On the Road

by Jack Kerouac

  “Let me tell you more,” I said, “and only as a parenthesis within what you’re saying and to conclude my last thought. As a child lying back in my father’s car in the back seat I also had a vision of myself on a white horse riding alongside over every possible obstacle that presented itself: this included dodging posts, hurling around houses, sometimes jumping over when I looked too late, running over hills, across sudden squares with traffic that I had to dodge through incredibly—”

  “Yes! Yes! Yes!” breathed Dean ecstatically. “Only difference with me was, I myself ran, I had no horse. You were a Eastern kid and dreamed of horses; of course we won’t assume such things as we both know they are really dross and literary ideas, but merely that I in my perhaps wilder schizophrenia actually ran on foot along the car and at incredible speeds sometimes ninety, making it over every bush and fence and farmhouse and sometimes taking quick dashes to the hills and back without losing a moment’s ground . . .”

  We were telling these things and both sweating. We had com pletely forgotten the people up front who had begun to wonder what was going on in the back seat. At one point the driver said, “For God’s sakes, you’re rocking the boat back there.” Actually we were; the car was swaying as Dean and I both swayed to the rhythm and the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank tranced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particu lars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives. ,

  “Oh, man! man! man!” moaned Dean. “And it’s not even the beginning of it—and now here we are at last going east together, we’ve never gone east together, Sal, think of it, we’ll dig Denver together and see what everybody’s doing although that matters little to us, the point being that we know what IT is and we know TIME and we know that everything is really FINE.” Then he whispered, clutching my sleeve, sweating, “Now you just dig them in front. They have worries, they’re counting the miles, they’re thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they’ll get there—and all the time they’ll get there anyway, you see. But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won’t be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end. Listen! Listen! ‘Well now,’” he mimicked, “‘I don’t know—maybe we shouldn’t get gas in that station. I read recently in National Petroffious Petroleum News that this kind of gas has a great deal of O-Octane gook in it and someone once told me it even had semi-official high-frequency cock in it, and I don’t know, well I just don’t feel like it anyway . . .’ Man, you dig all this.” He was poking me furiously in the ribs to understand. I tried my wildest best. Bing, bang, it was all Yes! Yes! Yes! in the back seat and the people up front were mopping their brows with fright and wishing they’d never picked us up at the travel bureau. It was only the beginning, too.

  In Sacramento the fag slyly bought a room in a hotel and invited Dean and me to come up for a drink, while the couple went to sleep at relatives’, and in the hotel room Dean tried everything in the book to get money from the fag. It was insane. The fag began by saying he was very glad we had come along because he liked young men like us, and would we believe it, but he really didn’t like girls and had recently concluded an affair with a man in Frisco in which he had taken the male role and the man the female role. Dean plied him with businesslike questions and nodded eagerly. The fag said he would like nothing better than to know what Dean thought about all this. Warning him first that he had once been a hustler in his youth, Dean asked him how much money he had. I was in the bathroom. The fag became extremely sullen and I think suspicious of Dean’s final motives, turned over no money, and made vague promises for Denver. He kept counting his money and checking on his wallet. Dean threw up his hands and gave up. “You see, man, it’s better not to bother. Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken.” But he had sufficiently conquered the owner of the Plymouth to take over the wheel without remonstrance, and now we really traveled.

  We left Sacramento at dawn and were crossing the Nevada desert by noon, after a hurling passage of the Sierras that made the fag and the tourists cling to each other in the back seat. We were in front, we took over. Dean was happy again. All he needed was a wheel in his hand and four on the road. He talked about how bad a driver Old Bull Lee was and to demonstrate—“Whenever a huge big truck like that one coming loomed into sight it would take Bull infinite time to spot it, ’cause he couldn’t see, man, he can’t see.” He rubbed his eyes furiously to show. “And I’d say, ‘Whoop, look out, Bull, a truck,’ and he’d say, ‘Eh? what’s that you say, Dean?’ ‘Truck! truck!’ and at the very last moment he would go right up to the truck like this—” And Dean hurled the Plymouth head-on at the truck roaring our way, wobbled and hovered in front of it a moment, the truckdriver’s face growing gray before our eyes, the people in the back seat subsiding in gasps of horror, and swung away at the last moment. “Like that, you see, exactly like that, how bad he was.” I wasn’t scared at all; I knew Dean. The people in the back seat were speechless. In fact they were afraid to complain: God knew what Dean would do, they thought, if they should ever complain. He balled right across the desert in this manner, demonstrating various ways of how not to drive, how his father used to drive jalopies, how great drivers made curves, how bad drivers hove over too far in the beginning and had to scramble at the curve’s end, and so on. It was a hot, sunny afternoon. Reno, Battle Mountain, Elko, all the towns along the Nevada road shot by one after another, and at dusk we were in the Salt Lake flats with the lights of Salt Lake City infinitesimally glimmering almost a hundred miles across the mirage of the flats, twice showing, above and below the curve of the earth, one clear, one dim. I told Dean that the thing that bound us all together in this world was invisible, and to prove it pointed to long lines of telephone poles that curved off out of sight over the bend of a hundred miles of salt. His floppy bandage, all dirty now, shuddered in the air, his face was alight. “Oh yes, man, dear God, yes, yes!” Suddenly he stopped the car and collapsed. I turned and saw him huddled in the corner of the seat, sleeping. His face was down on his good hand, and the bandaged hand automatically and dutifully remained in the air.

