Notes and Quotes – Jack Kerouac

– Notes and Quotes –

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)

Moody Street, Lowell, MA

Motto of Lowell, MA: “Art is the Handmaid of Human Good”

Belief and Technique for Modern Prose

Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
Submissive to everything, open, listening
Try never get drunk outside your own house
Be in love with your life
Something that you feel will find its own form
Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
Blow as deep as you want to blow
Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
The unspeakable visions of the individual
No time for poetry but exactly what is
Visionary tics shivering in the chest
In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
Like Proust be an old teahead of time
Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
Accept loss forever
Believe in the holy contour of life
Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
You’re a Geniuos all the time
Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

“It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.”

“No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength.”

“I don’t know, I don’t care, and it doesn’t make any difference!”

“This is the story of America. Everybody’s doing what they think they’re supposed to do.”

“There is universal substance which is divine substance because where else can it be?”

On the Road (1957), The Portable Jack Kerouac (1995)

Cassady on Writing:

“Man, wow, there’s so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears . . .”

– Dean Moriarty [Neal Cassady] on writing, On the Road (Pg. 5) (Pg. 143, Portable Jack Kerouac)

Mad Ones Quote:

“But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

Sal Paradise, On the Road (Pg. 144, Portable)

“Same old Paradise.”

Jane Lee, On the Road (Pg. 199, Portable)

“Some’s bastards, some’s aint, that’s the score.”

“His chief hate was Washington bureaucracy; second to that, liberals; then cops.”

Bull Lee, On the Road (Pg. 201, Portable)

“New Orleans is a very dull town. It’s against the law to go to the colored section. The bars are insufferably dreary.”

I [Sal Paradise] said, “There must be some ideal bars in town.”

“The ideal bar doesn’t exist in America. An ideal bar is something that’s gone beyond our ken. In nineteen ten a bar was a place where men went to meet during or after work, and all there was was a long counter, brass rails, spittoons, player piano for music, a few mirrors, and barrels of whiskey at ten cents a shot together with barrels of beer at five cents a mug. Now all you get is chromium, drunken women, fags, hostile bartenders, anxious owners who hover around the door, worried about their leather seats and the law; just a lot of screaming at the wrong time and deadly silence when a stranger walks in.”

Bull Lee, On the Road (Pg. 201, Portable)

“I love cats. I especially like the ones that squeal when I hold ‘em over a bathtub.”

Bull Lee, On the Road (Pg. 206-7, Portable)

Visions of Cody (1960)

Cody to Jack and Jimmy: “(as classical music begins to play) You’ll play the white piccolo, and you play the black piccolo, I’ll play the sweetpotato, for two minutes, and then you’ll take the sweetpotato, we’ll pass it around in rotation see so we don’t get any bum kicks because of the poor instrument.” (149)

Book of Sketches

surveying rusticities (33)

folks visitin (34)

From The Crazy Wide Forever (2007), Sal Paradise, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen:

“. . . opium n rum n nun-come. . . “, “. . . say fuck granma and drink pepsi an bow down afore th’ Red Chinese an shoot yerself right after this next beer . . .”, “Sublim’nal crim’nals”, “Grandfeudin’ Fathers” (Ch. 4)

Dean: “. . . keepin up his furthermores n heretofore n yesyesyes that’s right that’s right that way he had you understand . . .”, “. . . pukin out his pois’nous purple parlance on the patrons o this poetry affair . . .”, “ . . .Min wades in jumps up on Sach’s back n hikes that spike right ouch aw Jesus through his chalky cheek . . .”, “Vaudeville villains” (Ch. 5)

Home at Christmas from The Portable Jack Kerouac (1995)

“. . . I come down deeper in the joy of people.” (Portable, 48)

The Scripture of the Golden Eternity (1956)

“A million souls dropped through hell and nobody saw them or counted them.”

Orpheus Emerged (2002)

“You should learn to control your excesses.” (79).

“ . . . I’ll have to read it before I can listen to anyone praise it.”

“Notes Gleaned From a Voyage to Morphina”

“It’s the paradis artificial of Baudelaire.” (85).

