by Jack Kerouac
And besides Memère is already saying that the mountains of Berkeley are going to topple over on us in an earthquake—Also she cant stand the morning fog—When she goes to the fine supermarkets down the street she hasnt got enough money anyway to buy anything she really wants—I rush out and buy a twelve-dollar radio and all the newspapers to make her feel good but she just doesnt like it—She says “California is sinister. I wanta spend my social security checks in Florida.” (We’re living on my $100 a month and her $84 a month.) I begin to see that she will never be able to live anywhere but near my sister, who is her great pal, or around New York City, which was her great dream once. Memère liked me too but I dont woman-chatter with her, spend most of my time reading and writing. Good old Ben comes over once in a while to cheer us up somehow tho he just depresses her. (“He’s like an old Grandpaw! Where did you meet people like that? He’s just a good old Grandpaw he’s not a young man!”) With my supply of Moroccan pep pills I write and write by candlelight in my room, the ravings of old angel midnight, nothing else to do, or I walk around the leafy streets noticing the difference between the yellow streetlamps and the white moon and coming home and painting it with house paint on cheap paper, drinking cheap wine meanwhile. Memère has nothing to do. Our furniture will come soon from Florida, that harried mass I told about. I therefore realize that I am an imbecile poet trapped in America with a dissatisfied mother in poverty and shame. It makes me mad I’m not a renowned man of letters living in a Vermont farmhouse with lobsters to broil and a wife to go downy with, or even my own woods to meditate in. I write and write absurdities as poor Memère mends my old pants in the other room. Ben Fagan sees the sadness of it all and puts his arm around my shoulders chuckling.
76
And one night in fact, I go to the nearby movie and lose myself for three hours in tragic stories about other people (Jack Carson, Jeff Chandler) and just as I step out of the theater at midnight I look down the street towards San Francisco Bay completely forgetting where I am and I see the Golden Gate Bridge shining in the night, and I shudder with horror. The bottom drops out of my soul. Something about that bridge, something sinister like Ma says, something like the forgotten details of a vague secanol nightmare. Come three thousand miles to shudder—and back home Memère is hiding in her shawl wondering what to do. It’s really too much to believe. And like for instance we have a swell little bathroom but with slanted eaves but when I take joyous bubble baths every night, of hot water and Joy liquid soap, Memère complains she’s afraid of that bathtub! She wont take a bath because she’ll fall, she says. She’s writing letters back to my sister and our furniture hasnt even arrived from Florida!
God! Who asked to be born anyway? What do with the bleak faces of pedestrians? What do with Ben Fagan’s smoking pipe?
77
But here on a foggy morning comes crazy old Alex Fairbrother in Bermuda shorts of all things and carrying a bookcase to leave with me, and not even really a bookcase but boards and redbricks—Old Alex Fairbrother who climbed the Mountain with me and Jarry when we were Dharma Bums who didnt care about anything—Time has caught up with us—Also he wants to pay me a day’s wages to help him clean out a house in Buena Vista he owns—Instead of smiling at Memère and saying hello he starts right in talking to me the way he did in 1955, completely ignoring her even when she brings him a cup of coffee: “Well Duluoz, I see you’ve made your way back to the West Coast. Speaking of Virginia gentry did you know that they do go back to England—Fox trips—The mayor of London entertained about fifty at the time of the 350th anniversary celebration and Elizabeth II let them have Elizabeth the First’s wig (I think) to exhibit and lots of things never lent out of the tower of London before. You see I had a Virginia girl once … What kind of Indians are Mescaleros? Library is closed today …” and Memère’s in the kitchen saying to herself that all my friends are insane. But actually I needed to earn that day’s wages from Alex. I’d already been down to a factory where I thought of getting a job but just one glimpse of two kids pushing a bunch of boxes around to the orders of a dull looking foreman who probably questioned them about their private lives during lunch hour, and I left—I’d even walked into the employment office and right out again like a Dostoevsky character. When you’re young you work because you think you need the money: when you’re old you already know you dont need anything but death, so why work? And besides, “work” always means somebody else’s work, you push another man’s boxes around wondering “Why doesnt he push his own boxes around?” And in Russia probably the worker thinks, “Why doesnt the Peoples’ Republic push their own goddam boxes around?” At least, by working for Fairbrother, I was working for a friend: he would have me saw bushes so I could at least think “Well I’m sawing a bush for old Alex Fairbrother who’s very funny and climbed a mountain with me two years ago.” But anyway we set off for work next morning on foot and just as we were crossing a small side street a cop came over and gave us two tickets fining us $3 each for jaywalking, which was half my day’s wages already. I stared at the bleak California face of the cop in amazement. “We were talking, we didnt notice no red light,” I said, “besides it’s eight o’clock in the morning there’s no traffic!” and on top of that he could see we had shovels on our shoulders and were going to work someplace.
