Desolation Angels

by Jack Kerouac

  “This is the church of Maria de Guadalupe. A peasant found a shawl in Guadalupe Mexico with Her Face imprinted on it like the cloth the women had at the cross of Jesus.”

  “It happened in Mexico?”

  “Si.”

  “And they pray to Marie? But that poor young mother is only half way to the altar—She comes slow slow slow on her knees all quiet. Aw but these are good people the Indians you say?”

  “Oui—Indians just like the American Indians but here the Spaniards did not destroy them” (in French). “Içi les espanols sont marié avec les Indiens.”

  “Pauvre monde! They believe in God just like us! I didnt know that, Ti Jean! I never saw anything like this!” We creeped up to the altar and lighted candles and put dimes in the church box to pay for the wax. Ma made a prayer to God and did the sign of the cross. The Chihuahua desert blew dust into the church. The little mother was still advancing on her knees with the infant quietly asleep in her arms. Memère’s eyes blurred with tears. Now she understood Mexico and why I had come there so often even tho I’d get sick of dysentery or lose weight or get pale. “C’est du monde qu’il on du coeur,” she whispered, “these are people who have heart!”

  “Oui.”

  She put a dollar in the church machine hoping it would do some good somehow. She never forgot that afternoon: in fact even today, five years later, she still adds a prayer for the little mother with the child crawling to the altar on her knees: “There was something was wrong in her life. Her husband, or maybe her baby was sick—We’ll never know—But I shall always pray for that leetle woman. Ti Jean when you took me there you showed me something I’d never believed I’d ever ever see—”

  Years later, when I met the Reverend Mother in the Bethlehem Benedictine Monastery talking to her thru wooden nunnery bars, and told her this, she cried …

  And meanwhile the old man Penitente still kneeled there arms outspread, all your Zapatas and Castros come and go but the Old Penitence is still there and will always be there, like Coyotl Old Man in the Navajo Mountains and Mescalero Foothills up north:—

  Chief Crazy Horse looks north

  *

  Geronimo weeps—

  with tearful eyes—

  *

  no pony

  The first snow flurries.

  *

  With a blanket.

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  It was also very funny to be in Mexico with my mother for when we came out of the church of Santa Maria we sat in the park to rest and enjoy the sun, and next to us sat an old Indian in his shawl, with his wife, saying nothing, looking straight ahead on their big visit to Juarez from the hills of the desert out beyond—Come by bus or burro—And Ma offered them a cigarette. At first the old Indian was afraid but finally he took a cigarette, but she offered him one for his wife, in French, in Quebecois Iroquois French, “Vas il, ai paw ’onte, un pour ta famme” so he took it, puzzled—The old lady never looked at Memère—They knew we were American tourists but never tourists like these—The old man slowly lighted his cigarette and looked straight ahead—Ma said to me: “They’re afraid to talk?”

  “They dont know what to do. They never meet anybody. They come from the desert. They dont even speak Spanish just Indian. Say Tarahumare.”

  “How’s anybody can say dat?”

  “Say Chihuahua.”

  Ma says “Chihuahua” and the old man grins at her and the old lady smiles. “Goodbye” says Memère as we leave. We go wandering across the sweet little park full of children and people and ice cream and balloons and come to a strange man with birds in a cage, who catches our eye and yells for our attention (I had taken my mother around to the back streets of Juarez). “What does he want?”

  “Fortune! His birds will tell your fortune! We give him one peso and his little bird grabs a slip of paper and your fortune’s written on it!”

  “Okay! Seenyor!” The little bird beaks up a clip of paper from a pile of papers and hands it to the man. The man with his little mustache and gleeful eyes opens it. It reads as follows:—

  “You will have goods fortuna with one who is your son who love you. Say the bird.”

  He gives the little paper to us laughing. It’s amazing.

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  “Now,” says Memère as we walk arm in arm thru the streets of Old Juarez, “how could that little silly bird know I have a son or anything about me—Phew there’s a lot of dust around here!” as that million million grained desert blows dust along the doors. “Can you explain me that? What is one peso, eight cents? And the little bird knew all dat? Hah?” Like Thomas Wolfe’s Esther, “Hah?,” only a longer lasting love. “Dat guy with the mustache doesnt know us. His little bird knew everything.” She had the bird’s slip of paper securely in her purse.

