Atop an Underwood (22 page)

How a poor little guy like Shorty has to throw up a barricade of gruffness in order to survive, altho he is in himself a gentle young man, altho he never washes his face . . . . . about your Randy Shepperton, the way he smiles and then wipes it off like lightning, leaving a worried face, haggard in the light; how he laughs hollowly, to make politeness, bores you because he is always making politeness; and above all, how he swallowed slowly when you told him the bad news, instead of seeming worried, he just stared blankly, poor kid, haggardly swallowing slowly in order to conceal all the fine things that I wish he'd broadcast in sincere swoops of the hand . . . . Tell about Fabe, and the way he throws up a front of dignity in front of his kid, little father and little son; how he loves to orate with a flourish, with a driving point . . . . . Tell about work-happy N., his nervous look, his bitchiness at times, his goodness at times . . . a little bit of everything in everything . . . . tell about how a piece of work mellows if you let it alone to study later . . . . . tell how it feels to go to bed hungry, how it feels to want a woman and not have one (Ho! they all know that!) . . . . tell, tell, tell . . . . . how a cheap whore can think she is better than you . . . . how a little slip of a skirt thinks she can change the entire weather, tissue, and color of your thought by the wiles of her scrawny self . . . . . my goodness . . . . tell of the hostess juke-boxes, and the dedications . . . a man walking into a tavern, saying hello Joe, everything fine and you begin to think that men are decent after all, but when he leaves, the others begin to talk about him, behind his back, and you realize that the Brotherhood of Mankind is dead, damn it . . . . tell, tell, tell . . . . tell also the sombre silver of November . . . . the smell of cordy rawnesses in doorways and the way the cold wind goes down your jersey, freezing your chest . . . . . tell of Halloween in your mouth, the wild black orange gibberings and the screeching fury and horror of the harvest frowse, the witch, the pumpkin lit by candle and dripping, the night is black and it is Halloween, rattle the window and rattle the knee . . . . . the legend of your progenitors . . . . . tell, tell, tell . . . . about the N.Y. Times book review, how trite it is in the main, how unimportant and smug it is, how disgusting it is in the end . . . how a young writer can go to town, but not forever . . . . tell of Xmas at home in Lowell, the snow falling in the street, padding feet, the lights in the window, blue, green, red; the smell of candies and nuts inside, the bitter gum smell of the tree, the gifts, sitting in the plush sofa of the parlor with a glass of dark port wine, watching the tree and thinking things over, looking at the tree with silent melancholia, thinking happily about Xmas at home and snow drifting down past the arc-light on the corner . . . . . Halper standing in a Manhattan doorway, cold, laughing in the snowfall . . . . Wolfe walking by the Boston Harbor, smelling the warehouse and the wharves, feeling food, voyage, thrill, clangor of the heart, Faust is back . . . . . tell of Saroyan waking up in the night across the Paramount, his hair freezing on his head, laughing at the walls, the snow falls in Manhattan . . . . . and above all tell of Kerouac walking in the streets of Lowell in the winter's night, looking up alleys illuminated by the round cold disc of the moon, knowing the clear screaming glint of star in winter, knowing the black black outline of squalid wooden porches in Lowell, Mass., dirty alleys, grimy back-porches black against the white moon of winter, narrow little alleys with solitary ashbarrels throwing a shadow on the frozen ground, walking up the long street, empty echo of steps on the frozen sidewalk, knowing the silence and beauty of winter midnight in Lowell slums ........ remember, Kerouac, to notice the thing that is New England in the winter, men riding by in a dirty grey ‘30 Essex, three of them in front on a very cold grey day, cords of wood on the back seat, the old car puffing and steaming in the dead cold New England winter afternoon .... that's it, the dead cold winter afternoon of New England .... dead cold greyness .... snow falling on Moody St., and the light from Rochette's diner, and the New Year's Eve 1939, Jack O' Diamonds, the Rex, Freddy, the snow, remember? Above all, Zaggie my child, remember the thing that counts, the great big thing that stands up alone and predominates shaggily, like a dead cold winter afternoon in grey raw New England, grey raw, raw ...

I am going to stress a new set of values, which people have been minimizing in importance up to now on account of their apparent unimportance as compared to the lofty ideas of economists, historians, scholars, etc. In actuality, I am going to show that this scale of values surpasses the supposedly magnanimous one; that it is actually the one which builds up the world and man to meet all the vicissitudes and trials which make up the day and age.

Howdy!

This is Jack Kerouac, speaking to you.

