by Jack Kerouac
I’ve never seen a more dangerous neighborhood than those Brooklyn housing projects behind Bush Terminal pier.
We finally get to Borough Hall and dive into a subway, Van Cortlandt line, takes us all clear to 110th Street and Broadway and we go in the bar where my old favorite bartender Johnny is tending the beer.
I order bourbon and whiskey—I see the vision of haggard awful deathly faces passing one by one thru the bar of the world but my God they’re all on a train, an endless train, and it endlessly runs into the Graveyard. What to do? I try to tell Alyce:—
“Leecey, I see nothing but horror and terror everywhere—”
“That’s because you’re sick from drinking too much.”
“But what’ll I do with the horror and the terror I see?”
“Sleep it off, man—”
“But the bartender gave me the bleakest look—as tho I was dead.”
“Maybe you are.”
“Because I’m not staying with you?”
“That’s right.”
“But that’s solipsistic stupid woman explanation of the horror we share—”
“Share and share alike.”
The endless train into the endless graveyard, all full of cockroaches, kept running and running into Johnny the Bartender’s hungry haggard eyes—I said “Johnny don’t you see? We’re all made at for perfidy?” and suddenly I realized I was making poems out of nothing at all, like always, so that if I were a Burroughs Adding Machine Computer I’d still make numbers dance to me. All, all, for tragedy.
And poor Leecie, she didnt understand Goyeshe me.
Go to Part Three.
PART THREE
PASSING THROUGH TANGIERS, FRANCE AND LONDON
50
What a crazy picture, maybe the picture of the typical American, sitting on a boat mulling over fingernails wondering where to really go, what to do next—I suddenly realized I had nowhere to turn at all.
But it was on this trip that the great change took place in my life which I called a “complete turningabout” on that earlier page, turning from a youthful brave sense of adventure to a complete nausea concerning experience in the world at large, a revulsion in all the six senses. And as I say the first sign of that revulsion had appeared during the dreamy solitary comfort of the two months on Desolation mountain, before Mexico, since which time I’d been melanged again with all my friends and old adventures, as you saw, and not so “sweetly,” but now I was alone again. And the same feeling came to me: Avoid the World, it’s just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end. But what to do instead? And here I was relentlessly being carried to further “adventures” across the sea. But it was really in Tangiers after an overdose of opium the turningabout really clicked down and locked. In a minute—but meanwhile another experience, at sea, put the fear of the world in me, like an omen warning. This was a huge tempest that whacked at our C-4 from the North, from the Januaries and Pleniaries of Iceland and Baffin Bay. During wartime I’d actually sailed in those Northern seas of the Arctic but it was only in summertime: now, a thousand miles south of these in the void of January Seas, gloom, the cappers came glurring in gray spray as high as a house and plowed rivers all over our bow and down the washes. Furyiating howling Blakean glooms, thunders of thumping, washing waving sick manship diddling like a long cork for nothing in the mad waste. Some old Breton knowledge of the sea still in my blood now shuddered. When I saw those walls of water advancing one by one for miles in gray carnage I cried in my soul WHY DIDNT I STAY HOME!? But it was too late. When the third night came the ship was heaving from side to side so badly even the Yugoslavs went to bed and jammed themselves down between pillows and blankets. The kitchen was insane all night with crashing and toppling pots even tho they’d been secured. It scares a seaman to hear the Kitchen scream in fear. For eating at first the steward had placed dishes on a wet tablecloth, and of course no soup in soupbowls but in deep cups, but now it was too late for even that. The men chewed at biscuits as they staggered to their knees in their wet sou’westers. Out on deck where I went a minute the heel of the ship was enough to kick you over the gunwale straight at walls of water, sperash. Deck lashed trucks groaned and broke their cables and smashed around. It was a Biblical Tempest like an old dream. In the night I prayed with fear to God Who was now taking all of us, the souls on board, at this dread particular time, for reasons of His own, at last. In my semi delirium I thought I saw a snow white ladder being held down to us from the sky. I saw Stella Maris over the Sea like a statue of Liberty all in shining white. I thought of all the sailors that ever drowned and O the choking thought of it, from Phoenicians of 3000 years ago to poor little teenage sailors of America only last war (some of whom I’d sailed in safety with)—The carpets of sinking water all deep blue green in the middle of the ocean, with their damnable patterns of foam, the sickening choking too-much of it even tho you’re only looking at the surface—beneath all that the upwell of cold miles of fathoms—swaying, rolling, smashing, the tonnages of Peligroso Roar beating, heaving, swirling—not a face in sight! Here comes more! Duck! The whole ship (only as long as a Village) ducks into it shuddering, the crazy screws furiously turn in nothingness, shaking the ship, slap, the bow’s now up, thrown up, the screws are dreaming deep below, the ship hasnt gained ten feet—it’s like that—It’s like frost in your face, like the cold mouths of ancient fathers, like wood cracking in the sea. Not even a fish in sight. It’s the thunderous jubilation of Neptune and his bloody wind god canceling men. “All I had to do was stay home, give it all up, get a little home for me and Ma, meditate, live quiet, read in the sun, drink wine in the moon in old clothes, pet my kitties, sleep good dreams—now look at this petrain I got me in, Oh dammit!” (“Petrain” is a 16th Century French word meaning “mess.”) But God chose to let us live as at dawn the captain turned the ship the other way and gradually left the storm behind, then headed back east towards Africa and the stars.