  “A little bird that knew Gerard.”

  “And the little bird picked out the paper with his crazy face! Ah but the people are poor here, eh?”

  “Yeh—but the government is taking care of that a lot. Used to be there were families sleeping on the sidewalk wrapped in newspapers and bullfight posters. And girls sold themselves for twenty cents. They have a good government since Aleman, Cardenas, Cortines—”

  “The poor little bird of Mexica! And the little mother! I can always say I’ve seen Mexica.” She pronounced it “Mexica.”

  So I bought a pint of Juarez Bourbon in a store and back we went to the American bus station in El Paso, got on a big doubledecker Greyhound that said “Los Angeles” on it, and roared off in a red desert dusk drinking from the pint in our front seats yakking with American sailors who knew nothing about Santa Maria de Guadalupe or the Little Bird but were good old boys nevertheless.

  And as the bus rammed down that empty road among desert buttes and lava humps like the landscape of the moon, miles and miles of desolation towards that last faint Chihuahuan Mountain to the South or New Mexico dry rock range to the North, Memère drink-in-hand said: “I’m afraid of those mountains—they’re trying to say something to us—they might fall right over us any minute!” And she leaned over to tell the sailors that, who laughed, and she offered them a drink and even kissed their polite cheeks, and they enjoyed it, such a crazy mother—Nobody in America was ever going to understand again what she’d try to tell them about what she saw in Mexico or in the Universe Entire. “Those mountains aint out there for nothing! They’re there to tell us something! They’re just sweet boys,” and she fell asleep, and that was it, and the bus droned on to Arizona.

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  But we’re in america now and at dawn it’s the city called Los Angeles tho nobody can see what it can possibly have to do with angels as we stash our gear in lockers to wait for the 10 A.M. San Francisco bus and go out in gray streets to find a place for coffee and toast—It’s 5 A.M. even too early for anything and all we get to see are the night’s remnants of horrified hoodlums and bloody drunks staggering around—I’d wanted to show her the bright happy L.A. of Art Linkletter Television shows or glimpses of Hollywood but all we saw was horror of Gruesome’s end, the battered junkies and whores and suitcases tied with string, the empty traffic lights, no birds here, no Maria here—but dirt and death yes. Tho a few miles beyond these embittered awful paves were the soft shiny shores of a Kim Novak Pacific she’d never see, where hors d’oeuvres are thrown away to the dogs of sea—Where Producers mingle with their wives in a movie they never made—But all poor Memère ever saw of L.A. was dawn batteredness, hoodlums, some of them Indians of America, dead sidewalks, crops of cop cars, doom, early morning whistles like the early morning whistles of Marseilles, haggard ugly awful California City I-cant-go-on-what-am-I-doing-here mierda—Oh, who ever hath lived and suffered in America knows what I mean! Whoever rode coal cars out of Cleveland or stared at mailboxes in Washington D. C. knows! Whoever bled again in Seattle or bled again in Montana! Or peeled in Minneapolis! Or died in Denver! Or cried in Chicago or said “Sorry I’m burning” in Newark! Or sold shoes in Winchendon! Or flared out in Philadelphia? Or pruned
in Toonerville? But I tell you there’s nothing more awful than empty dawn streets of an American city unless it’s being thrown to the Crocodiles in the Nile for nothing as catpriests smile. Slaves in every toilet, thieves in every hole, pimps in every dive, Governors signing redlight warrants—Gangs of ducktailed blackjacketed hoods on every corner some of them Pachucos, I pray in fact to my Papa “Forgive me for dragging Memère thru all this in search of a cup of coffee”—The same streets I’ve known before but not with her—But every evil dog in evildom understands it when he sees a man with his mother, so bless you all.

