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ON THE ROAD (excerpt from Part Two)
by Jack Kerouac (1957)
Chapter 6
It was drizzling and mysterious at the
beginning of our journey. I could see that it was all going to be one
big saga
of the mist. “Whooee!” yelled Dean. “Here we go!” And he hunched over
the wheel
and gunned her; he was back in his element, everybody could see that,
we were
all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense
behind
and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.
And we
moved! We flashed past the mysterious white signs in the night
somewhere in New
Jersey that say SOUTH (with an arrow) and WEST (with an arrow) and took
the
south one. New Orleans! It burned in our brains. From the dirty snows
of
“frosty fagtown New York” as Dean called
it, all the way to the greeneries and river smells of old New
Orleans at
the bottom of America: then west. Ed was in the back seat: Marylou and
Dean and
I sat in front and had the warmest talk about the goodness and joy of
life.
Dean suddenly became tender. “Now dammit, look here, all of you, we all
must
admit that everything is fine and there is no need
in the world to worry, and in fact we
should realize what it would mean to us to UNDERSTAND
that we’re not REALLY worried about
ANYTHING. Am I right?”. We all agreed. “Here
we go, we’re all together…What did we do in New York? Let’s forgive”.
We all
had our spats back there. “That’s behind us, merely by miles and inclinations. Now we’re heading down to
New Orleans to dig Old Bull Lee and ain’t that going to be kicks and
listen
will you to this old tenorman blow his top” – he shot up the radio
volume till
the car shuddered – “and listen to him
tell the story and put down true relaxation and knowledge.”
We all jumped to the music and agreed. The
purity of the road. The white line in the middle of the highway
unrolled and
hugged our left front tire as if glued to our groove. Dean hunched his
muscular
neck, T-shirted in the winter night, and blasted the car along. He
insisted I
drive through Baltimore for traffic practice: that was all right,
except he and
Marylou insisted on steering while they kissed and fooled around. It
was crazy:
the radio was on full blast. Dean beat drums on the dashboard till a
great sag
developed in it: I did too. The poor Hudson – the slow boat to China –
was
receiving her beating.
“Oh man, what kicks!” yelled Dean. “Now
Marylou, listen really, honey, you know that I’m capable of everything
at the
same time and I have unlimited energy – now in San Francisco we must go
on
living together. I know just the place for you – I’ll be home just a
cut-hair
less than every two day and for twelve hours at a stretch, and man,
you
know what we can do in twelve hours, darling. Meanwhile I’ll go right
on living
at Camille’s like nothin’, see, she won’t know. We can work it, we’ve
done it
before.” It was all right with Marylou, she was really out for
Camille’s scalp.
The understanding had been that Marylou would switch to me in Frisco,
but I now
began to see they were going to stick and I was going to be left alone
at the
other end of the continent. But why think about when all the golden
land’s
ahead of you and all kinds of unforeseen events wait lurking to
surprise you
and make you glad you’re alive to see?
We arrived in Washington at dawn. It was the day of Harry Truman’s
inauguration
for his second term. Great displays of war might were lined along
Pennsylvania
Avenue and we rolled by in our battered boat. There were B-29s, PT
boats,
artillery, all kind of war material that looked murderous in the snowy
grass:
the last thing was a regular small
ordinary lifeboat that looked pitiful and foolish. Dean slowed down to
lookk at
it: He kept shaking his head in awe. “What are these people up to?
Harry’s
sleeping somewhere in this town…Good old Harry…Man from Missouri, as I
am …
That must be his own boat.”
Dean went to sleep in the back seat and Dunkel
drove. We gave him specific
instructions to take it easy. No sooner were we snoring than he gunned
the car
up to eighty, bad bearings and all, and not only that but he made a
triple pass
at a spot where a cop was arguing with a motorist – he was in the
fourth
lane of a four-lane highway, going the
wrong way. Naturally, the cop took after us with his siren whining. We
were
stopped. He told us to follow him to
the station house. There was a mean cop in there who took an immediate
dislike
to Dean: he could smell jail all over him. He sent his cohort outdoors
to
question Marylou and me privately. They wanted to know how old Marylou
was,
they were trying to whip up a Mann Act idea. But she had her marriage
certificate. Then they took me aside alone and wanted to know who was
sleeping
with Marylou. “Her husband,” I said quite simply. They were curious.
Something
was fishy. They tried some amateur Sherlocking by asking the same
questions
twice, expecting us to make a slip. I said, “those two fellows are
going back
to work on the railroad in California, that is the short one’s wife,
and I’m a
friend on a two-week vacation from college”.
The cop smiled and said, “Yeah? Is this really
your own wallet?”
Finally the mean one inside fined Dean twentyfive
dollars. We
told them we only had forty to go all the way to the Coast: they said
that made
no difference to them. When Dean protested, the mean cop threatened to
take him
back to Pennsylvania and slap a special charge on him.
“What charge?”
