by Jack Kerouac
“We’ll go see my girl Nanette! I’ll give her to you.” But when I see her I know he’ll never give her to me, she’s an absolute trembling beauty and loves Raphael to death. We all go off gaily to shishkabob and bop. I spend the entire night translating her French to him, how much she loves him, then have to translate his English to her, how he knows that but.
“Raphael dit qu’il t’aime mais il veux vraiment faire l’amour avec les étoiles! C’est ça qu’il dit. Il fait l’amour avec toi dans sa manière drôle.” (“Raphael says he loves you but he really wants to make love to the stars, that’s what he says, he makes love to you in his funny way.”)
Pretty Nanette says in my ear in the noisy Arab cocktail lounge: “Dit lui que ma soeur vas m’donner d’l’argent demain.” (“Tell him my sister’ll give me money tomorrow.”)
“Raphael why dont you just give her to me! She has no money!”
“What’d she say just then?” Raphael has made a girl fall in love with him without even being able to talk to her. It all ends up a man is tapping me on the shoulder as I wake up with my head on a bar where they’re playing cool jazz. “Five thousand francs, please.” That’s five of my eight, my Paris money’s all gone, three thousand francs left comes to $7.50 (then)—just enough to go to London and get my English publisher money and sail home. I’m mad as hell at Raphael for making me spend all that money and there he is yelling at me again how greedy and nowhere I am. Not only that as I lay there on his floor he makes love to Nanette all night, as she whimpers. In the morning I sneak out with the excuse a girl is waiting for me at a café, and never come back. I just walk all over Paris with the bag on my back looking so strange even the whores of St. Denis dont look at me. I buy my ticket to London and eventually go.
But I did see finally the Parisian woman of my dreams in an empty bar where I sipped coffee. There was only one man on duty, a nice looking guy, and in walks a pretty Parisienne with that slow tantalizing nowhere-to-go walk, hands in pockets, saying, simply “ça va? La vie?” Apparently ex-lovers.
“Oui. Comme ci comme ça.” And she flashes him that languid smile worth more than her whole naked body, a really philosophic smile, lazy and amorous and ready for anything, even rainy afternoons, or bonnets on the Quai, a Renoir woman with nothing to do but come revisit her old lover and taunt him with questions about life. Like you can see even in Oshkosh though, or Forest Hills, but what a walk, what a lazy grace as tho her lover was chasing her on a bicycle from the railyards and she didnt care. Edith Piaf’s songs express that type of Parisian woman, whole afternoons of fondling hair, actually boredom, ending in sudden disputes over coat money which run out the window so loud even the sad old Sûreté will come in eventually to shrug at tragedy and at beauty, knowing all the time it’s neither tragic nor beautiful just boredom in Paris and love for nothing else to do, really—Paris lovers wipe the sweat off and crack long loaves of bread a million miles from Gotterdammerung across the Marne (I guess) (never having met Marlene Dietrich in a Berlin Street)—
I arrive in London in the evening, Victoria Station, and go at once to a bar called “Shakespeare.” But I might as well’ve walked into Schrafft’s:—white table cloths, quiet clinking bartenders, oak paneling among Stout ads, waiters in tuxedos, ugh, I walk out of there as fast as I can and go roaming the nighttime streets of London with that pack still on my back as bobbies watch me pass with that strange still grin I remember so well, and which says: “There ’e is, clear as your nose, it’s Jack the Ripper come back to the scene of ’is crimes. Keep an eye on ’im whilst I call the Hinspector.”
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Maybe you could hardly blame them either because as I walked thru the fogs of Chelsea looking for fish n chips a bobby walked in front of me half a block, just vaguely I could see his back and the tall bobby hat, and the shuddering poem occurred to me: “Who will strangle the bobby in the fog?” (for some reason I dont know, just because it was foggy and his back was turned to me and my shoes were silent soft soled desert boots like the shoes of footpads)—And at the border, that is at the customs of the English Channel (Newhaven) they’d all given me strange looks as tho they knew me and since I only had fifteen shillings in my pocket ($2) they’d almost barred me from entering England altogether, only relenting when I showed proof I was an American writer. Even then, though, the Bobbies were standing watching me with that faint evil halfsmile, rubbing their jaws wisely, even nodding, as tho to say “We seen the likes a im before” although if I’d been with John Banks I’d be in the gaol house now.
