Atop an Underwood (19 page)

 

Hello, this is Jack Kerouac F.P., a new writer.

F.P. stands for furious poet.

Here are sixty little old stories for you to study at your leisure. I have made them short in order to augment their dignity as regards to fullness and completeness. Also, you will most likely go a little more slowly in your reading of them, due to the fact that you will feel 59 stories ahead of you the moment you start reading the first, and 58 stories ahead of you the moment you start reading the second, and all that. There is a kind of mute sanctity to a story, and if you have to read enough of them, you will no doubt take it a bit slow and not try to gobble everything up in one night, idiotically, like Clifton Fadiman, who I maintain has never read a book in his life.

I am making a drive for slower and finer reading.

Try it. You will find that it pays more, fills you with respect for the world of letters, which is another department of my drive.

Try it now. Read this slowly and religiously. I am making a drive toward slower and more religious reading. You will find, as you go along, that I am also making a drive toward a whole mess of other things.

Jack Kerouac F.P.
Harcourt, Brace & Co. New York (!)

To talk like Albert Halper once did, I've held down a lot of good jobs in my day.

The best job I ever had was in Connecticut. As you will presently know, I do not like to work, or to be nearer the truth, I do not like to surrender the hours and minutes of my life to anyone, let alone a fogy old employer. I rather like the idea of having all my hours to myself: eating a fudge sundae, watching a movie, sleeping on my couch, singing in the bathroom, studying the woods, kidding around with a girl, playing cards lazily, writing, etc. All kinds of stuff that America brands “shiftless,” at one time or another.

I am a shiftless fellow myself, you know. I am rather proud of that. Perhaps I might even lay a claim, in all seriousness and in due gravity, to being the most shiftless man in the world. This is because I have been bungling things up all my life, happily, and my conscience is clear. I am a thorough bungler.

Now, this job I held down in Connecticut was ideal. It called for about six hours of work per day, but the way I did it, it called for only an hour a day. I was a salesman, and instead of soliciting these people with white fences around their little homes, I preferred to stuff their mailboxes with leaflets, quietly tip-toeing so that I might not disturb them. It is against my inner principles to go up to a beautiful little home and harbor any solicitation in my heart.

I absolutely refuse to bother these housewives, and therefore I took great pains not to disturb them, hoping inside that the company would tolerate my incapability to actually sell for a least another two weeks. So I went from door to door, as they say, stuffing mailboxes with leaflets and creeping down the steps. Once I got caught. A housewife espied me sneaking off and captured me.

“Yes?”

“Oh, nothing,” I smiled. “I'm just distributing samples and stuff.” I had the interests of the company well at heart, I assure you sincerely, but I also had the interests of these private lives at heart. However, this was one grand exception.

“Come here,” she said, “and tell me all about it.”

I spent a whole hour listening to her tell of her son, who was lazy, and her daughter, who was very athletic and played basketball. I liked the part about her son. He sounded like a swell guy, and undoubtedly this house contained much fine humanity that I was missing. But the woman talked about a lot of other things, and I got bored fast. I left, and was so exhausted with the morning's work, that I retired to the forest.

That was the nice part about this Connecticut job. After my daily hour's work, I used to retire to my nook in the forest, and would lie there for hours, studying the woods and watching the sky. It was a stone's throw from an airport, but whenever an airplane roared across the sky above me, obstructing my view of the clouds, etc. I ignored it and passed it off as a bad job by man. I also studied the fallen leaves, and watched them sail off from the trees one by one. You see, it was October, and the ground was warm, dry, almost choking. It was an emotional experience for me of great consequence. That is so, because I will never forget it. It was a swell job.

One afternoon, I wasn't alone studying the forest. There was a girl with me, and she was all mixed up about the stuff I was saying. It was nothing; I was only trying to teach her to see, with her eyes. She watched the airplanes, but I ignored them completely. I am not used to them yet, but I suppose I will have to soon.

It was a swell job. It contained just the right amount of forest-studying time for me. . . . . almost all day. As you see, the girl was part of my curriculum. I will even go as far as to say that I am quite a lover of girls, and am vexed plenty of times by the problem which they offer me, and all mankind. But I will overcome that, too.

Anyway, that was my job, and a good one too. It was the greatest job I ever held down, because I got a lot out of it, which is the utilitarian way of judging things, no? My conscience, is it necessary to repeat, was clear, and is still clear. As a bell. I am the world champ bungler, except when it comes to Pity and Love.

But we'll go into that later. Pity and Love have nothing to do with this, the greatest job I ever had, and even perhaps, the greatest job of all time in all the world itself.

Everybody knows about Radio City, with its beautiful stage shows, its tremendous organ music, its fine moving pictures, the immense sweep of its interior architecture, the deep lushness of its lobbies, the magnificent oil paintings hanging from majestic walls, the tall trim ushers, the luxuriously plushed seats with plenty of arm space, the efficient air cooling system, and above all that odor, the odor and savor of abundance, wealth, opulence—that odor of luxury, “the best that money can buy,” the smells that come radiating from large, ample, and luxuriant things, the faint suggestions of massive squat comfort that things of wealth will create in the mind.

Well, the Crown is also a theatre, and it is located on Middlesex Street in Lowell, Mass., my old home town. The Crown, in my day, was infested with rats upstairs, but we used to ignore them and concentrate on the movies. It was cheaper to sit upstairs, and we went up there rats or no rats.