  The people in the back seat sighed with relief. I heard them whispering mutiny. “We can’t let him drive any more, he’s absolutely crazy, they must have let him out of an asylum or something.”

  I rose to Dean’s defense and leaned back to talk to them. “He’s not crazy, he’ll be all right, and don’t worry about his driving, he’s the best in the world.”

  “I just can’t stand it,” said the girl in a suppressed, hysterical whisper. I sat back and enjoyed nightfall on the desert and waited for poorchild Angel Dean to wake up again. We were on a hill overlooking Salt Lake City’s neat patterns of light and he opened his eyes to the place in this spectral world where he was born, unnamed and bedraggled, years ago.

  “Sal, Sal, look, this is where I was born, think of it! People change, they eat meals year after year and change with every meal. EE! Look!” He was so excited it made me cry. Where would it all lead? The tourists insisted on driving the car the rest of the way to Denver. Okay, we didn’t care. We sat in the back and talked. But they got too tired in the morning and Dean took the wheel in the eastern Colorado desert at Craig. We had spent almost the entire night crawling cautiously over Strawberry Pass in Utah and lost a lot of time. They went to sleep. Dean headed pellmell for the mighty wall of Berthoud Pass that stood a hundred miles ahead on the roof of the world, a tremendous Gibraltarian door shrouded in clouds. He took Berthoud Pass like a June bug—same as at Tehachapi, cutting off the motor and floating it, passing everybody and never halting the rhythmic advance that the mountains themselves intended, till we overlooked the great hot pl
ain of Denver again—and Dean was home.

  It was with a great deal of silly relief that these people let us off the car at the corner of 27th and Federal. Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.

  6

  Now we had a number of circumstances to deal with in Denver, and they were of an entirely different order from those of 1947. We could either get another travel-bureau car at once or stay a few days for kicks and look for his father.

  We were both exhausted and dirty. In the john of a restaurant I was at a urinal blocking Dean’s way to the sink and I stepped out before I was finished and resumed at another urinal, and said to Dean, “Dig this trick.”

  “Yes, man,” he said, washing his hands at the sink, “it’s a very good trick but awful on your kidneys and because you’re getting a little older now every time you do this eventually years of misery in your old age, awful kidney miseries for the days when you sit in parks.”

  It made me mad. “Who’s old? I’m not much older than you are!”

  “I wasn’t saying that, man!”

  “Ah,” I said, “you’re always making cracks about my age. I’m no old fag like that fag, you don’t have to warn me about my kidneys.” We went back to the booth and just as the waitress set down the hot-roast-beef sandwiches—and ordinarily Dean would have leaped to wolf the food at once—I said to cap my anger, “And I don’t want to hear any more of it.” And suddenly Dean’s eyes grew tearful and he got up and left his food steaming there and walked out of the restaurant. I wondered if he was just wandering off forever. I didn’t care, I was so mad—I had flipped momentarily and turned it down on Dean. But the sight of his uneaten food made me sadder than anything in years. I shouldn’t have said that . . . he likes to eat so much . . . He’s never left his food like this . . . What the hell. That’s showing him, anyway.

  Dean stood outside the restaurant for exactly five minutes and then came back and sat down. “Well,” I said, “what were you doing out there, knotting up your fists? Cursing me, thinking up new gags about my kidneys?”

  Dean mutely shook his head. “No, man, no, man, you’re all completely wrong. If you want to know, well—”

  “Go ahead, tell me.” I said all this and never looked up from my food. I felt like a beast.

  “I was crying,” said Dean.

  “Ah hell, you never cry.”

  “You say that? Why do you think I don’t cry?”

  “You don’t die enough to cry.” Every one of these things I said was a knife at myself. Everything I had ever secretly held against my brother was coming out: how ugly I was and what filth I was discovering in the depths of my own impure psychologies.

  Dean was shaking his head. “No, man, I was crying.”

  “Go on, I bet you were so mad you had to leave.”

  “Believe me, Sal, really do believe me if you’ve ever believed anything about me.” I knew he was telling the truth and yet I didn’t want to bother with the truth and when I looked up at him I think I was cockeyed from cracked intestinal twistings in my awful belly. Then I knew I was wrong.

  “Ah, man, Dean, I’m sorry, I never acted this way before with you. Well, now you know me. You know I don’t have close relationships with anybody any more—I don’t know what to do with these things. I hold things in my hand like pieces of crap and don’t know where to put it down. Let’s forget it.” The holy con-man began to eat. “It’s not my fault! It’s not my fault!” I told him. “Nothing in this lousy world is my fault, don’t you see that? I don’t want it to be and it can’t be and it won’t be.”

  “Yes, man, yes, man. But please harken back and believe me.”

  “I do believe you, I do.” This was the sad story of that afternoon. All kinds of tremendous complications arose that night when Dean and I went to stay with the Okie family.