51
I feel I didnt explain that right, but it’s too late, the moving finger crossed the storm and that’s the storm.
I thereafter spent ten quiet days as that old freighter chugged and chugged across the calmest seas without seeming to get anywhere and I read a book on world history, wrote notes, and paced the deck at night. (How insouciantly they write about the sinking of the Spanish fleet in the storm off Ireland, ugh!) (Or even one little Galilean fisherman, drowned forever.) But even in so peaceful and simple an act as reading world history in a comfortable cabin on comfortable seas I felt that awful revulsion for everything—the insane things done in human history even before us, enough to make Apollo cry or Atlas drop his load, my God the massacres, purges, tithes stolen, thieves hanged, crooks imperatored, dubs praetorian’d, benches busted on people’s heads, wolves attacked nomad campfires, Genghiz Khans ruining—testes smashed in battle, women raped in smoke, children belted, animals slaughtered, knives raised, bones thrown—Clacking big slurry meatjuiced lips the dub Kings crapping on everybody thru silk—The beggars crapping thru burlap—The mistakes everywhere the mistakes! The smell of old settlements and their cookpots and dungheaps—The Cardinals like “Silk stockings full of mud,” the American congressmen who “shine and stink like rotten mackerel in the moonlight”—The scalpings from Dakota to Tamurlane—And the human eyes at Guillotine and burning stake at dawn, the glooms, bridges, mists, nets, raw hands and old dead vests of poor mankind in all these thousands of years of “history” (they call it) and all of it an awful mistake. Why did God do it? or is there really a Devil who led the Fall? Souls in Heaven said “We want to try mortal existence, O God, Lucifer said it’s great!”—Bang, down we fall, to this, to concentration camps, gas ovens, barbed wire, atom bombs, television murders, Bolivian starvation, thieves in silk, thieves in neckties, thieves in office, paper shufflers, bureaucrats, insult, rage, dismay, horror, terrified nightmares, secret death of hangovers, cancer, ulcers, strangulation, pus, old age, old age homes, canes, puffed flesh, dropped teet
h, stink, tears, and goodbye. Somebody else write it, I dont know how.
How to live with glee and peace therefore? By roaming around with your baggage from state to state each one worse deeper into the darkness of the fearful heart? And the heart only a thumping tube all delicately murderable with snips of artery and vein, with chambers that shut, finally someone eats it with the knife and fork of malice, laughing. (Laughing for awhile anyway.)
Ah but as Julien would say “There’s nothing you can do about it, revel in it boy—Bottoms up in every way, Fernando.” I think of Fernando his puffed alcoholic eyes like mine looking out on bleak palmettos at dawn, shivering in his scarf: beyond the last Frisian Hill a big scythe is cutting down the daisies of his hope tho he’s urged to celebrate this each New Years Eve in Rio or in Bombay. In Hollywood they swiftly slide the old director in his crypt. Aldous Huxley half blind watches his house burn down, seventy years old and far from the happy walnut chair of Oxford. Nothing, nothing, nothing O but nothing could interest me any more for one god damned minute in anything in the world. But where else to go?
