by Jack Kerouac
Then I got fever and became delirious and unconscious. Dysentery. I looked up out of the dark swirl of my mind and I knew I was on a bed eight thousand feet above sea level, on a roof of the world, and I knew that I had lived a whole life and many others in the poor atomistic husk of my flesh, and I had all the dreams. And I saw Dean bending over the kitchen table. It was several nights later and he was leaving Mexico City already. “What you doin, man?” I moaned.
“Poor Sal, poor Sal, got sick. Stan’ll take care of you. Now listen to hear if you can in your sickness: I got my divorce from Camille down here and I’m driving back to Inez in New York tonight if the car holds out.”
“All that again?” I cried.
“All that again, good buddy. Gotta get back to my life. Wish I could stay with you. Pray I can come back.” I grabbed the cramps in my belly and groaned. When I looked up again bold noble Dean was standing with his old broken trunk and looking down at me. I didn’t know who he was any more, and he knew this, and sympathized, and pulled the blanket over my shoulders. “Yes, yes, yes, I’ve got to go now. Old fever Sal, good-by.” And he was gone. Twelve hours later in my sorrowful fever I finally came to understand that he was gone. By that time he was driving back alone through those banana mountains, this time at night.
When I got better I realized what a rat he was, but then I had to understand the impossible complexity of his life, how he had to leave me there, sick, to get on with his wives and woes. “Okay, old Dean, I’ll say nothing.”
part five
Dean drove from Mexico City and saw Victor again in Gregoria and pushed that old car all the way to Lake Charles, Louisiana, before the rear end finally dropped on the road as he had always known it would. So he wired Inez for airplane fare and flew the rest of the way. When he arrived in New York with the divorce papers in his hands, he and Inez immediately went to Newark and got married; and that night, telling her everything was all right and not to worry, and making logics where there was nothing but inestimable sorrowful sweats, he jumped on a bus and roared off again across the awful continent to San Francisco to rejoin Camille and the two baby girls. So now he was three times married, twice divorced, and living with his second wife.
In the fall I myself started back home from Mexico City and one night just over Laredo border in Dilley, Texas, I was standing on the hot road underneath an arc-lamp with the summer moths smashing into it when I heard the sound of footsteps from the darkness beyond, and lo, a tall old man with flowing white hair came clomping by with a pack on his back, and when he saw me as he passed, he said, “Go moan for man,” and clomped on back to his dark. Did this mean that I should at last go on my pilgrimage on foot on the dark roads around America? I struggled and hurried to New York, and one night I was standing in a dark street in Manhattan and called up to the window of a loft where I thought my friends were having a party. But a pretty girl stuck her head out the window and said, “Yes? Who is it?”
“Sal Paradise,” I said, and heard my name resound in the sad and empty street.
“Come on up,” she called. “I’m making hot chocolate.” So I went up and there she was, the girl with the pure and innocent dear eyes that I had always searched for and for so long. We agreed to love each other madly. In the winter we planned to migrate to San Francisco, bringing all our beat furniture and broken belongings with us in a jalopy panel truck. I wrote to Dean and told him. He wrote back a huge letter eighteen thousand words long, all about his young years in Denver, and said he was coming to get me and personally select the old truck himself and drive us home. We had six weeks to save up the money for the truck and began working and counting every cent. And suddenly Dean arrived anyway, five and a half weeks in advance, and nobody had any money to go through with the plan.
I was taking a walk in the middle of the night and came back to my girl to tell her what I thought about during my walk. She stood in the dark little pad with a strange smile. I told her a number of things and suddenly I noticed the hush in the room and looked around and saw a battered book on the radio. I knew it was Dean’s high-eternity-in-the-afternoon Proust. As in a dream I saw him tiptoe in from the dark hall in his stocking feet. He couldn’t talk any more. He hopped and laughed, he stuttered and fluttered his hands and said, “Ah—ah—you must listen to hear.” We listened, all ears. But he forgot what he wanted to say. “Really listen—ahem. Look, dear Sal—sweet Laura—I’ve come—I’m gone—but wait—ah yes.” And he stared with rocky sorrow into his hands. “Can’t talk no more—do you understand that it is—or might be—But listen!” We all listened. He was listening to sounds in the night. “Yes!” he whispered with awe. “But you see—no need to talk any more—and further.”