Atop an Underwood (1999)

[A Day in September]:

“. . . he is accosted by an acquaintance, and immediately the man is no longer truthful and philosophic and meditative; he has to apply himself to the other individual in such a way that he becomes partly submerged within the other’s ego-universe, and in doing so, loses his own private dignity.” (37)

After the brief interaction: “And now life broadens suddenly and swiftly. Life is no longer the ego-universe of the millworker . . .” (38)

[I Know I Am August]:

“It is in times like these that I feel like taking a swim.” (42)

Radio Script: The Spirit of ‘14:

“‘I’m that intangible masterpiece called war! Look at me.’” (47)

from Raw Rookie Nerves:

“. . . now in a lethargy of fear . . .” (55)

Where the Road Begins:

“Now! The train is easing to a crawling stop, and you wait while the torturous engineer blasts all the atoms of your existence with his damned preciseness!” (59)

“You realize that a man can take a train and never reach his destination, that a man has no destination at the end of the road, but that he merely has a starting point on the road–which is Home.” (59)

“. . . whichever you do, little madman, you shall always return to the place where the road began.” (59)

New York Night Club–:

“Preoccupied with his paltry little truck universe, as if it were the only universe in the place.” (62)

There’s Something About a Cigar:

“‘That’s the wonderful thing about you’

“‘What is?’

“‘Nothing’” (67-8)

“‘I don’t know what the hell you are talking about, honest’

“‘I don’t myself. I’m trying to say something that’s inside of me, that I’m dead sure about, but it doesn’t come out in order.’” (70)

“‘When I have money, it doesn’t mean a thing to me. The only time money means a thing to me is when I have it.’” (70)

God:

“[Writing] depends on God. He has endowed me with the power; my performance depends on the power of his gift.

“It is like this.

“I am not trying to copy anyone. I am truthful to myself. I shall write as if I had just been born, endowed with words.” (72)

Movies: “The situations are built around the time-honored idea of woman bewitches man with curves and curls.” (74)

“I love cats and hate propaganda.” (74)

“You can’t be an artist unless you’re a member of humanity. Hermits make awful poets, I think.” (75)

“That advance of the lost race of man: the homo.”

“He cannot help it, I thought. And neither can I.” (76)

[One Sunday Afternoon in July]:

“I was amazed by the fact that I was not the only writer living, not the only young man ‘with a locomotive in his chest . . .’ (83)

Song: “To a Wild Rose”

The Birth of a Socialist:

“So [the millworker] is not afraid, and hasn’t been for fifteen years. But has he ever been uncertain?” (87)

“A huge factory, operated by throbbing and terrible machinery, was depending on the weary muscles of one young writer.” (91)

“After the day was over, I took a shower and told one of the workers that I was quitting.

“Can’t take it? he asks, smiling.

“Perhaps I could if I had to, I replied. But I don’t have to. I wouldn’t want to have to. I’m a man–with brains–and not a dumb animal.

“To myself I concluded: It is not right for me to give eight hours of my precious life to anyone at such a gory task every day. I should rather keep those eight hours to myself, meditating in the grass, let’s say; or walking through the woods.” (92)

No Connection: A Novel That I Don’t Intend to Finish:

“Whatever I have to say will undoubtedly be of no use when a pair of stockinged limbs go clicking by on seductive heels.” (93)

“A novel is usually written by novelists. I am a human being, with a soul, a vanity, an ego, and a suitcase. I am a poet and a writer. I am not a novelist. I live on this earth, and if you don’t mind my saying so, the other man-creatures that exist with me are damned difficult to get along with. And I don’t doubt that they find me difficult also.” (93)

“O. Henry kicks like a scotch and soda with too much soda.” (94)

“Like all other poets, I am kicking. I want to kick, you might say. You say, all poets like to kick. And this one here, Jack Kerouac, wants to kick in an original manner, but damned if he can find something original. He wants to be an original kicker, so that people will look at him and say: That fellow is a poet with an original bone to pick. They’ll bury his hatchet with him.

“The Question Before the House is this: Who is this Jack Kerouac, and what’s he kicking about, not that there isn’t anything to kick about . . .

“Who?” (94)

On the Porch, Remembering:

“. . . I stare languidly at the roofs of the city, disconsolately feeding upon the overwhelming drabness of the cloudy sky like vultures at lean fare.” (98)

“But I can still remember vividly myself at the age of six, sitting in a parlor, listening to the eternal sigh of the Gray Time, and wondering if it wouldn’t have been better not [to] be born.” (98)

The Sandbank Sage:

“‘One day,’ he told me on a cloudy morning, ‘I shall go into those forests and explore them.’

“‘You’re nuts,’ I told him. ‘They have already been explored. They are full of houses and roads and barking dogs and rubbish.’” (99)

“‘Alcide,’ I roared in his ear. ‘I am the new prophet.’

“‘You,’ he said. ‘Have been reading the Bible.’

