smoking. Fat old North Carolinians watched hands aback clasped. Sunday morning, I empty of my little tricks to make life livable. An empty orphan sitting nowhere, sick and crying. Like dying I saw all the years flash by, all the efforts my father had made to make living something to be interested about but only ending in death, blank death in the glare of automobile day, automobile cemeteries, whole parking lots of cemeteries everywhere. I saw the glum faces of my mother, of Irwin, of Julien, of Ruth, all trying to make it to go on believing without hope. Gay college students in the back of the bus making me even sicker to think of their purple plans all in time to end blind in an automobile cemetery insurance office for nothing. Where’s yonder old mule buried in those piny barrens or did the buzzard just eat? Caca, all the world caca. I remembered the enormous despair of when I was 24 sitting in my mother’s house all day while she worked in the shoe factory, in fact sitting in my father’s death chair, staring like a bust of Goethe at nothing. Getting up once in a while to plunk sonatas on the piano, sonatas of my own spontaneous invention, then falling on the bed crying. Looking out the window at the glare of automobiles on Crossbay Boulevard. Bending my head over my first novel, too sick to go on. Wondering about Goldsmith and Johnson how they burped sorrow by their firesides in a life that was too long. That’s what my father told me the night before he died, “Life is too long.”

  So wondering if God is a personal God who’s actually personally concerned about what happens to us, every one. Putting us up to burdens? To Time? To the crying horror of birth and the impossible lostness of the promise of death? And why? Because we’re fallen angels who said in Heaven “Heaven is great, it better be anyway” and off we fell? But do you or do I remember doing such a thing?

  All I remember is that before I was born there was bliss. I actually remember the dark swarming bliss of 1917 altho I was born in 1922! New Years’ Eves came and went and I was just blisshood. But when I was dragged out of my mother’s womb, blue, a blue baby, they yelled at me to wake up, and slapped me, and ever since then I’ve been chastised and lost for good and all. Nobody slapped me in bliss! Is God everything? If God is everything then it’s God who slapped me. For personal reasons? Do I have to carry this body around and call it mine own?

  Yet in Raleigh a tall blue-eyed Southerner told me my bag was being shipped to my destination station in Winter Park. “God bless you,” I said, and he did a calm double take.

  40

  As for my mother, there’s no other like her in the world, really. Did she bear me just to have a little child to bless her heart? She got her wish.

  At this time she was retired from a lifetime (beginning at 14) of shoe skiving in shoe factories of New England and later New York, was collecting her social security pittance and living with my married sister as a kind of housemaid tho she didnt mind doing the housework at all, natural to her. A neat French Canadian born in St. Pacôme in 1895 while her pregnant mother was visiting Canada from New Hampshire. She was born a twin but the gleeful fleshly little twin died (O what would she have been like?) and the mother died too. So my mother’s position in the world was immediately cut off. Then her father died at 38. She was housemaid for aunts and uncles till she met my father who was infuriated at the way she was being treated. My father dead, and I a bum, she was housemaid for relatives again tho in her prime (wartime New York), she used to make $120 a week sometimes at the shoe factories on Canal Street and in Brooklyn, those times when I was too sick or sad to be on my own with wives and friends, and I came home, she totally supported me while I however wrote my books (with no real hope of ever having them published, just an artist). In 1949 I earned about $1000 on my first novel (advance) but that never went far so now she was at my sister’s, you saw her in the door, in the yard emptying the garbage, at the stove making roasts, at the sink washing dishes, at the ironing board, at the vacuum cleaner, all gleeful anyway. A suspicious paranoid who told me Irwin and Julien were devils and would ruin me (probably true), she nevertheless was gleeful as a child most of the time. Everybody loved her. The only time my father ever had any cause to complain about this pleasant peasant woman was when she’d let him have it fullblast for losing all his money gambling. When the old man died (age 57) he said to her, to Memère as my nephew now called her (short for grandemère):—“Angie, I never realized what a great women you are. Will you ever forgive me for all the wrong things I’ve done like those times I was away for days and the money I lost gambling, the few pitiful dollars I could’ve spent on you with some silly hat?—”

  “Yes, Emil, but you always gave us the house money for food and rent.”

  “Yes, but I lost a lot more than that on the horses and playing cards and money I gave away to a lot of bums—Ah!—But now that I’m dying I guess, and here you are workin in the shoe factory, and Jacky’s here to take care of me, and I aint worth it, now I realize what I lost—all those years—” One night he said he wished he had real old good Chinese food so Memère gave me five dollars and had me ride the subway all the way from Ozone Park to Chinatown New York to buy Chinese food in cartons, and bring it back. Pa ate every bit of it but threw up (cancer of the liver).

  When we buried him she insisted on an expensive coffin, which made me so goddamed mad, but not only that, though I wasnt mad on that score, she had his old sweet body ambulated to New Hampshire for funeral and burial there by the side of his first son, Gerard, my holy brother, so now as thunder breaks in Mexico City where I write, they’re still there, side by side, 35 and 15 years there in the earth, but I never revisited their graves knowing that what’s there is not really Papa Emil or Gerard, only dung. For if the soul cant escape the body give the world to Mao Tse-tung.