“But why did you come so soon, Dean?”
“Ah,” he said, looking at me as if for the first time, “so soon, yes. We—we’ll know—that is, I don’t know. I came on the railroad pass—cabooses—old hard-bench coaches—Texas—played flute and wooden sweet potato all the way.” He took out his new wooden flute. He played a few squeaky notes on it and jumped up and down in his stocking feet. “See?” he said. “But of course, Sal, I can talk as soon as ever and have many things to say to you in fact with my own little bangtail mind I’ve been reading and reading this gone Proust all the way across the country and digging a great number of things I’ll never have TIME to tell you about and we STILL haven’t talked of Mexico and our parting there in fever—but no need to talk. Absolutely, now, yes?”
“All right, we won’t talk.” And he started telling the story of what he did in LA on the way over in every possible detail, how he visited a family, had dinner, talked to the father, the sons, the sisters—what they looked like, what they ate, their furnishings, their thoughts, their interests, their very souls; it took him three hours of detailed elucidation, and having concluded this he said, “Ah, but you see what I wanted to REALLY tell you—much later—Arkansas, crossing on train—playing flute—play cards with boys, my dirty deck—won money, blew sweet-potato solo—for sailors. Long long awful trip five days and five nights just to SEE you, Sal.”
“What about Camille?”
“Gave permission of course—waiting for me. Camille and I all straight forever-and-ever . . .”
“And Inez?”
“I—I—I want her to come back to Frisco with me live other side of town—don’t you think? Don’t know why I came,” Later he said in a sudden moment of gaping wonder, “Well and yes, of course, I wanted to see your sweet girl and you—glad of you—love you as ever.” He stayed in New York three days and hastily made preparations to get back on the train with his railroad passes and again recross the continent, five days and five nights in dusty coaches and hard-bench crummies, and of course we had no money for a truck and couldn’t go back with him. With Inez he spent one night explaining and sweating and fighting, and she threw him out. A letter came for him, care of me. I saw it. It was from Camille. “My heart broke when I saw you go across the tracks with your bag. I pray and pray you get back safe. .. . I do want Sal and his friend to come and live on the same street. .. . I know you’ll make it but I can’t help worrying—now that we’ve decided everything. .. . Dear Dean, it’s the end of the first half of the century. Welcome with love and kisses to spend the other half with us. We all wait for you. [Signed] Camille, Amy, and Little Joanie.” So Dean’s life was settled with his most constant, most embittered, and best-knowing wife Camille, and I thanked God for him.
The last time I saw him it was under sad and strange circumstances. Remi Boncœur had arrived in New York after having gone around the world several times in ships. I wanted him to meet and know Dean. They did meet, but Dean couldn’t talk any more and said nothing, and Remi turned away. Remi had gotten tickets for the Duke Ellington concert at the Metropolitan Opera and insisted Laura and I come with him and his girl. Remi was fat and sad now but still the eager and formal gentleman, and he wanted to do things the right way, as he emphasized. So he got his bookie to drive us
to the concert in a Cadillac. It was a cold winter night. The Cadillac was parked and ready to go. Dean stood outside the windows with his bag, ready to go to Penn Station and on across the land.
“Good-by, Dean,” I said. “I sure wish I didn’t have to go to the concert.”
“D’you think I can ride to Fortieth Street with you?” he whispered. “Want to be with you as much as possible, m’boy, and besides it’s so durned cold in this here New Yawk . . .” I whispered to Remi. No, he wouldn’t have it, he liked me but he didn’t like my idiot friends. I wasn’t going to start all over again ruining his planned evenings as I had done at Alfred’s in San Francisco in 1947 with Roland Major.
“Absolutely out of the question, Sal!” Poor Remi, he had a special necktie made for this evening; on it was painted a replica of the concert tickets, and the names Sal and Laura and Remi and Vicki, the girl, together with a series of sad jokes and some of his favorite sayings such as “You can’t teach the old maestro a new tune.”