“I’m just doing my job,” he says, “just like you’re doing.” I promised myself I’d never do another day’s “work” at a “job” in America ever again come hell or high water. But of course it wasn’t as easy as that with Memère to protect somehow—All the way from sleepy Tangiers of blue romance to the empty blue eyes of an American traffic cop somewhat sentimental like the eyes of Junior High School superintendents, rather, somewhat un sentimental like the eyes of Salvation Army mistresses beating tambourines on Christmas Eve. “It’s my job to see that the laws are obeyed,” he says absently: they never say anything about keeping law and order any more, there are so many silly laws including the ultimate imminent law against flatulating it’s all too confused to even be called “order” anymore. While giving us this sermon some nut is holding up a warehouse two blocks away wearing a Halloween mask, or, worse, some councilman is tabling a new law in the legislature demanding stiffer penalties for “Jaywalking”—I can see George Washington crossing against the light, bareheaded and bemused, wondering about Republics like Lazarus, bumping into a cop at Market and Polk—
Anyway Alex Fairbrother knows about all this and is a big analytical satirist of the whole scene, laughs at it in his strange humorless way, and we actually have fun the rest of the day altho I cheat a little when he tells me to dispose of some piled underbrush I just dump it over the stone wall into the next lot, knowing he cant see me because he’s on his hands and knees in the mud in the cellar taking it out by the handfuls and having me bring the buckets out. He’s a very strange nut who’s always moving furniture around and re-fixing things and houses: if he rents a small house on a Mill Valley hill he’ll spend all his time building a small terrace by hand, but then move out suddenly, to another place, where he’ll tear out the wallpaper. It is not at all surprising to see him suddenly coming down the street carrying two piano stools, or four empty art frames, or a dozen books on ferns, in fact I dont understand him but I like him. He once sent me a box of Boy Scout cookies that came all crumbled in the mail from three thousand miles away. In fact there’s something crumbly about him. He moves around the U.S.A. crumbling from job to job as a librarian where he apparently confuses the women librarians. He’s very learned but it’s on so many different and unconnected subjects nobody understands. He’s very sad, actually. He wipes his glasses and sighs and says “It’s disconcerting to see the population explosion is going to weaken American aid—maybe we should send them vaginal jelly in Shell Oil barrels? It would be a new kind of Tide Gamble made in America.” (Here he actually refers to what is printed on cartons of Tide soap sent overseas, so he knows what he’s talking about, it’s only that no one else can connect why h
e said it.) Hard enough, even, in this vague world to know why anybody exists let alone come on like they do. Like Bull Hubbard has always said, I guess, life is “insufferably dull.” “Fairbrother I’m bored!” I finally say—
Removing his glasses, sighing, “Try Suave. The Aztecs used Eagle oil. Had some long name starting with a ‘Q’ and ended with ‘oil.’ Quetzlacoatl. Then they could always wipe the extra goo off with a feathered serpent. Maybe they even tickled your heart before they tore it out. You cant always tell from the American Press, they have such long mustaches in the Pen & Pencil Set.”
I suddenly realized he was just a crazy lonely poet speaking out an endless muttering monologue of poems to himself or anyone who listened day or night.
“Hey Alex, you mispronounced Quetzalcoatl: it goes Kwet-sa-kwatay. Like coyotl goes co-yo-tay, and peotl goes pey-o-tay, and Popocatepetl the volcano goes Popo-ca-tep-atay.”
“Well you spit your pits out at the walking wounded there, I’m just giving it the old Mount Sinai Observation pronunciation … Like after all, how do you pronounce D.O.M. when you live in a cave?”
“I dont know, I’m only a Celtic Cornishman.”