Well, just a few years ago when my gang and myself were just about growing up to be men, we used to go to the Crown every Sunday afternoon to see the double feature. Henry used to put on his green suit and ring, and that's when he would flash his gold teeth. It was then we called him Kid Faro. The rest of the gang would also attire itself nattily; there was Kid Faro, myself, Fouch, Freddie, and Salvey.

Before we went in for the afternoon's performance in the Crown theatre, we used to buy a Mr. Goodbar in the store across the street, or perhaps go to the White Tower just down a block for a nickel box of ice cream. Kid Faro used to buy a bar of candy, the aforementioned Mr. Goodbar, and when I had my ice cream finished in the movie, I would usually ask him for some of his sweetmeat. Kid Faro used to proffer me a chocolate-covered peanut, or at best, a small corner of the bar. Kid Faro knew his onions.

Well, the show always bored us, naturally. We were all about 17 years old. We would watch the horses ride across the scene, and the cowboys turn in their saddles to shoot. It was always the same thing. But somehow or other, every Sunday afternoon, the five of us would dress up nattily and stroll down to the Crown for a double feature, ten cents. I guess, way down deep, that we all knew that this was the thing. This was it, and we should not lose it. We all dressed up and moseyed down to the Crown, five American boys walking down the street beneath the telephone-wires, past the package stores and second-hand stores and laundries and variety stores and closed barrooms and drugstores and restaurants. Five American young men, walking down the street on a Sunday afternoon, talking, walking past the houses and things of the city, of the state, of the country; walking along toward the Crown. It sure was the thing.

Sometimes we would raise hell in there, on the second floor where the rats used to be when we were only so high. We would yell out as loud as we could. Fouch had a specialty of his own. He would yell out this word with his resounding voice: “Aaah-ooh-way-braasshh!!” It was supposed to indicate the flatulence of a huge fat Wall Street financier, but only the five of us knew that. The rest of the people in the Crown just laughed because it sounded whacky anyway. But we laughed even louder. I pulled it a couple of times myself, and let me tell you, it was great, sitting up there on the second floor of the Crown and shouting: “Aah-ooh-way-braasshh!” and hearing girls snicker, fellows laugh, and the cop come running up the steps as best he could. The cop was about 70 years old, so we didn't have much to fear from his tottering quarter. The thing is, we never abused him. We just went to the Crown and sat down upstairs, sometimes watching the western badmen shoot it out, sometimes raising hell for the Americanism of it all.

It was the thing that got us ... the thing . . .

My folks once lived in a little cottage by the sea, about 150 years ago in Brittany, and just a few months ago in West Haven, Conn. The first day we moved into that little cottage by the sea, it was raining very heavily, greyly. My dad and myself were helping the movers rush the furniture into the house from the truck, which was parked in the mud in front of the cottage, the motor facing a lashing gale from the Sound, facing the great menace of monstrous rolling waves of grey water and spray. My mother stood in the parlor, huddled, watching us bring the things in, and looking out across the mud at the massive grey heave of the sea, listening to the boom and smack of the big waves against the seawall. “My,” I'll bet she said to herself, “what am I getting myself into?”

But it was all right. When the movers left to go get the second load of furniture, I put on my bathing trunks and walked across the mud, picking my feet tenderly among the pebbles, heading for the great menace of grey sea, unafraid, thrilled, furious with power, mad with the glory of the elements. I walked into the water and began to swim, rising high up with the crest of the waves, and then sinking way down into their greyblack valleys of water and foam; testing the salty spray, smashing my face and eyes onward into the great sea, swimming out and laughing aloud. I ploughed on, bobbing up and down in the play of the mighty waves, getting dizzy with the rise and fall of it, seeing the horizon in the grey rainy distance and then losing it in the face of a monster wave.

I put out for a boat which was anchored; a small rowboat, with the words “We're Here” painted on the bow. Well, I was there all right, and I scrambled aboard with some difficulty, because the little boat was heaving crazily, side to side, stern to stern, rolling motions, thrusts forward and back, then rolling again . . . . but I made it, and sat myself on the bow, facing the sea, facing the tremendous wind and rain which cut my face until I thought it would bleed.

I turned, and saw my mother back there on the porch of the little cottage by the sea; she was looking at me, waving with anxiety and fear. I gestured that everything was all right, made a motion which said: “Boy, this is fun!” But it was more than that, more than that.

Suddenly, looking at my mother back there on shore, looking out to sea at her son, looking out to sea where her son was afloat in the savage rage and roar of the tempest, a speck in the ocean's huge fury, it came to me that this had happened before in the lives of my people. It occurred to me that many a Kerouac mother had stood on the steps of a little thatched cottage in Brittany, over there on the cold Northwest coast of France, standing there and looking out to sea for her son, her son, her son lost in the tempest, her son lost in the storm of the sea. Oh, but it was strong, strong! The thought came to me and I gloried in it . . . . . I sat there and faced the smash of the gale, laughing, and thinking about the ancient Breton fishermen, of whom I was a descendant, who had been out to sea in a storm while their mothers stood on the porches of little cottages and looked out to sea for them, praying and waving their handkerchiefs and grieving, grieving. Man, but I was a Breton that day! Man but I was powerful. Man but my mother looked heroic, ancient, great and mighty, standing there in the rain and looking out to sea at her son.