So Dean couldn’t ride uptown with us and the only thing I could do was sit in the back of the Cadillac and wave at him. The bookie at the wheel also wanted nothing to do with Dean. Dean, ragged in a motheaten overcoat he brought specially for the freezing temperatures of the East, walked off alone, and the last I saw of him he rounded the corner of Seventh Avenue, eyes on the street ahead, and bent to it again. Poor little Laura, my baby, to whom I’d told everything about Dean, began almost to cry.
“Oh, we shouldn’t let him go like this. What’ll we do?”
Old Dean’s gone, I thought, and out loud I said, “He’ll be all right.” And off we went to the sad and disinclined concert for which I had no stomach whatever and all the time I was thinking of Dean and how he got back on the train and rode over three thousand miles over that awful land and never knew why he had come anyway, except to see me.
So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.
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KEROUAC IN HARDCOVER (editor’s choice)
ON THE ROAD
Hailed by The New York Times as the most beautifully executed, the clearest, and the most important utterance yet of the Beat Generation, On the Road is the kind of book people read, reread, and take to heart. Experience anew the classic story that broke open conformist 1950s America. This beautiful hardcover edition has been published to celebrate On the Road’s fortieth anniversary and makes an ideal gift or complement to the old battered paperback edition fans now own.
ISBN 0-670-87478-7
SOME OF THE DHARMA
Written at the height of Kerouac’s commitment to Buddhism, Some of the Dharma confirms that he was not only “on the road” but also “on the path.” Begun as reading notes for Allen Ginsberg, the book evolved into a vast and all-encompassing work of experimental non-fiction into which Kerouac poured his life, incorporating poems, haiku, prayers, journal entries, meditations, fragments of letters, ideas about writing, overheard conversations, sketches, blues, and more. An intricate word mosaic, it is visually complex: each page is unique, filled with patterns and interlocking pieces of text.
ISBN 0-670-84877-8
LOOK FOR THESE CLASSICS BY THE BEAT GENERATION’S ANGEL-HEADED HIPSTER
□ BIG SUR
“A humane, precise account of the extraordinary ravages of alcohol delirium tremens on Kerouac. .. . Here we meet San Francisco’s poets & recognize hero Dean Moriarty ten years after On the Road. .. . Here at the peak of his suffering, humorous genius, Kerouac wrote through his misery to end with ‘Sea,’ a brilliant poem appended on the hallucinatory Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur.”—Alien Ginsberg
ISBN 0-14-016812-5
□ THE DHARMA BUMS
Two ebullient young men search for Truth the Zen way: From yabyum and poetry in Berkeley, Marin County, and San Francisco, to solitude in the High Sierras and a vigil atop Desolation Peak in Washington State. Published just a year after Kerouac’s On the Road put the Beat Generation on the literary map, The Dharma Bums helped launch the “rucksack revolution.” ISBN 0-14-004252-0
□ JACK KEROUAC
Selected Letters: 1940—1956
Edited by Ann Charters
Written between 1940, when Kerouac was a freshman at college, and 1956, immediately before his leap into celebrity with the publication of On the Road, these personal, truthful, and mesmerizing letters offer valuable insights into his family life, friendships, travels, love affairs, and literary apprenticeship. ISBN 0-14-023444-6
□ ON THE ROAD
Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty roar across America in the novel that defined the Beat Generation and changed the course of American writing. “The Huckleberry Finn of the mid-twentieth century.” (The New York Times Book Review) ISBN 0-14-004259-8
□ THE PORTABLE JACK KEROUAC
Edited by Ann Charters
Planned by the author before his death and completed by biographer Ann Charters, this anthology makes clear the ambition and accomplishment of Kerouac’s work. It presents selections from the “Legend of Duluoz” novels in chronological order, and also includes poetry, letters, and essays on Buddhism, writing, and the Beat Generation.
ISBN 0-14-017819-8
□ TRISTESSA
Allen Ginsberg described this gem of a short novel as “A narrative meditation studying a hen, a rooste
r, a dove, a cat, a chihuahua dog, family meat, and a ravishing, ravished junky lady, first in their crowded bedroom, then out to drunken streets, taco stands, & pads at dawn in Mexico City slums.” ISBN 0-14-016811-7