“Name of Cornish language is Kernuak. Cymeric group. If Celt and Cymry were pronounced as if with soft C’s we’d have to call Cornwall Sornwall and then what would happen to all that corn we’ve eaten. When you go to Bude beware of the undertow. Even worse to haunt Padstow if you’re good looking. Best thing to do is go in a pub and raise your glass to Mr. Penhagard, Mr. Ventongimps, Mr. Maranzanvose, Mr. Trevisquite and Mr. Tregeargate or go around digging for kistvaens and cromlechs. Or pray to Earth in the names of St. Teath, St. Erth, St. Breock, St. Gorran and St. Kew and it’s not too far from derelict tin mine chimneys. Hail the Black Prince!” As he was saying this we were carrying our shoevels back at sunset eating ice cream cones (you cant blame me for misspelling “shovels” there).
He adds: “Clearly Jack what you need is a Land Rover and go camping in Inner Mongolia unless you wanta bring a bed lamp.” All I could do, all anybody can ever do is shrug at all this, helplessly, but he goes on and on like that.
When we get back to my house the furniture has just come in from Florida and Ma and Ben are gleefully drinking wine and unpacking. Good old Ben has brought her some wine that night, and as tho he knew she didnt really want to unpack at all but just move back to Florida, which we finally did three weeks later anyway in this tangled year of my life.
78
Ben and I got drunk one last time, sitting in his grass in the moonlight drinking whiskey from the bottle, whooee and wahoo like old times, crosslegged facing each other, yelling Zen questions: “Under the quiet tree somebody’s blown my pussywillow apart?”
“Was it you?”
“Why do sages always sleep with their mouths open?”
“Because they want more booze?”
“Why do Sages kneel in the dark?”
“Because they’re creaky?”
“Which direction did the fire go?”
“To the right.”
“How do you know?”
“Because it burned me.”
“How do you know?”
“I didnt know.”
And such nonsense, and also telling long stories about our childhoods and pasts:—“Pretty soon Ben do you realize there’ll be so many additional childhoods and pasts with everybody writing about them everybody’ll give up reading in despair—There’ll be an Explosion of childhoods and pasts, they’ll have to have a Giant Brain print them out microscopically on film to be stored in a warehouse on Mars to give Heaven Seventy Kotis to catch up on all that reading—Seventy Million Million Kotis!—Whoopee!—Everything is free!—”
“Nobody has to care any more, we can even leave the whole scene to itself with Japanese fornicating machines fornicating chemical dolls on and on, with Robot Hospitals and Calculator Machine Crematories and just go off and be free in the universe!”
“In the freedom of eternity! We can just float around like Khans on a cloud watching the Samapatti T.V.”
“We’re doing that already.”
One night we even got high on peotl, the Chihuahuan Mexican cactus button that gives you visions after three preliminary hours of empty nausea—It was the day that Ben had received a set of Buddhist monk robes in the mail from Japan (from friend Jarry) and the day I was determined to paint great pictures with my pitiful set of housepaints. Picture this for the insanity yet the harmlessness of a couple of goofballs who study poetry in solitude:—The sun is setting, ordinary people of Berkeley are eating their supper (in Spain, “supper” bears the mournful humble title of “La Cena,” with all its connotations of earthly sorrowful simple food for the living beings who cannot live without it), but Ben and I have a gob of green cactus glup stuck in our stomachs, our eyes are iris-wide and wild, and here he is in those mad robes sitting absolutely motionless on his cottage floor, staring in the dark, upheld thumbs touching, refusing to answer me when I yell from the yard, actually sincerely seeing the old Pre-Heaven Heaven of Old in his quiet eyeballs waving like kaleidoscopes all deep blue and rose glory—And there I am kneeling in the grass in the half dark pouring enamel paint onto paper and blowing on it till it blossoms out and mixes up, and’s going to be a great masterpiece until suddenly a poor little bug lands on it and gets stuck—So I spend the last thirty minutes of twilight trying to extricate the little bug from my sticky masterpiece without hurting it or pulling off a leg, but no go—So I lie there looking at the struggling little bug in the paint and realize I should never have painted at all for the sake of that little bug’s life, whatever it is, or will be—And such a strange dragon-like little bug with noble forehead and features—I almost cry—The next day the painting is dry and the little bug is there, dead—In a few months his dust just vanishes away from the painting altogether—Or was it Fagan sent that little bug from his magic Samapatti revery to show me that art so sure and art so pure is not so sure and pure as all that? (Putting me in mind of the time I was writing so swiftly I killed a bug with the rash of my pencil deed, ugh—)
79
So what do we all do in this life which comes on so much like an empty voidness yet warns us that we will die in pain, decay, old age, horror—? Hemingway called it a dirty trick. It might even be an ancient Ordeal laid down on us by an evil Inquisitor in Space, like the ordeal of the sieve and scissors, or even the water ordeal where they dump you in the water with toes tied to thumbs, O God—Only Lucifer could be so mean and I am Lucifer and I’m not that mean, in fact Lucifer Goes to Heaven—The warm lips against warm necks in beds all over the world trying to get out of the dirty Ordeal by Death—
When Ben and I sober up I say “How goes it with all that horror everywhere?”