  41

  I know better than that—God must be a personal God because I’ve known a lot of things that werent in texts. In fact when I went to Columbia all they were trying to teach us was Marx, as if I cared. I cut classes and stayed in my room and slept in the arms of God. (This is what the dialectical materialists call “cherubim tendencies,” or the psychiatrists call “schizoid tendencies.”) Ask my brother and my father in their graves about tendencies.

  I see them tending
towards the golden eternity, where all is restored again forever, where actually whatever you loved is all compacted in One Essence—The Only One.

  Now Christmas Eve we all sat around drinking Martinis in front of the TV. Poor little sweet Davey the gray cat who used to follow me into the North Carolina woods when I went there to meditate with the dogs, who therefore used to hide above my head in the tree, once throwing down a twig or leaf to make me notice him, he was now a ragged cat taken to carousal and fights and even got bitten by a snake. I tried to sit him on my lap but he didn’t remember anymore. (Actually my brother-in-law kept throwing him out the door.) Old Bob the dog who used to lead me thru the woods down midnight paths, shining white somehow, he was now dead. I think Davey missed him.

  I took out my sketchbook and sketched Ma as she dozed in her chair during midnight mass from New York. When I later showed the picture to a girl friend in New York she said it looked very Medieval—the strong arms, the stern sleeping face, the repose in faith.

  Once I took home five teaheads in Mexico City who were selling me pot but they all turned out to be thieves, stealing my scout knife, flashlight, Murine and Noxzema while my back was turned, tho I noticed it and said nothing. At one point the leader stood behind me, as I sat, for a good thirty seconds of silence, during which time it occurred to me he was probably going to stab me with my own knife so they could search the apartment at leisure for my hidden money. I wasnt even scared, I just sat there not caring, high. When the thieves finally left at dawn one of them insisted I give him my $50 raincoat. I said “Non” distinctly, for sure, finally, saying that my mother would kill me: “Mi madre, pow!” pantomiming a punch to my own chin—To which the strange leader said in English: “So you are afraid of something.”

  On the porch of the house was my old rolltop desk with all the unpublished manuscripts in it, and the couch where I slept. To sit at my old desk and stare was sad. All the work I’d done at it, four novels and innumerable dreams and poems and notes. It made me realize suddenly I was working as hard as any man in the world so what did I have to reproach myself for, privately or otherwise? Saint Paul wrote (Corinthians 8:10): “Therefore I write these things being absent, lest being present I should use sharpness, according to the power which the Lord hath given me to edification, and not to destruction.”

  When I left, after Ma made a huge delicious turkey dinner for New Year’s Day, I told her I’d be back in the Fall to move her out to a little house of her own, figuring I’d make enough money on the book that had just been accepted. She said, “Oui, Jean, I do want a lil home of my own,” almost crying, and I kissed her goodbye. “Don’t let those bums in New York talk you into anything,” she added, because she was convinced that Irwin Garden was out to get me, as my father had predicted for some reason, saying: “Angie, tell Jack that Irwin Garden is going to try to destroy him someday, and that Hubbard too—That Julien is all right—But Garden and Hubbard are going to destroy him.” And it was weird to ignore it since he’d said it just before he died, in a quiet prophetic voice, as tho I were some kind of important Saint Paul or even a Jesus with foreordained Judases and enemies in the Kingdom of Heaven. “Stay away from them! Stick to your little girlfriend who sent you the cigars!” yelled my ma, meaning the box of cigars Ruth Heaper had mailed me for Christmas. “They’ll destroy you if you let them! I dont like the funny look in their face!” Yet, strangely, I was on my way back to New York to borrow $225 from Irwin so I could sail to Tangiers Morocco to visit with Hubbard!

  Wow.

  42

  And meanwhile in New York, in fact, Irwin and Raphael and Ruth Heaper posed for sinister photos in the Ruth Apartment showing Irwin in a black turtleneck sweater, Raphael in an evil cap (obviously making love to Ruth) and Ruth herself in her pajamas.

  Raphael was always making time with my girls. Unfortunately my pa’d never known him.

  On the train to New York I saw a pregnant woman pushing a baby carriage in front of a cemetery.

  (That’s a pome.)

  The first thing on tap as I unpacked in Ruth Heaper’s bedroom was Life Magazine was going to take all our pictures in Gerard Rose’s print and frame shop in Greenwich Village, arranged by Irwin. Gerard Rose had never liked me and didn’t like this whole idea at all. Gerard was the original cool subterranean who was so bugged, so listless, yet so goodlooking like Gerard Phillipe, yet so down, so bored, that when Hubbard met him he said this to me in comment on Gerard:—“I can just picture Gerard and me sittin in a bar when the Mongols invade New York—Gerard’s leaning his head on his hand sayin ‘Tartars Everywhere.’” But I liked Gerard of course and when I finally published my book that Fall he yelled: “Ho ho! The Playboy of the Beat Generation? Wanta buy a Mercedes?” (as if I could afford it then or now.)