On the overdose of opium this was intensified to the point where I actually got up and packed to go back to America and find a home.
52
At first the sea fear slept, I actually enjoyed the approach to Africa and of course I had a ball the first week in Africa.
It was sunny afternoon February 1957 when we first saw the pale motleys of yellow sand and green meadow which marked the vague little coast line of Africa far away. It grew bigger as the afternoon drowsed on till a white spot that had troubled me for hours turned out to be a gas tank in the hills. Then like seeing sudden slow files of Mohammedan women in white I saw the white roofs of the little port of Tangiers sitting right there in the elbow of the land, on the water. This dream of white robed Africa on the blue afternoon Sea, wow, who dreamed it? Rimbaud! Magellan! Delacroix! Napoleon! White sheets waving on the rooftop!
And suddenly a small Moroccan fishing boat with a motor but a high balconied poop in carved Lebanese wood, with cats in jalabas and pantaloons chattering on deck, came plopping by turning south down the Coast for the evening’s fishing beneath the star (now) of Stella Maris, Mary of the Sea who protects all fishermen by investing with grace of hope in the dangers of the sea her own Archangelic prayer of Safety. And some Mahomet Star of the Sea of their own to guide them. The wind ruffled on their clothes, their hair, “their real hair of real Africa” I said to myself amazed. (Why travel if not like a child?)
Now Tangiers grew, you saw sandy barrens of Spain on the left, the hump leading to Gibraltar around the Horn of Hesperid, the very amazing spot the entryway to the Mediterranean Atlantis of old flooded by the Ice Caps so celebrate in the Book of Noah. Here’s where Mister Hercules held the world up groaning as “rough rocks groaning vegetate” (Blake). Here the patch-eyed international gem smugglers sneaked up with blue .45’s to steal the Tangier harem. Here the crazy Scipios came to trounce the blue eyed Carthage. Somewhere in that sand beyond the Atlas Range I saw my blue eyed Gary Cooper winning the “Beau Geste.” And a night in Tangiers with Hubbard!
The ship anchored in the sweet little harbor and spun slowly around giving me all kinds of views of city and headland from my porthole as I packed to leave the ship. On the headland around Tangiers Bay was a beacon turning in the blue dusk like St. Mary assuring me port is made and all’s all safe. The city turns on magical little lights, the hill of the Casbah hums, I wanta be out there in those narrow Medina alleys looking for hasheesh. The first Arab I see is too ridiculous to believe: a little bum boat puts out to our Jacob’s Ladder, the motor men ragged teenage Arabs in sweaters like the sweaters of Mexico, but in the mid boat stands a fat Arab in a grimy red fez, in a blue business suit, hands behind him, looking for to sell cigarettes or buy something or anything at all. Our handsome Yugo captain shouts them away from the bridge. At about seven we dock and I go ashore. Big Arabic Letterings are stamped on my fresh innocent passport by clerks in dusty fezzes and baggy pants. In fact it’s exactly like Mexico, the Fellaheen world, that is, the world that’s not making History in the present: making History, manufacturing it, shooting it up in H bombs and Rockets, reaching for the grand conceptual finale of Highest Achievement (in our times the Faustian “West” of America, Britain and Germany high and low).
I get a cab to Hubbard’s address on a narrow hilly street in the European quarter beneath the Medina twinkle hill.
Poor Bull has been on a health kick and is already asleep at 9:30 when I knock on his garden door. I’m amazed to see him strong and healthy, no longer skinny from drugs, all tanned and muscular and vigorous. He’s six foot one, blue eyes, glasses, sandy hair, 44, a scion of a great American industrial family but they’ve only a-scioned him a $200 a month trust fund and are soon to cut that down to $120, finally two years later rejecting him completely from their interior decorated livingrooms in retirement Florida because of the mad book he’s written and published in Paris (Nude Supper)—a book enough to make any mother turn pale (more anon). Bull grabs his hat and says “Come on, let’s go dig the Medina” (after we turn on) and vigorously striding like an insane German Philologist in Exile he leads me thru the garden and out the gate to the little magic street. “Tomorrow morning first thing after I’ve had my simple breakfast of tea and bread, we’ll go rowing in the Bay.”