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  After a whole day riding thru the green fields and orchards of beautiful San Joaquin Valley, even my mother impressed tho she mentions the dry furze on those distant hills (and has already complained and rightly so about the caney wastes of Tucson and Mojave deserts)—as we sit there stoned to death with tiredness, of course, but almost there, only five hundred miles of valley up to north and the City—a long complicated way of telling you that we arrive at Fresno at dusk, walk around a little, get back on now with a fantastically vigorous Indian driver (some Mexican kid from Madera) off we go bashing to Oakland as the driver bears down on everything in that two way Valley lane (99) making whole populations of oncoming cars quake and revert into line—He’ll just ram em right down.

  So we arrive in Oakland at night, Saturday, (me finishing the last sip of my California rotgut port mixed with bus station ice) bang, we first thing see a battered drunkard all covered with blood staggering thru the bus station for emergency aid—My mother cant even see anymore, she’s been sleeping all the way from Fresno, but she does see that sight and sighs wondering what next, New York? maybe Hell’s Kitchen or Lower East Side East? I promise myself I’m going to show her something, a good little home and some quiet and trees, just like my father must’ve promised when he moved her from New England to New York—I get all the bags and hail a Berkeley bus.

  Pretty soon we’re out of Oakland downtown streets of empty movie marquees and dull fountains and we’re rolling thru little long streets full of old 1910 white cottages and palms. But mostly other trees, your California northern trees, walnut and oak and cypress, and finally we come to near the University of California where I lead her down a leafy little street with all our gear towards the dull dimlamp of old Bhikku Ben Fagan studying in his backyard cabin. He’s going to show us where to get a hotel room and help us find an apartment tomorrow either the upstairs or downstairs of a cottage. He’s my only connection in Berkeley. By God as we come walking across his tall grass there we see him in a rose covered window with his head bent over the Lankavatara Scripture, and he’s smiling! I cant understand what he’s smiling about, maya? Buddha laughing on Mount Lanka or something? But here comes woesome old me and my maw down the yard with battered suitcases arriving almost like phantoms dripping from the sea. He’s smiling!

  For a moment, in fact, I hold my mother back and shush so I can watch him (the Mexicans call me an “adventurer”) and by God he’s just alone in the night smiling over old Bodhisattva truths of India. You cant go wrong with him. He’s smiling happily, in fact, it’s really a crime to disturb him—but it’s got to be done, besides he’ll be pleased and maybe even shocked into Seeing Maya but I have to clomp on his porch and say “Ben, it’s Jack, I’m with my mother.” Poor Memère is standing behind me with her poor eyes half closed from inhuman weariness, and despair too, wondering now what as big old Ben comes clomping to the little rose covered door with pipe in mouth and says “Well, well, well, whaddaya know?” Ben is too smart and really too nice to say anything like “Well hello there, when did you get in?” I’d already written ahead to him but had rather expected to arrive somehow in the daytime and find a room before dropping in on him, maybe alone while Memère could read a Life Magazine or eat sandwiches in her hotel room. But here it was 2 A.M., I was utterly stupefied, I’d seen no hotels or rooms to rent from the bus—I wanted to lean my shoulder on Ben somehow. He had to work in the morning too. But that smile, in the flowery silence, everybody in Berkeley asleep, and over such a text as the Lankavatara Scripture which says things like Behold the hairnet, it is real, say the fools, or like Life is like the reflection of the moon on the water, which one is the true moon? meaning: Is reality the unreal part of unreality? or vice versa, when you open the door does anyone enter or is it you?

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  And smiling over that in the western night, stars waterfalling over his roof like drunkards stumbling downstairs with lanterns in their asses, the whole cool dew night I loved so much of northern California (that rainforest freshness), that smell of fresh green mint growing among tangled rubbery weeds and flowers.

  The little cottage had quite a history, too, as I’ve shown earlier, had been the haven of Dharma Bums in the past where we’d had big tea discussions on Zen or sex orgies and yabyum with girls, where we’d played phonograph music and drank loudly in the night like Gay Mexicans in that quiet collegiate neighborhood, no one complaining somehow—The same old battered rocking chair was still on the little Walt Whitman rosey porch of vines and flowerpots and warped wood—In the back were still the little God-leak pots of Irwin Garden, his tomato plants, maybe some of our lost dimes or quarters or snapshots—Ben (a California poet from Oregon) had inherited this sweet little spot after everybody’d dispersed east some as far east as Japan (like old Dharma Bum Jarry Wagner)—So he sat there smiling over the Lankavatara Scripture in the quiet California night a strange and sweet sight to see after all those three thousand miles from Florida, for me—He was still smiling as he invited us to sit down.