From Chelsea I carried that woesome pack of mine clear around downtown London in the foggy night, ending exhausted at Fleet Street where by God I saw old 55-year-old Julien of the future a bowlegged blondy Scotsman emerging from the Glasgow Times tweaking his mustache just like Julien (who is of Scot descent), hurrying on twinkling newspaperman feet to the nearest pub, the King Lud, to foam at beers of Britain’s barrels—Under the streetlamp right where Johnson and Boswell strolled, there he goes, in tweed suit, “knaows mothah” and all that, bemused with the news of Edinborough, Falklands and the Lyre.
I managed to borrow five pounds from my English agent at his home and hurried thru the Soho (Saturday Midnight) looking for a room. As I was standing before a record store staring at an album cover of Jerry Mulligan’s big goofy American hipster face a bunch of Teddy Boys spilling out with thousands of others from Soho boites approached me, like the bluejeaned Moroccan hipsters but all beautifully dressed however in vests and ironed pants and shiny shoes, saying “I say, do you knaow Jerry Mulligan?” How they spotted me in those rags and rucksack I’ll never know. Soho is the Greenwich Village of London full of sad Greek and Italian restaurants with checkered tablecloths by candlelight, and jazz hangouts, nightclubs, strip joints and the like, with dozens of blondes and brunettes cruising for money: “I sye, ducks” but none of them even looking at me because I was dressed so awful. (I’d come to Europe in rags expecting to sleep in haystacks with bread and wine, no such haystack anywhere.) “Teddy Boys” are the English equivalent of our hipsters and have absolutely nothing to do with the “Angry Young Men” who are not street characters twirling keychains on corners but university trained middleclass intellectual gentlemen most of them effete, or when not effete, political instead of artistic. Teddy Boys are dandies on street corners (like our own brand of special zooty well-dressed or at least “sharp” hipsters with lapel-less jackets or soft Hollywood-Las Vegas sports shirts). The Teddy Boys have not yet started writing or at least publishing and when they do they’ll make the Angry Young Men look like academic poseurs. The usual bearded Bohemians also roam around the Soho but they’ve been there since well before Dowson or De Quincey.
Piccadilly Circus, where I got my cheap hotel room, is the Times Square of London except there are charming street performers who dance and play and sing for pennies thrown at them, some of them sad violinists recalling the pathos of Dickens’ London.
What amazed me as much as anything were the fat calm tabby cats of London some of whom slept peacefully right in the doorway of butcher shops as people stepped over them carefully, right there in the sawdust sun but a nose away from the roaring traffic of drams and buses and cars. England must be the land of cats, they abide peacefully all over the back fences of St. John’s Wood. Elderly ladies feed them lovingly just like Ma feeds my cats. In Tangiers or Mexico City you hardly ever see a cat, if so late at night, because the poor often catch them and eat them. I felt London was blessed by its kind regard for cats. If Paris is a woman who was penetrated by the Nazi invasion, London is a man who was never penetrated but only smoked his pipe, drank his stout or half n half, and blessed his cat on the purring head.
In Paris on cold nights the apartment houses along the Seine look bleak like the apartment houses of New York on Riverside Drive on January nights when all the inhospitable blasts of the Hudson hit men in spats rounding the corner to their foyer, but on the banks of the Thames at night there seems to be a kind o
f hope in the twinkle of the river, of East End across the way, something bustlingly Englishy hopeful. During the war I’d also seen the interior of England, those incredibly green countrysides of haunted mead, the bicyclists waiting at the railroad crossing to get home to thatched house and hearth—I loved it. But I had no time and no desire to hang around, I wanted to go home.
As I walked down Baker Street one night I actually looked for Sherlock Holmes’ address forgetting completely he’d been just a fiction in Conan Doyle’s mind!
I got my money in the agency office on the Strand and bought a ticket to New York on the Dutch ship S.S. Nieuw Amsterdam sailing from Southampton that night.
PART FOUR
PASSING THROUGH AMERICA AGAIN
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So I’d made that big trip to Europe at just the wrong time in my life, just when I became disgusted with any new experience of any kind, so I’d rushed through and here I was already going back, May 1957, shamefaced, dull-hearted, scowling, ragged and nuts.
And as the Nieuw Amsterdam pulls out to sea from the Southampton dock that night I waltz into the thirdclass dining-room hungry for my supper but here are two hundred and fifty fastidiously dressed tourists sitting at glittering cutleries and white tablecloths being served by anxious tuxedo’d waiters under grand chandeliers. The waiters do a doubletake when they see me in my jeans (my only pants) and open collared flannel shirt. I walk across their gantlet line to my assigned table which is right in the middle of the diningroom and has four table partners in impeccable suits and gowns, ow. A German laughing girl in a party dress: a German in a suit, severe and neat: and two Dutch young businessmen headed for Luchow’s in Export New York. But I have to sit there. And strangely enough the German is polite to me, even seeming to like me (Germans always like me for some reason), so that when the ratty waiter gets impatient with me when I scan the incredibly luxurious menu with mixed up thoughts (“Wow will it be almondine salmon with wine sauce or roast beef au jus with petites pommes de terres de printemps or omelette speciale with avocado salad or filet mignon smothered in mushrooms, mon doux, what’ll I do?”) and he says nastily tapping his wrist: “Well make up your mind!” the German youth stares at him indignantly. And when the waiter’s gone to bring me roasted brains and asperge hollandaise he says, “I voud not take dat from a vaiter if I vere you!” He snaps this out at me like a Nazi, actually like a well bred German or continental gentleman in any case, but with sympathy for me, but I say:—
“I dont care.”
He points out that somebody’s got to care or “Dis peoples vill get atrocious und forgetting deir place!” I cant explain to him that I dont care because I’m a French Canadian Iroquois American aristocrat Breton Cornish democrat or even a beat hipster but when the waiter comes back the German makes sure to make the waiter run back for extras. Meanwhile the German girl is gaily enjoying herself foreseeing her voyage of six days with three handsome young Europeans and even looking at me with a straight human smile. (I’d already run into official European snobbery when strolling Saville Row or Threadneedle Street or even Downing Street being stared at by government fops in wescots, who’d have done better with lorgnettes, as brief as that.) But next morning I was unceremoniously moved to a corner table where I wouldnt be so conspicuous. As far as I was concerned I would have preferred to eat in the galley with my elbows on the table anyway. But now I was trapped with three elderly Hollander schoolteachers, a girl of 8, and an American girl of 22 with dark rings of dissipation under her eyes which didnt bother me except that she traded her German sleeping pills for my Moroccan ones (soneryls) but her sleeping pills were actually pep pills of some terrifying variety that kept you awake.
So three times a day I sneaked to my corner in the dining-room and faced these women with a bleak smile. Roaring gay laughter came from my original German table.
My stateroom had one other old man in it, a fine old Hollander who smoked a pipe, but the horrible thing was that his old wife came in constantly to hold his hand and talk, so that I was reluctant to even wash at the sink. I had the upper bunk where I read day and night. I noticed that the old Dutch lady had that same almost breakable delicate white forehead skin with pale blue veins in it you sometimes see in a Rembrandt portrait.… Meanwhile, our third class quarters being in the stern of the ship, we rolled and pitched sickeningly all the way to Nantucket Lightship. The original crowd in the diningroom diminished every day as everybody got sea sick. On the first night at a nearby table a whole clan of Dutchmen had started out laughing and eating, all brothers and sisters and in-laws going to live or visit in America, but by the time we were two days out of Southampton only one gaunt brother remained eating grimly everything that was brought to him, like myself afraid to waste all that good food that went with his fare ($225), even ordering extras and grimly eating that. I myself had my new young waiter rushing around for extra desserts. I wasnt going to miss one whipcream, nauseous or not.
At night the gay stewards always arranged dances with fun hats but that was when I’d put on my zippered windbreaker and scarf up and pace the decks, sometimes sneaking up to the first class deck and walking swiftly around and around the empty wind howling promenade, nobody there. I missed my old lonesome quiet Yugo freighter, though, because in the day time you saw all these sick people bundled up in deck chairs staring at nothing.
For breakfast I always had cold roast beef with Dutch sugar powdered raisin bread followed by the usual bacon and eggs and pot of coffee.
At one point the American girl and her blond English girlfriend insisted I visit the gymnasium with them, which was always empty, it was only later I realized they probably wanted to sex. They kept eyeing the handsome sailors wistfully, I guess they’d read novels about “shipboard love affairs” and were trying desperately to get it done before New York. Some help I was dreaming of my veal and ham baked in foil. One morning in the fog the waters were calm and glassy and there was the Nantucket Lightship followed a few hours later by floating garbage from New York including one empty carton reading CAMPBELL’S PORK AND BEANS making me almost cry with joy remembering America and all the pork n beans from Boston to Seattle … and maybe those pine trees in a homestead window in the morning.
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So I raced out of New York and down South to get my mother, loaded with another publisher’s installment ($100)—Just stopping long enough to spend two days with Alyce who was now soft and pretty in a Springtime dress and glad to see me—A few beers, a few lovings, a few whispered words in ear, and off I was to my “new life” promising I’d see her soon.
My mother and I packed all the pitiful junks of life and called the movers giving them the only California address I knew, Ben Fagan’s cottage in Berkeley—I figured we’d go there by bus, all three thousand awful miles of it, rent an apartment in Berkeley and have plenty of time to re-route the movers to our new home which I promised myself would be my final glad sanctuary (hoping for pine trees).
Our “junk” consisted of old clothes I never would wear again, cartons of old manuscripts of mine some from 1939 with the paper already yellowed, pitiful heat lamps and overshoes of all things (overshoes of old New England), bottles of shaving lotion and holy water, even lightbulbs saved from years ago, old smoking pipes of mine, a basketball, a baseball glove, my God even a bat, old curtains that had never been put up for lack of a home, rolled-up useless rag rugs, books weighing a ton (even old editions of Rabelais with no covers) and all kinds of inconceivable pots and pans and sad shifts that people somehow need to keep to go on—Because I still remember the America when men traveled with nothing but a paperbag for luggage, always tied with string—I still remember the America of people waiting in line for coffee and donuts—The America of 1932 when people foraged in riverside dumps looking for junk to sell—When my father sold neckties or dug ditches for the W.P.A.—When old men with burlap bags at night fished thru garbage cans or collected rare horse dung in the streets—When yams were something to joy about. But her
e it was 1957 prosperous America and people laughing at all our junk in the center of which nevertheless my mother’d hidden her essential sewing basket, her essential crucifix, and her essential family photo album—Not to mention her essential salt shaker, pepper shaker, sugar shaker (all full) and her essential bar of soap already half used, all wrapped in the essential sheets and blankets of beds not yet seen.
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Here now I’m telling about the most important person in this whole story and the best. I’ve noticed how most of my fellow writers all seem to “hate” their mothers and make big Freudian or sociological philosophies around that, in fact using it as the straight theme of their fantasies, or at least saying as much—I often wonder if they’ve ever slept till four in the afternoon and woke up to see their mother darning their socks in a sad window light, or come back from revolutionary horrors of weekends to see her mending the rips in a bloody shirt with quiet eternal bowed head over needle—And not with martyred pose of resentment, either, but actually seriously bemused over mending, the mending of torture and folly and all loss, mending the very days of your life with almost glad purposeful gravity—And when it’s cold she puts on that shawl, and mends on, and on the stove potatoes are burbling forever—Making some neurotics go mad to see such sanity in a room—Making me mad sometimes because I’d been so foolish tearing shirts and losing shoes and losing and tearing hope to tatters in that silly thing called wild—“You’ve got to have an escape valve!” Julien’d often yelled at me, “let out that steam or go mad!” tearing my shirt, only to have Memère two days later sitting in her chair mending that very shirt just because it was a shirt and it was mine, her son’s—Not to make me feel guilty but to fix the shirt—Though it always made me feel guilty to hear her say: “It was such a nice shirt, I paid $3.25 for it in Woolworth’s, why do you let those nuts tear at your shirt like that. Ça pas d’bon sens.” And if the shirt was beyond repair she’d always wash it and put it away “for patching” or to make a rag rug with. In one of her rag rugs I recognized three decades of tortured life not only by myself but herself, my father, my sister. She’d have sewn up the grave and used it if possible. As for food, nothing went wasted: an odd potato half eaten ends up delightfully tidbit fried by a piece of later meat, or a quarter of an onion finds its way into a jar of home-pickled onions, or old corners of roastbeef into a delicious homey burbling fricassee. Even a torn old handkerchief is washed and mended and better to blow your nose in than ten thousand crinkly new Brooks Brothers Handkerchiefs with idle monogram. Any stray toy I bought for her “doodad” shelf (little Mexican burros in plastic, or piggy banks or vaselets) remained on that shelf for years and years, duly dusted and arranged according to her taste esthetically. A minor cigarette hole in old jeans is suddenly patched with pieces of 1940 jean. Her sewing basket contains a wooden darner (like a small bowling duckpin) older than I am. Her needles some of them come from Nashua 1910. As the years go by her family write her increasingly loving letters realizing what they lost when they took her orphan money and spent it. At the TV which I bought her with my pitiful 1950 money she stares believingly, only a battered old 1949 Motorola set. She watches the commercials where the women primp or the men boast and doesnt even know I’m in the room. It’s all a show for her eyes. I have nightmares of her and I finding pastrami slabs in old junkyards of New Jersey on a Saturday morning, or of the top drawer of her dresser open in the road of America showing silk bloomers, rosaries, tin cans full of buttons, rolls of ribbon, needle hassocks, powder pouffes, old berets and boxes of cotton saved from old medicine bottles. Who could put down a woman like that? Whenever I need something she has it somewhere:—an aspirin, an ice bag, a bandage, a can of cheap spaghetti in the cupboard (cheap but good). Even a candle when the big civilized power blows out.