  So, for the Life photographers I drank up, got high, combed my hair and had them shoot me standing on my head: “Tell everybody this is the way to keep the doctor away!” They didnt even smile. They took other photos of Raphael and Irwin and Simon and me sitting on the floor, interviewed us and wrote notes, went away inviting us to a party, and never even published the pictures or the story. There’s the saying around the trade that the cutting room floor of Life Magazine is cluttered a foot deep with “Lost Faces,” or “The Face on the Cutting Room Floor.” It wasnt about to destroy my potentiality as an artist, a writer, but it was an awful waste of energy and in a way a grisly joke.

  Meanwhile we went to the party indicated and heard a man in a Brooks Brothers jacket say: “Who wants to be a party pooper after all?” The moment we heard the word “pooper” we all left, something somehow wrong with it, like the farts of summer camp counselors.

  43

  Yes, it was only the beginning. But things were still horribly funny in those days, like Raphael painting a mural with house paint on the wall of a bar on 14th Street and 8th Avenue, for money, and the owners of the bar were big Italian gangsters with gats. They stood around in loose-fitting suits as Raphael painted huge monks on the wall. “The more I look at it the more I like it,” said a mobster, rushing to the phone as it rang, taking a bet and sticking it in his hat. The mobster bartender wasnt quite so sure:

  “I don’t know, I think Raphael dont know what he’s up to.”

  Raphael whirls around with the brush, the other hand forefinger to thumb like an Italian, “Lissen you guys! You dont know anything about beauty! You’re all a bunch of big mobsters wondering where beauty hides! Beauty hides in Raphael!”

  “Why does beauty hide in Raphael?” they ask somewhat concerned, scratching their armpits, pushing back their hats, answering the phone to take more bets.

  I sat there with a beer wondering what would happen. But Raphael yelled at them: I suddenly realized he would have made the most beautiful persuasive mobster in New York or in the whole entire Mafia: “Ech! All your lives eating popsicles on Kenmare Street then when you grow up you bring no popsicle beauty with you. Look at this painting! It’s beauty!”

  “Am I in it?” asks the bartender, Rocco, with an upward angelic look at the mural to make the other mobsters laugh.

  “Of course you’re in it, you’re the monk on the end, the black monk—What you need is white hair!” yells Raphael dipping his brush in a bucket of white paint and suddenly daubing huge white waterfalls around the black monk’s head.

  “Hey!” yells Rocco seriously amazed. “I dont have white hair or even long white hair?”

  “You do now because I’ve pronounced it, I’ve pronounced you Beauty Hair!” and Raphael dabs more white all over the whole mural, ruining it actually as everybody’s laughing and he’s grinning that thin Raphael grin as tho he had a throatful of laughter he doesnt want to let out. And it was then I really loved him because he wasnt afraid of any mobsters, in fact he was a mobster himself and the mobsters knew it. As we hurry from the bar back to Ruth’s pad for spaghetti supper Raphael says to me angrily: “Ah, I think I’ll quit the poetry racket. It’s not gettin me nowhere. I want tiplet pige
ons on my roof and a villa on Capri or in Crete. I dont wanta have to talk to those dopey gamblers and hoods, I wanta meet counts and princesas.”

  “You want a moat!”

  “I want a heartshaped moat like in Dali—When I meet Kirk Douglas I dont wanta have to apologize.” And at Ruth’s he immediately plunges in and boils canned clams in a vat of oil, meanwhile boiling spaghettini, and pours it all out, mixes it, mixes a salad, lights a candle, and we all have a perfect Italian Clam Spaghetti supper with laughs. Avant garde opera singers rush in and start singing beautiful songs by Blow and Purcell with Ruth Erickson but Raphael says to me: “Who are all these creeps” (almost “cweeps”)—“Gripplings, man.” He wants to kiss Ruth Heaper but I’m there so he rushes out to find a girl in the bar on Minetta Lane, a colored and white mixed bar now closed.

  And the next day Irwin carts me and Simon and Raphael off in a bus to Rutherford New Jersey to meet William Carlos Williams the old great poet of 20th Century America. Williams is a general practitioner all his life, his office is still there where he’d examined patients for 40 years and got his material for fine Thomas Hardy-like poems. He sits there staring out the window as we all read him our poems and prose. He’s actually bored. Who wouldnt at 72? He’s still thin and youthful and grand, tho, and at the end he goes down to the cellar and brings up a bottle of wine to cheer us all up. He tells me: “Keep writing like that.” He loves Simon’s poems and later writes in a review that Simon is actually the most interesting new poet in America (Simon will write lines like, “Does the fire hydrant weep as many tears as me?” or “I have a red star on my cigarette”)—But of course Dr. Williams loves Irwin of nearby Paterson N.J. the best because of his huge, in a sense uncriticizable howling altogether sameness greatness (like Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet, Dizzy comes on in waves of thought, not in phrases)—Let Irwin or Dizzy get warmed up and the walls fall down, at least the walls of your ear-porch—Irwin writes about tears with a big tearful moan, Dr. Williams is old enough to understand—Actually a historic occasion and finally we dopey poets ask him for the last advice, he stands there looking thru the muslin curtains of his livingroom at the New Jersey traffic outside and says: