On the Road

by Jack Kerouac

  “I won’t signify, Henry.”

  “Anybody signify with me, my nose opens up, I get mad enough to kill. You know why I been in jail all my life? Because I lost my temper when I was thirteen years old. I was in a movie with a boy and he made a crack about my mother—you know that dirty word—and I took out my jackknife and cut up his throat and woulda killed him if they hadn’t drug me off. Judge said, ‘Did you know what you were doing when you attacked your friend?’ ‘Yessir, Your Honor, I did, I wanted to kill the sonofabitch and still do.’ So I didn’t get no parole and went straight to reform school. I got piles too from sitting in solitary. Don’t ever go to a federal pen, they’re worstest. Sheet, I could talk all night it’s ben so long since I talked to somebody. You don’t know how good I feel coming out. You just sitting in that bus when I got on—riding through Terre Haute—what was you thinking?”

  “I was just sitting there riding.”

  “Me, I was singing. I sat down next to you ’cause I was afraid to set down next to any gals for fear I go crazy and reach under their dress. I gotta wait awhile.”

  “Another hitch in prison and you’ll be put away for life. You better take it easy from now.”

  “That’s what I intend to do, only trouble is m’nose opens up and I can’t tell what I’m doing.”

  He was on his way to live with his brother and sister-in-law; they had a job for him in Colorado. His ticket was bought by the feds, his destination the parole. Here was a young kid like Dean had been; his blood boiled too much for him to bear; his nose opened up; but no native strange saintliness to save him from the iron fate.

  “Be a buddy and watch m’nose don’t open up in Denver, will you, Sal? Mebbe I can get to my brother’s safe.”

  When we arrived in Denver I took him by the arm to Larimer Street to pawn the penitentiary suit. The old Jew immediately sensed what it was before it was half unwrapped. “I don’t want that damn thing here; I get them every day from the Canyon City boys.”

  All of Larimer Street was overrun with ex-cons trying to sell their prison-spun suits. Henry ended up with the thing under his arm in a paper bag and walked around in brand-new jeans and sports shirt. We went to Dean’s old Glenarm bar—on the way Henry threw the suit in an ashcan—and called up Tim Gray. It was evening now.

  “You?” chuckled Tim Gray. “Be right over.”

  In ten minutes he came loping into the bar with Stan Shephard. They’d both had a trip to France and were tremendously disappointed with their Denver lives. They loved Henry and bought him beers. He began spending all his penitentiary money left and right. Again I was back in the soft, dark Denver night with its holy alleys and crazy houses. We started hitting all the bars in town, roadhouses out on West Colfax, Five Points Negro bars, the works.

  Stan Shephard had been waiting to meet me for years and now for the first time we were suspended together in front of a venture. “Sal, ever since I came back from France I ain’t had any idea what to do with myself. Is it true you’re going to Mexico? Hot damn, I could go with you? I can get a hundred bucks and once I get there sign up for GI Bill in Mexico City College.”

  Okay, it was agreed, Stan was coming with me. He was a rangy, bashful, shock-haired Denver boy with a big con-man smile . and slow, easy-going Gary Cooper movements. “Hot damn!” he said and stuck his thumbs on his belt and ambled down the street, swaying from side to side but slowly. His grandfather was having it out with him. He had been opposed to France and now he was opposed to the idea of going to Mexico. Stan was wandering around Denver like a bum because of his fight with his grandfather. That night after we’d done all our drinking and restrained Henry from getting his nose opened up in the Hot Shoppe on Colfax, Stan scraggled off to sleep in Henry’s hotel room on Glenarm. “I can’t even come home late—my grandfather starts fighting with me, then he turns on my mother. I tell you, Sal, I got to get out of Denver quick or I’ll go crazy.”

  Well, I stayed at Tim Gray’s and then later Babe Rawlins fixed up a neat little basement room for me and we all ended up there with parties every night for a week. Henry vanished off to his brother’s and we never saw him again and never will know if anybody’s signified with him since and if they’ve put him away in an iron hall or if he busts his gaskets in the night free.

  Tim Gray, Stan, Babe, and I spent an entire week of afternoons in lovely Denver bars where the waitresses wear slacks and cut around with bashful, loving eyes, not hardened waitresses but waitresses that fall in love with the clientele and have explosive affairs and huff and sweat and suffer from one bar to another; and we spent the same week in nights at Five Points listening to jazz, drinking booze in crazy Negro saloons and gabbing till five o’clock in the morn in my basement. Noon usually found us reclined in Babe’s back yard among the little Denver kids who played cowboys and Indians and dropped on us from cherry trees in bloom. I was having a wonderful time and the whole world opened up before me because I had no dreams. Stan and I plotted to make Tim Gray come with us, but Tim was stuck to his Denver life.

  I was getting ready to go to Mexico when suddenly Denver Doll called me one night and said, “Well, Sal, guess who’s coming to Denver?” I had no idea. “He’s on his way already, I got this news from my grapevine. Dean bought a car and is coming out to join you.” Suddenly I had a vision of Dean, a burning shuddering frightful Angel, palpitating toward me across the road, approaching like a cloud, with enormous speed, pursuing me like the Shrouded Traveler on the plain, bearing down on me. I saw his huge face over the plains with the mad, bony purpose and the gleaming eyes; I saw his wings; I saw his old jalopy chariot with thousands of sparking flames shooting out from it; I saw the path it burned over the road; it even made its own road and went over the corn, through cities, destroying bridges, drying rivers. It came like wrath to the West. I knew Dean had gone mad again. There was no chance to send money to either wife if he took all his savings out of the bank and bought a car. Everything was up, the jig and all. Behind him charred ruins smoked. He rushed westward over the groaning and awful continent again, and soon he would arrive. We made hasty preparations for Dean. News was that he was going to drive me to Mexico.

  “Do you think he’ll let me come along?” asked Stan in awe.

  “I’ll talk to him,” I said grimly. We didn’t know what to expect. “Where will he sleep? What’s he going to eat? Are there any girls for him?” It was like the imminent arrival of Gargantua; preparations had to be made to widen the gutters of Denver and foreshorten certain laws to fit his suffering bulk and bursting ecstasies.

  3

  It was like an old-fashioned movie when Dean arrived. I was in Babe’s house in a golden afternoon. A word about the house. Her mother was away in Europe. The chaperon aunt was called Charity; she was seventy-five years old and spry as a chicken. In the Rawlins family, which stretched all over the West, she was continually shuttling from one house to another and making herself generally useful. At one time she’d had dozens of sons. They were all gone; they’d all abandoned her. She was old but she was interested in everything we did and said. She shook her head sadly when we took slugs of whisky in the living room. “Now you might go out in the yard for that, young man.” Upstairs—it was a kind of boarding house that summer—lived a guy called Tom who was hopelessly in love with Babe. He came from Vermont, from a rich family, they said, and had a career waiting for him there and everything, but he preferred being where Babe was. In the evenings he sat in the living room with his face burning behind a newspaper and every time one of us said anything he heard but made no sign. He particularly burned when Babe said something. When we forced him to put down the paper he looked at us with incalculable boredom and suffering. “Eh? Oh yes, I suppose so.” He usually said just that.

  Charity sat in her corner, knitting, watching us all with her birdy eyes. It was her job to chaperon, it was up to her to see nobody swore. Babe sat giggling on the couch. Tim Gray, Stan Shephard, and I sprawled around in chairs. Poor Tom suffered the
tortures. He got up, yawned, and said, “Well, another day another dollar, good night,” and disappeared upstairs. Babe had no use whatever for him as a lover. She was in love with Tim Gray; he wriggled like an eel out of her grasp. We were sitting around like this on a sunny afternoon toward suppertime when Dean pulled up in front in his jalopy and jumped out in a tweed suit with vest and watch chain.

  “Hup! hup!” I heard out on the street. He was with Roy Johnson, who’d just returned from Frisco with his wife Dorothy and was living in Denver again. So were Dunkel and Galatea Dunkel, and Tom Snark. Everybody was in Denver again. I went out on the porch. “Well, m’boy,” said Dean, sticking out his big hand, “I see everything is all right on this end of the stick. Hello hello hello,” he said to everybody. “Oh yes, Tim Gray, Stan Shephard, howd’y’do!” We introduced him to Charity. “Oh yass, howd’y’do. This is m’friend Roy Johnson here, was so kind as to accompany me, harrumph! egad! kaff! kaff! Major Hoople, sir,” he said, sticking out his hand to Tom, who stared at him. “Yass, yass. Well, Sal old man, what’s the story, when do we take off for Mexico? Tomorrow afternoon? Fine, fine. Ahem! And now, Sal, I have exactly sixteen minutes to make it to Ed Dunkel’s house, where I am about to recover my old railroad watch which I can pawn on Larimer Street before closing time, meanwhile buzzing very quickly and as thoroughly as time allows to see if my old man by chance may be in Jiggs’ Buffet or some of the other bars and then I have an appointment with the barber Doll always told me to patronize and I have not myself changed over the years and continue with that policy—kaff! kaff! At six o’clock sharp!—sharp, hear me?—I want you to be right here where I’ll come buzzing by to get you for one quick run to Roy Johnson’s house, play Gillespie and assorted bop records, an hour of relaxation prior to any kind of further evening you and Tim and Stan and Babe may have planned for tonight irrespective of my arrival which incidentally was exactly forty-five minutes ago in my old thirty-seven Ford which you see parked out there, I made it together with a long pause in Kansas City seeing my cousin, not Sam Brady but the younger one . . .” And saying all these things, he was busily changing from his suitcoat to T-shirt in the living room alcove just out of sight of everyone and transferring his watch to another pair of pants that he got out of the same old battered trunk.

  “And Inez?” I said. “What happened in New York?”

  “Officially, Sal, this trip is to get a Mexican divorce, cheaper and quicker than any kind. I’ve Camille’s agreement at last and everything is straight, everything is fine, everything is lovely and we know that we are now not worried about a single thing, don’t we, Sal?”

  Well, okay, I’m always ready to follow Dean, so we all bustled to the new set of plans and arranged a big night, and it was an unforgettable night. There was a party at Ed Dunkel’s brother’s house. Two of his other brothers are bus-drivers. They sat there in awe of everything that went on. There was a lovely spread on the table, cake and drinks. Ed Dunkel looked happy and prosperous. “Well, are you all set with Galatea now?”

  “Yessir,” said Ed, “I am sure. I’m about to go to Denver U, you know; me and Roy.”

  “What are you going to take up?”

  “Oh, sociology and all that field, you know. Say, Dean gets crazier every year, don’t he?”

  “He sure does.”

  Galatea Dunkel was there. She was trying to talk to somebody, but Dean held the whole floor. He stood and performed before Shephard, Tim, Babe, and myself, who all sat side by side in kitchen chairs along the wall. Ed Dunkel hovered nervously behind him. His poor brother was thrust into the background. “Hup! hup!” Dean was saying, tugging at his shirt, rubbing his belly, jumping up and down. “Yass, well—we’re all together now and the years have rolled severally behind us and yet you see none of us have really changed, that’s what so amazing, the dura—the dura—bitity—in fact to prove that I have here a deck of cards with which I can tell very accurate fortunes of all sorts.” It was the dirty deck. Dorothy Johnson and Roy Johnson sat stiffly in a corner. It was a mournful party. Then Dean suddenly grew quiet and sat in a kitchen chair between Stan and me and stared straight ahead with rocky doglike wonder and paid no attention to anybody. He simply disappeared for a moment to gather up more energy. If you touched him he would sway like a boulder suspended on a pebble on the precipice of a cliff. He might come crashing down or just sway rocklike. Then the boulder exploded into a flower and his face lit up with a lovely smile and he looked around like a man waking up and said, “Ah, look at all the nice people that are sitting here with me. Isn’t it nice! Sal, why, like I was tellin Min just t’other day, why, urp, ah, yes!” He got up and went across the room, hand outstretched to one of the bus-drivers in the party. “howd’y’do. My name is Dean Moriarty. Yes, I remember you well. Is everything all right? Well, well. Look at the lovely cake. Oh, can I have some? Just me? Miserable me?” Ed’s sister said yes. “Oh, how wonderful. People are so nice. Cakes and pretty things set out on a table and all for the sake of wonderful little joys and delights. Hmm, ah, yes, excellent, splendid, harrumph, egad!” And he stood swaying in the middle of the room, eating his cake and looking at everyone with awe. He turned and looked around behind him. Everything amazed him, everything he saw. People talked in groups all around the room, and he said, “Yes! That’s right!” A picture on the wall made him stiffen to attention. He went up and looked closer, he backed up, he stooped, he jumped up, he wanted to see from all possible levels and angles, he tore at his T-shirt in exclamation, “Damn!” He had no idea of the impression he was making and cared less. People were now beginning to look at Dean with maternal and paternal affection glowing in their faces. He was finally an Angel, as I always knew he would become; but like any Angel he still had rages and furies, and that night when we all left the party and repaired to the Windsor bar in one vast brawling gang, Dean became frantically and demoniacally and seraphically drunk.