“Never mind what charge. Don’t worry about that
wise guy.” We had to give them the twentyfive, but first Ed Dunkel,
that
culprit, offered to go to jail. Dean considered it. The cop was
infuriated: he
said, “If you let your partner go to jail I’m taking you back to
Pennsylvania
right now. You hear that?”. All we wanted to do was go. “Another
speeding
ticket in Virginia and you lose your car,” said the mean cop as a
parting
volley. Dean was red in the face. We drove off silently. It was just
like an
invitation to steal to take our trip money away from us. They knew we
were
broke and had no relatives on the road or to wire to for money. The
American
police are involved in psychological warfare against those Americans
who don’t
frighten them with imposing paper and threats. It’s a Victorian police
force;
it peers out of musty windows and wants
to inquire about everything, and can make crimes if crimes don’t
exist, to its satisfaction. “Nine lines of crime, one of boredom,” said Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Dean
was so mad he wanted to come back to Virginia and shoot the cop as soon
as he
had a gun.
“Pennsylvania!” he scoffed. “I wish I knew what
the charge was! Vag probably; take all my money and charge me vag.
Those guys
have it so damn easy. They’ll out and shoot if you complain, too.”
There was
nothing to do but get happy with ourselves again and forget about it.
When we
got through Richmond we began forgetting about it, and soon everything
was
okay.
Now we had fifteen dollars to go all the way.
We’d have to pick up hitchhikers and bum quarters off them for gas. In
the
Virginia wilderness suddenly we saw a man walking on the road. Dean
zoomed to a
stop. I looked back and said he was only a bum and probably didn’t have
a cent.
“We’ll just pick him up for kicks!” Dean
laughed. The man was a ragged, bespectacled mad type, walking along
reading a
paperbacked muddy book he’d found in a culvert
by the road. He got in the car and went right on reading; he was
incredibly filthy and covered with scabs. He said his name was Hyman
Solomon
and that he walked all over the USA, knocking and sometimes kicking at
Jewish
doors and demanding money: “Give me money to eat, I’m a Jew”.
He said it worked very well and that it was
coming to him. We asked him what he was reading. He didn’t know. He
didn’t
bother to look at the title page. He was only looking at the words, as
though
he had found the real Torah where it belonged, in the wilderness.
“See? See? See?” cackled Dean, poking my ribs.
“I told you it was kicks. Everybody’s kicks, man!” We carried Solomon
all the
way to Testament. My brother by now was in his new house on the other
side of
town. Here we were back on the long, bleak street with the railroad
track
running down the middle and the sad, sullen Southerners loping in front
of
hardware stores and five-and-tens.
Solomon said, “I see you people need a little
money to continue your journey. You wait for me and I’ll go hustle up a
few
dollars at a Jewish home and I’ll go along with you as far as Alabama”.
Dean
was all beside himself with happiness; he and I rushed off to buy bread
and
cheese spread for a lunch in the car. Marylou and Ed waited in the car.
We
spend two hours in Testament waiting for Hyman Solomon to show up; he
was
hustling for his bread somewhere in town, but we couldn’t see him. The
sun
began to grow red and late.
Solomon never showed up so we roared out of
Testament. “Now you see, Sal, God does exist, because we keep getting
hung-up
with this town, no matter what we try to do, and you noticed the
strange
Biblical name of it, and that strange Biblical character who made us
stop here
once more, and all things tied together all over like rain connecting
everybody
the world over by chain touch…” Dean rattled on like this: he was
overjoyed and
exuberant. He and I suddenly saw the whole country like an oyster for
us to
open; and the pearl was there, the pearl was there. Off we roared
south. We
picked up another hitchhiker. This was a sad young kid who said he had
an aunt
who owned a grocery store in Dunn, North Carolina, right outside
Fayetteville.
“When we get there can you bum a buck
off her? Right! Fine! Let’s go!” We were in Dunn in an hour, at dusk.
We drove
to where the kid said his aunt had the grocery store. It was a said
little
street that dead-ended at a factory wall. There was a grocery store but
there
was no aunt. We wandered what the kid was talking about. We asked him
how far
he was going. He didn’t know. It was a big hoax: once upon a time, in
some lost
back-alley adventure, he had seen the grocery store in Dunn, and it was
the
first story that popped into his disordered, feverish mind. We bought
him a hot
dog, but Dean said we couldn’t take him along because we needed room to
sleep
and room for hitchhikers who could buy a little gas. This was sad but
true.We
left him in Dunn at nightfall.
I drove through South Carolina and beyond
Macon, Georgia, as Dean and Marylou, and Ed slept. All alone in the
night I had
my own thoughts and held the car to the white line in the holy road.
What was I doing? Where was I going? I’d soon
find out. I got dog-tired beyond Macon and woke up Dean to resume. We
got out
of the car for air and suddenly all around us was fragrant green grass
and the
smell of fresh manure and warm waters. “We’re in the South! We’ve left
the
winter!” Faint daybreak illuminated green shoots by the side of the
road. I
took a deep breath: a locomotive howled across the darkness.
Mobile-bound. So
were we. I took off my shirt and exulted. Ten miles down the road Dean
drove
into a filling station with the motor off, noticed that the attendant
was fast
asleep at the desk, jumped out, quietly filled the gas tank, saw to it
the bell
didn’t ring, and rolled off like an Arab with a five dollar tankful of
gas for
our pilgrimage.
I slept and woke up to the crazy exultant
sound of music and Dean and Marylou
talking and the green land rolling by.
“Where are we?”.“Just
passed the tip of Florida, man –
Flomaton, it’s called.” Florida! We were rolling down to the coastal
plain and
Mobile; up ahead were great soaring
clouds of the Gulf of Mexico. It was only thirty-two hours since we’d
said
good-by to everybody in the dirty snows of the North. We stopped at a
gas
station, and there Dean and Marylou played piggyback around the tanks
and
Dunkel went inside and stole three packs of cigarettes without trying.
We were
fresh out. Rolling into Mobile over the long highway, we all took our
winter
clothes off and enjoyed the Southern temperature. This was when Dean started telling his life story and when,
beyond
Mobile, he came upon an obstruction of wrangling cars at a crossroads
and
instead of slipping around them just balled right through the driveaway
of a
gas station and went right on without relaxing his steady continental
seventy.
We left gaping faces behind us. He went right on with his tale. “I tell
you
it’s true, I started at nine, with a girl called Milly Mayfair in back
of Rod’s
garage on Grant Street – same street Carlo lived on in Denver. That’s
when my
father was still working at the smithy’s a bit. I remember my aunt
yelling out
the window. “What are you doing down there in the back of the garage?”
Oh honey
Marylou, if I’d only known you then! Wow! How sweet you musta been at
nine.” He
tittered maniacally: he stuck his finger in her mouth and licked it; he
took
her hand and rubber it over himself. She just sat there, smiling
serenely.
Big long Ed Dunkel sat looking out the window,
talking to himself. “Yes sir. I thought I was a ghost that night.” He
was also
wondering what Galatea Dunkel would say to him in New Orleans.
Dean went on. “One
time I rode a freight from New
Mexico clear to LA – I was eleven years old, lost my father at a
siding, we
were all in a hobo jungle. I was with a man called Big Red, my father
was out
drunk in a boxcar – it started to roll – Big Red and I mixed it – I
didn’t see
my father for months. I rode a long freight all the way to California,
really
flying, firstclass freight, a desert Zipper. All the way I rode over
the
couplings – you can imagine how dangerous, I was only a kid, I didn’t know –
clutching a loaf of bread under one arm and the other hooked
around the brake bar. This is no story,
this is
true. When I got to LA I was so starved for milk and cream I got a job
in a
dairy and the first thing I did I drank two quarts of heavy cream and
puked”.
“Poor Dean”, said Marylou, and she kissed him.
He stared ahead proudly. He loved her.
We were suddenly driving along the blue waters
of the Gulf, and at the same time a momentous mad thing began on the
radio: it
was the Chicken Jazz’n Gumbo disk-jockey show
from New Orleans, all mad jazz records, with the disk jockey
saying,
“Don’t worry ‘bout nothing!”. We saw New Orleans in the night
ahead of
us with joy. Dean rubbed his hands over the wheel. “Now we are going to
get our
kicks!”. At dusk we were coming into the humming streets of New
Orleans. “Oh,
smell the people!” yelled Dean with his face out of the window,
sniffing. “Ah!
God! Life!” He swung around a trolley. “Yes!” He darted the car and
looked in
every direction for girls. “Look at her!” The air was so sweet
in New
Orleans it seemed to come in soft bandannas; and you could smell the
river and
really smell the people, and mud, and molasses, and every kind of
tropical
exhalation with your nose suddenly removed from the dry ices of a
Northern
winter. We bounced in our seats. “And dig her!” yelled Dean,
pointing at
another woman. “Oh! I love, love, love women! I think women are
wonderful! I
love women!” He spat out the window; he groaned; he clutched his head.
Great
beads of sweat fell from his forehead from pure excitement and
exhaustion.
We bounced the car up on the Algiers ferry and
found ourselves crossing the Mississippi River by boat. “Now we must
all get
out and dig the river and the people and smell the world”, said Dean,
bustling
with his sunglasses and cigarettes and leaping out of the car like a
jack-in-the-box. We followed. On rails we leaned and looked at the
great brown
father of waters rolling down from mid-America like the torrent of
broken souls
– bearing Montana logs and Dakota muds and Iowa vales and things that
had
drowned in Three Forks, where the secret began in ice. Smoky New
Orleans
receded on one side; old sleepy Algiers with its warped wood-sides
bumped us on
the other. Negroes were working in the hot afternoon, stoking the ferry
furnaces that burned red and made our tires smell. Dean dug them,
hopping up
and down in the heat. He rushed around the deck and upstairs with his
baggy
pants hanging halfway down his belly. Suddenly I saw him eagering on
the flying
bridge. I expected him to take off on wings. I heard his mad laugh all
over the
boat – “Hee-hee-hee-hee-hee!” Marylou was with him. He covered
everything in a
jiffy, came back with the full story, jumped in the car just as
everybody was
tooting to go, and we slipped off, passing two or three cars in a
narrow space,
and found ourselves darting through Algiers […]
7/13
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