“It’s Mother Kali dancing around to eat up everything she gave birth to, eats it right back—She wears dazzling dancing jewels and covered all over with silks and decorations and feathers, her dance maddens men, the only part of her aint covered is her vagina which is surrounded with a Mandala Crown of jade, lapis lazuli, cornelean, red pearls and mother of pearl.”
“No diamonds.”
“No, that’s beyond …”
I ask my own mother what’s with all our horror and unhappiness, dont mention Mother Kali to scare her, she goes beyond Mother Kali by saying: “People’s got to do right—Let’s you and me get out of this lousy California with the cops wont let you walk, and the fog, and those damn hills about to fall on our back, and go home.”
“But where’s home?”
“Home is with your family—You’ve only got one sister—I’ve only got one grandson—And one son, you—Let’s all get together and live quiet. People like your Ben Fagan, your Alex Poorbrother, your Irwin Gazootsky, they dont know how to live!—You gotta have fun, good food, good beds, nothing more—La tranquillité qui compte!—Never mind all the fuss about you worry this and that, make yourself a haven in this world and Heaven comes after.”
Actual
ly, there can be no haven for the living lamb but plenty haven for the dead lamb, okay, soon enough, but I’ll follow Memère because she speaks of tranquillity. In fact she didnt realize it was I myself who’d wrecked all Ben Fagan’s tranquillity by coming here in the first place, but okay. We already start packing to go back. She has her social security checks every month as I say and my book is coming out in a month. What she is really delivering to me is a message about quietude: in a previous lifetime she must surely (if there is such a thing as a previous lifetime possible to an individual soul-entity)—she must surely have been a Head Nun in a remote Andalusian or even Grecian nunnery. When she goes to bed at night I hear her rosary beads rattle. “Who cares about Eternity! we want the Here and Now!” yell the snakedancers of streets and riots and Guerneca hand grenades and airplane bombs. When sweetly waking in the night on her pillow my mother opens her tired pious eyes, she must be thinking: “Eternity? Here and Now? Wat they talkin about?”
Mozart on his death bed must have known this—
And Blaise de Pascal most of all.
80
The only answer Alex Fairbrother has for my question about horror is with his eyes, his words are hopelessly entangled in a Joycean stream of learning like: “Horror Everywhere? That sounds like a nice idea for a new Tourist Bureau? You could have Coxie’s Armies laid out in Arizona canyons buying tortillas and ice cream from the shy Navajos only the ice cream is really peyote ice cream green like pistachio and everybody goes back home singing Adios Muchachos Companéros de la Vida—”
Or something. It’s only in his sighing eyes you see it, in his crumbling eyes, his disillusioned Boy Scout Leader eyes …
And then to top it all off one day Cody is rushing across our porch and into the house dying to borrow ten dollars from me for an urgent pot connection. I’ve practically come to California to be near old buddy Cody but his wife has refused to help this time, probably because I have Memère with me, probably because she’s afraid he’ll go mad with me again like he did on the road years ago—To him it makes no difference, he hasnt changed, he just wants to borrow ten dollars. He says he’ll be back. Meanwhile he also borrows Ben’s tendollar Tibetan Book of the Dead and rushes off, all muscular as usual in T-shirt and frayed jeans, crazy Cody. “Any girls around here?” he cries anxiously as he drives off.