  Remember that the Windsor, once Denver’s great Gold Rush hotel and in many respects a point of interest—in the big saloon downstairs bullet holes are still in the walls—had once been Dean’s home. He’d lived here with his father in one of the rooms upstairs. He was no tourist. He drank in this saloon like the ghost of his father; he slopped down wine, beer, and whisky like water. His face got red and sweaty and he bellowed and hollered at the bar and staggered across the dance-floor where honkytonkers of the West danced with girls and tried to play the piano, and he threw his arms around ex-cons and shouted with them in the uproar. Meanwhile everybody in our party sat around two immense tables stuck together. There were Denver D. Doll, Dorothy and Roy Johnson, a girl from Buffalo, Wyoming, who was Dorothy’s friend, Stan, Tim Gray, Babe, me, Ed Dunkel, Tom Snark, and several others, thirteen in all. Doll was having a great time: he took a peanut machine and set it on the table before him and poured pennies in it and ate peanuts. He suggested we all write something on a penny postcard and mail it to Carlo Marx in New York. We wrote crazy things. The fiddle music whanged in the Larimer Street night. “Isn’t it fun?” yelled Doll. In the men’s room Dean and I punched the door and tried to break it but it was an inch thick. I cracked a bone in my middle finger and didn’t even realize it till the next day. We were fumingly drunk. Fifty glasses of beer sat on our tables at one time. All you had to do was rush around and sip from each one. Canyon City ex-cons reeled and gabbled with us. In the foyer outside the saloon old former prospectors sat dreaming over their canes under the locking old clock. This fury had been known by them in greater days. Everything swirled. There were scattered parties everywhere. There was even a party in a castle to which we all drove—except Dean, who ran off elsewhere—and in this castle we sat at a great table in the hall and shouted. There were a swimming pool and grottoes outside. I had finally found the castle where the great snake of the world was about to rise up.

  Then in the late night it was just Dean and I and Stan Shephard and Tim Gray and Ed Dunkel and Tommy Snark in one car and everything ahead of us. We went to Mexi
can town, we went to Five Points, we reeled around. Stan Shephard was out of his mind with joy. He kept yelling, “Sonofabitch! Hot damn!” in a high squealing voice and slapping his knees. Dean was mad about him. He repeated everything Stan said and phewed and wiped the sweat off his face. “Are we gonna get our kicks, Sal, travelin down to Mexico with this cat Stan! Yes!” It was our last night in holy Denver, we made it big and wild. It all ended up with wine in the basement by candlelight, and Charity creeping around upstairs in her nightgown with a flashlight. We had a colored guy with us now, called himself Gomez. He floated around Five Points and didn’t give a damn. When we saw him, Tommy Snark called out. “Hey, is your name Johnny?”

  Gomez just backed up and passed us once more and said, “Now will you repeat what you said?”

  “I said are you the guy they call Johnny?”

  Gomez floated back and tried again. “Does this look a little more like him? Because I’m tryin my best to be Johnny but I just can’t find the way.”

  “Well, man, come on with us!” cried Dean, and Gomez jumped in and we were off. We whispered frantically in the basement so as not to create disturbance with the neighbors. At nine o’clock in the morning everybody had left except Dean and Shephard, who were still yakking like maniacs. People got up to make breakfast and heard strange subterranean voices saying, “Yes! Yes!” Babe cooked a big breakfast. The time was coming to scat off to Mexico.

  Dean took the car to the nearest station and had everything shipshape. It was a ’37 Ford sedan with the right-side door unhinged and tied on the frame. The right-side front seat was also broken, and you sat there leaning back with your face to the tattered roof. “Just like Min ’n’ Bill,” said Dean. “We’ll go coughing and bouncing down to Mexico; it’ll take us days and days.” I looked over the map: a total of over a thousand miles, mostly Texas, to the border at Laredo, and then another 767 miles through all Mexico to the great city near the cracked Isthmus and Oaxacan heights. I couldn’t imagine this trip. It was the most fabulous of all. It was no longer east-west, but magic south. We saw a vision of the entire Western Hemisphere rockribbing clear down to Tierra del Fuego and us flying down the curve of the world into other tropics and other worlds. “Man, this will finally take us to IT!” said Dean with definite faith. He tapped my arm. “Just wait and see. Hoo! Whee!”