This is a command. This is the first time I’ve seen “Old Bull” (actually a friend of the “Old Bull” in Mexico) since the days in New Orleans when he was living with his wife and kids near the Levee (in Algiers Louisiana)—He doesnt seem any older except he doesnt seem to comb his hair as carefully any more, which I realize the next day is only because he’s distraught and completely bemused in the midst of his writing, like a mad haired genius in a room. He’s wearing American Chino pants and pocketed shirts, a fisherman’s hat, and carries a huge clicking switchblade a foot long. “Yessir, without this switchblade I’d be dead now. Bunch of Ay-rabs surrounded me in an alley one night. I just let this old thing click out and said ‘Come on ya buncha bastards’ and they cut out.”
“How do you like the Arabs?”
“Just push em aside like little pricks” and suddenly he walked right thru a bunch of Arabs on the sidewalk, making them split on both sides, muttering and swinging his arms with a vigorous unnatural pumping motion like an insane exaggerated Texas oil millionaire pushing his way thru the Swarms of Hong Kong.
“Come on Bull, you cant do that every day.”
“What?” he barked, almost squeaking. “Just brush em aside, son, dont take no shit from them little pricks.” But by next day I realized everybody was a little prick:—me, Irwin, himself, the Arabs, the women, the merchants, the President of the U.S.A. and Ali Baba himself; Ali Baba or whatever his name was, a child leading a flock of sheep in the field and carrying a baby lamb in his arms with a sweet expression like the expression of St. Joseph when he himself was a child:—“Little prick!” I realized it was just an expression, a sadness on Bull’s part that he would never regain the innocence of the Shepherd or in fact of the little prick.
Suddenly as we climbed the hill of white street steps I remembered an old sleeping dream where I climbed such steps and came to a Holy City of Love. “Do you mean to tell me that my life is going to change after all that?” I say to myself, (high), but suddenly to the right there was a big Kaplow! (hammer into steel) ca blam! and I looked into the black inky maw of a Tangiers garage and the white dream died right there, for good, right in the greasy arm of a big Arab mechanic crashing furiously at the fenders and hems of Fords in the oil rag gloom under one Mexican lightbulb. I kept on climbing the holy steps with weariness, to the next horrible disappointment. Bull kept yelling back “Come on, step on it, young man like you cant even keep up with old man like me?”
“You walk too fast!”
“Lard assed hipsters, aint no good for nothing!” says Bull.
We walk almost running down a steep hill of grass and boulders
, with a path, to a magical little street with African tenements and again I’m hit in the eye by an old magic dream: “I was born here: This is the street where I was born.” I even look up at the exact tenement window to see if my crib’s still there. (Man, that hasheesh in Bull’s room—and it’s amazing how American potsmokers have gone around the world by now with the most exaggerated phantasmagoria of gooey details, hallucinations actually, by which their machine-ridden brains though are actually given a little juice of the ancient life of man, so God bless pot.) (“If you were born on this street you musta drowned a long time ago,” I add, thinking.)
Bull goes arm swinging and swaggering like a Nazi into the first queer bar, brushing Arabs aside and looking back at me with: “Hey what?” I cant see how he can have managed this except I learn later he’s spent a whole year in the little town sitting in his room on huge overdoses of morfina and other drugs staring at the tip of his shoe too scared to take one shuddering bath in eight months. So the local Arabs remember him as a shuddering skinny ghost who’s apparently recovered, and let him rant. Everybody seems to know him. Boys yell “Hi!” “Boorows!” “Hey!”
In the dim queer bar which is also the lunching spot of most of the queer Europeans and Americans of Tangiers with limited means, Hubbard introduces me to the big fat Dutch middleaged owner who threatens to return to Amsterdam if he dont find a good “poy” very soon, as I mentioned in an article elsewhere. He also complains about the declining peseta but I can surely see him moaning in his private bed at night for love or something in the sorry internationale of his night. Dozens of weird expatriates, coughing and lost on the cobbles of Moghreb—some of them sitting at the outdoor cafe tables with the glum look of foreigners reading zigzag newspapers over unwanted Vermouth. Ex-smugglers with skipper hats straggling by. No joyful Moroccan tambourine anywhere. Dust in the street. The same old fish heads everywhere.