  These had been neighbors of mine in my Denver solitude of two weeks before. The mother was a wonderful woman in jeans who drove coal trucks in winter mountains to support her kids, four in all, her husband having left her years before when they were traveling around the country in a trailer. They had rolled all the way from Indiana to LA in that trailer. After many a good time and a big Sunday-afternoon drunk in crossroads bars and laughter and guitar-playing in the night, the big lout had suddenly walked off across the dark field and never returned. Her children were wonderful. The eldest was a boy, who wasn’t around that summer but in a camp in the mountains; next was a lovely thirteen-year-old daughter who wrote poetry and picked flowers in the fields and wanted to grow up and be an actress in Hollywood, Janet by name; then came the little ones, little Jimmy who sat around the campfire at night and cried for his “pee-tater” before it was half roasted, and little Lucy who made pets of worms, horny toads, beetles, and anything that crawled, and gave them names and places to live. They had four dogs. They lived their ragged and joyous lives on the little new-settlement street and were the butt of the neighbors’ semi-respectable sense of propriety only because the poor woman’s husband had left her and because they littered up the yard. At night all the lights of Denver lay like a great wheel on the plain below, for the house was in that part of the West where the mountains roll down foothilling to the plain and where in primeval times soft waves must have washed from sealike Mississippi to make such round and perfect stools for the island-peaks like Evans and Pike and Longs. Dean went there and of course he was all sweats and joy at the sight of them, especially Janet, but I warned him not to touch her, and probably didn’t have to. The woman was a great man’s woman and took to Dean right away but she was bashful and he was bashful. She said Dean reminded her of the husband gone. “Just like him—oh, he was a crazy one, I tell ya!”

  The result was uproarious beer-drinking in the littered living room, shouting suppers, and booming Lone Ranger radio. The complications rose like clouds of butterflies: the woman—Frankie, everyone called her—was finally about to buy a jalopy as she had been threatening to do for years, and had recently come into a few bucks toward one. Dean immediately took over the responsibility of selecting and naming the price of the car, because of course he wanted to use it himself so as of yore he could pick up girls coming out of high school in the afternoons and drive them up to the mountains. Poor innocent Frankie was always agreeable to anything. But she was afraid to part with her money when they got to the car lot and stood before the salesman. Dean sat right down in the dust of Alameda Boulevard and beat his fists on his head. “For a hunnerd you can’t get anything better!” He swore he’d never talk to her again, he cursed till his face was purple, he was about to jump in the car and drive it away anyway. “Oh these dumb dumb dumb Okies, they’ll never change, how com-pletely and how unbelievably dumb, the moment it comes time to act, this paralysis, scared, hysterical, nothing frightens em more than what they want—it’s my father my father my father all over again!”

  Dean was very excited that night because his cousin Sam Brady, was meeting us at a bar. He was wearing a clean T-shirt and beaming all over. “Now listen, Sal, I must tell you about Sam—he’s my cousin.”

  “By the way, have you looked for your father?”

  “This afternoon, man, I went down to Jiggs’ Buffet where he used to pour draft beer in tender befuddlement and get hell from the boss and go staggering out—no—and I went to the old barber-shop next to the Windsor—no, not there—old fella told me he thought he was—imagine!—working in a railroad gandy-dancing cookshack or sumpin for the Boston and Maine in New England! But I don’t believe him, they make up fractious stories for a dime. Now listen to hear. In my childhood Sam Brady my close cousin was my absolute hero. He used to bootleg whisky from the mountains and one time he had a tremendous fist fight with his brother that lasted two hours in the yard and had the women screaming and terrified. We used to sleep together. The one man in the family who took tender concern for me. And tonight I’m going to see him again for the first time in seven years, he just g
ot back from Missouri.”

  “And what’s the pitch?”

  “No pitch, man, I only want to know what’s been happening in the family—I have a family, remember—and most particularly, Sal, I want him to tell me things that I’ve forgotten in my childhood. I want to remember, remember, I do!” I never saw Dean so glad and excited. While we waited for his cousin in the bar he talked to a lot of younger downtown hipsters and hustlers and checked on new gangs and goings-on. Then he made inquiries after Marylou, since she’d been in Denver recently. “Sal, in my young days when I used to come to this corner to steal change off the newsstand for bowery beef stew, that rough-looking cat you see out there standing had nothing but murder in his heart, got into one horrible fight after another, I remember his scars even, till now years and y-e-a-r-s of standing on the corner have finally softened him and chastened him ragely, here completely he’s become sweet and willing and patient with everybody, he’s become a fixture on the corner, you see how things happen?”

  Then Sam arrived, a wiry, curly-haired man of thirty-five with work-gnarled hands. Dean stood in awe before him. “No,” said Sam Brady, “I don’t drink any more.”

  “See? See?” whispered Dean in my ear. “He doesn’t drink any more and he used to be the biggest whiskyleg in town, he’s got religion now, he told me over the phone, dig him, dig the change in a man—my hero has become so strange.” Sam Brady was suspicious of his young cousin. He took us out for a spin in his old rattly coupe and immediately he made his position clear in regard to Dean.