I have just returned to my little cheap room from a day's work, ostensibly speaking, and find things in great shape. The radiator is working, and outside it's cold and raw; the room untouched, for I have the only key and am completely the master of this certain portion of the earth, $4.50 per week. Only thing wrong with the whole affair is nights: there are bugs in the bed, and I have to scratch and rant and fever quite a bit. But I hope to get the bedbugs fed up with my blood, so that they will leave me alone some time. Then everything will be perfect, because I have my typewriter, paper, and plenty of good books in this room, plus my radio and the light bulb hanging down lighting up the whole place clearly, with the precision, might I venture, of cubic realism. Above all, there is myself in this room, wearing a red football sweatshirt, great brown crepesoled shoes, white football socks, green gabardine pants, ring on the right hand's small finger (10¢ ring); wallet with no money in it, some loose change, a half a bread and some slices of cheese; keys to the kingdom; paper, manuscripts, notes, books, typewriter, cigarette butts, toothpaste, towels, radiator heating well, and hidden behind my desk an old gas stove slimy with black grease, lards, and fat. On the wall, spots of grease. On the floor, old cigarette butts; on my bed, the oldest blanket in the world, in America at least; a face cloth hanging from the bureau drawer; my filling station suits piled against the bottom of the writing desk; the top of my writing desk a bit greasy, but not enough to disconcert; the smell of urine predominant, I believe; and outside my window, an alley grate covered with discarded boxes, wrapped-up swill, apple cores, various refuse; opposite that, a massive bleak red-brick wall rising to a small aperture of the Hartford sky at dusk, the windows sadly and luminously gray, shabbily drear, facing the ending day with phosphorescently haggard weariness; and then I pull down the old brown shade to hide this scene, as I turn to ply my life within this dreaded four-walled prison, the kingdom of the slave.

 

I will tell you what this is—my life at this moment. Just now, I was reading Halper on the bed, engrossed, hungry, eager, happy, very alone. I had a mirror beside me, in order to catch glimpses of any fleas that I suspected were playing about my hair, jumping from the filth of the room into myself, intruding into the private cleanliness of a clean young man from a clean home; I wanted to see them and kill them, but it turned out to be my imagination, and I wound up just looking at my face in the mirror. It was not at all handsome, I thought; it was wild, old—my hair horrifying and crazy, lines running down my face, and with my head on the pillow, it looked to me like the portrait of a dying man; a stubble of beard, and bright shining eyes, lines down the side of the face. There were no fleas, just my old face and old wild hair.

Then,' let us finish this up. What is this life? What is Hartford? Hartford is cold now, November 11, 1941; sombre silver November, the old father of October, older than time itself; cold on the streets, raw and wooden-like odors in the hallway of this cheap dive; but once you are inside the barrooms with their spittoons and booths with people in them, music from the juke-box, men playing pinball machines, all the fine rich heat of humanity under one roof laughing and laughing, and the smell of beer and food; now the music grows louder, my typewriter resounds through the flimsy walls, and they bring me a plate of hot powerful food and I water at the mouth. That, then, is Hartford; raw wooden-like doorways, biting wind in the streets, clear precise lights on Main Street, people hurrying by red-nosed and on the way to a real palpitating destination; the entrance to the taverns, and then the taverns themselves, the food steaming and glistening in the tavern light, music streaming love through your heart, blame it on the heart, because this is my life at this moment.

Then back to the room, slowly it begins to befriend me, too slowly, but slowly by all means; the silent eloquence of its objects and a lonely young man sits and thinks and smokes, and then turns to read Tolstoi and Halper and Lin Yutang and Wolfe and Saroyan, and then turns to his typewriter and goes on, the locomotive in his chest chugging faster and faster and getting heavier and heavier every moment.

Today is November 12th, 1941. It is my last day with this typewriter, and tomorrow I shall have to return it to the agency, because I have no money with which to renew the rental of the machine for another month.

Hell, they're taking away everything. Even myself.

You see, first I go hungry, and I am writing this at nine o'clock in the evening without having had any supper except some old bread and cheese. Secondly, I have no cigarettes, and my lungs are crying out for the strong body of smoke. (Will one or two of you readers slip me a spare butt on the sly?) Thirdly, they're going to take away the typewriter, and then I will be left alone in this room with nothing. You see, my heart resides in a typewriter, and I don't have a heart unless there's a typewriter somewhere nearby, with a chair in front of it and some blank sheets of paper.

They took my food, my drug, and my heart away. There is no man left to speak of except 180 pounds of bone and flesh. But I'll manage. Now this here is a simple story. This morning, I had four cents in my pocket, and was walking around South Hartford, freezing; and not having had any breakfast, I decided to chisel a penny from someone. I saw some workmen digging a ditch, but I kept on walking, ignoring them. I went into a drugstore, thinking up a clever sentence: “How about a four cent cup of coffee?” I knew what the reaction would be to that—the counterman would laugh heartily at the predicament of being one cent shy, and proceed to draw me a cup of steaming hot java. A good joke, this guy happened to be just one cent shy, but he had his wits about him. Ho ho.