  “What now?” sighs poor Memère. “Jacky drag me all the way from my daughter’s house in Florida with no plans, no money.”

  “There’s lots of nice apartments around here for fifty dollars a month,” I say, “and besides Ben can show us where to get a room tonight.” Smoking and smiling and carrying most of our bags good old Ben leads us to a hotel five blocks away on University and Shattuck where we hire two rooms and go to sleep. That is, while Memère sleeps I walk back to the cottage with Ben to rehash old times. For us it was a strange quiet time between the era of our Zen Lunatic days of 1955 when we read our new poems to big audiences in San Francisco (tho I never read, just conducted sort of with a jug of wine) and the upcoming era of the paper and critics writing about it and calling it the “San Francisco Beat Generation Poetry Renaissance”—So Ben sat crosslegged sighing and said: “Oh nothing much happening around here. Think I’ll go back to Oregon pretty soon.” Ben is a big pink fellow with glasses and great calm blue eyes like the eyes of a Moon Professor or really of a Nun. (Or of Pat O’Brien, but he almost killed me when I asked him if he was an Irishman the first time I met him.) Nothing ever surprises him not even my strange arrival in the night with my mother; the moon’ll shine on the water anyway and chickens’ll lay more eggs and nobody’ll know the origin of the limitless chicken without the egg. “What were you smiling about when I saw you in the window?” He goes into the tiny kitchen and brews a pot of tea. “I hate to disturb your hermitage.”

  “I was probably smiling because a butterfly got caught in the pages. When I extricated it, the black cat and the white cat both chased it.”

  “And a flower chased the cats?”

  “No, Jack Duluoz arrived with a long face worrying about something, at 2 A.M. not even carrying a candle.”

  “You’ll like my mother, she’s a real Bodhisattva.”

  “I like her already. I like the way she puts up with you, you and your crazy three-thousand-mile ideas.”

  “She’ll take care of everything …”

  Funny thing about Ben, the first night me and Irwin had met him he cried all night face down on the floor, nothing we could do to console him. Finally he ended up never crying ever since. He had just come down from a summer on a mountain (Sourdough Mountain) just like me later, and had a whole book of new poems he hated, and cried: “Poetry is a lotta bunk. Who wants to bother with all that m
ental discrimination in a world already dead, already gone to the other shore? There’s just nothin to do.” But now he felt better, with that smile, saying: “It doesnt matter any more. I dreamed I was a Tathagata twelve feet long with gold toes and I didnt even care any more.” There he sits crosslegged, leaning slightly to the left, flying softly thru the night with a Mount Malaya smile. He appears as blue mist in the huts of poets five thousand miles away. He’s a strange mystic living alone smiling over books, my mother says next morning in the hotel “What kind of fella is that Benny? No wife, no family, nothing to do? Does he have a job?”

  “He has a part time job inspecting eggs in the university laboratory up the hill. He earns just enough for his beans and wine. He’s a Buddhist!”

  “You and your Buddhists! Why dont you stick to your own religion?” But we go forth at nine in the morning and immediately miraculously find a fine apartment, groundfloor with a flowery yard, and pay a month’s rent in advance and move our suitcases in. At 1943 Berkeley Way right near all the stores and from my bedroom window I can actually see the Golden Gate Bridge over the waters beyond the rooftops ten miles away. There’s even a fireplace. When Ben gets home from work I go get him at his cottage and we go buy a whole frying chicken, a quart of whiskey, cheese and bread and accessories, and that night by firelight as we all get drunk in the new apartment I fry the chicken in the rucksack cookpots right on the logs and we have a great feast. Ben has already bought me a present, a tamper to tamp down the tobacco in my pipe, and we sit smoking by the fire with Memère.

  But too much whiskey and we all get woozy and pass out. There are already two beds in the apartment and in the middle of the night I wake up to hear Memère’s groan from the whiskey and somehow I realize our new home is already cursed thereby.

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