“‘Hell, I have not. I saw a movie of the life of Christ. He got nailed to a cross by a bunch of cannibals.’” (100)

“I went away, and in the yard, Tarzan came by on an elephant and I roared, To hell with you.” (102)

“‘Stand back, you pack of howling dogs. Let this boy muse. Find your own Goddamned sandbanks!’” (102)

“Let the prophet come by with his staff. Get out of the way. You’ll get a staff on the head.” (103)

Farewell Song, Sweet from My Trees:

Magazines: The Shadow, Secret Agent X, etc (107, 108)

“The first bird blurts his tiny twit.” (112)

[I Have to Pull Up My Stakes and Roll, Man]:

“. . . I love America. I tell you I do.” (115)

Odyssey (Continued):

“This place spells poetry, ants in your clothes, and hunger.” (116)

“. . . Art is a readjustment of perception, from physical actuality to a perception expressed by the artist.” (116)

Definitions of a Poet: (122-3)

Old Love-Light:

October, a kind of old Love-light (128)

[Here I am at Last with a Typewriter]:

“When I was in college, I use to write for the fun of it. Now I’m in dead seriousness.” (130)

“I know a guy who sees something comical in everything, but he also goes too far.” (131) (Catskill?)

The Good Jobs:

“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 or minutes of my life to anyone, let alone a fogy old employer.” (135)

“. . . I got a lot out of it, which is the utilitarian way of judging things, no?” (136-7)

From Radio City to the Crown:

Proffer (138)

The Juke-Box Is Saving America:

“The juke-box, I said to my steak, is saving America.” (142)

. . . A Kerouac That Turned Out Sublime . . .:

“Ah, the scholars . . .” (148)

Lost Generation commentary…

“(let me tell you, Sir, freedom is an inner thing, and do not underestimate that remark, by all means)” (149)

Credo:

“. . . don’t mind critics, don’t mind the stuffy academic theses of scholars, they don’t know what they’re talking about, they’re way off the track, they’re cold; you’re warm, you’re redhot, you can write all day, you know what you know . . .” (153)

A Young Writer’s Notebook:

“. . . a man walking into a tavern, saying hello Joe, everything fine and you begin to think men are decent after all, but when leaves, the others begin to talk about him, behind his back, and you realize that the Brotherhood of Mankind is dead, damn it . . .” (158)

Today:

“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.” (167)

“A good joke, this guy happened to be one cent shy, but he had is wits about him. Ho ho.” (167)

Viand

“I talked excitedly, stumbled over my words, grew hoarse and passionate in voice as I always do when I get strong, good and strong.” (168)

“It was today. Now, as I write, it is night and tomorrow they are going to take away my typewriter and my heart. So I just thought I’d write a few words on paper, just for the hell of it.” (168)

Search by Night:

Glee and illicitly, frown and scowl (171)

“. . . hardly touching them, suddenly clutching them . . .” (173)

“. . . New York’s lack of human warmth . . .” (175)

In Lowell: “There is no lustful string, no prowling pursuit, no shame-faced hinting.” (176)

“. . . American people are really strong . . . . that only shows itself in times of great emergency.” (176)

“My search by night for the eye of the War had been unsuccessful . . . and yet, of course, it was so very successful.” (176)

Part Three – From Background:

“I began to write a novel right in the City Room about Lowell and the three attendant ills of most middle-sized cities: provincialism, bigotry, and materialism.” (179)

Famine for the Heart:

Song: “Blues in the Night”

“Oh, life is bitter beauty. Oh, life is awful glory. Oh, Christ!” (192)

“Oh! the moon never breams,’ began Pete, ‘without bringing me dreams . . .’” (195)

Beauty as a Lasting Truth:

“My immediate project, in this life task, is not fame (though fame I most certainly do demand): it is a desire to make the world see what I see, a very egotistical sense of “guiding” a stupid child to my way of seeing things.” (227)

My Generation, My World:

Honorable discharge from the Merchant Marines, Naval Hospital, Bethesda, MD, “indifferent character” (228)

The Wound of Living:

“. . . I love pine forests and pure thought.” (231)

The Romanticist:

“. . . I have written reams and reams or writings . . . And through it all, I have always been restless, unhappy, and seeking new horizons. What shall I do?” (236)

The Two Americans:

Sausages, and three varieties of vegetables: “That’s right. Three! Boiled potatoes, mashed potatoes, and fried potatoes.” (244)

“‘Wonderful cigarette, Luckies . . .’” (245)

Visions of Gerard (1963)

riton tu, ritontu

vien

kitigi, kidigi

paresseux

jackrabbit

rabbit

Blagues

joie de vivre

beau lieu

“I had never seen Gerard angry.

I was amazed and scared in the corner, as one might have felt seeing Christ in the temple bashing the moneychanger tables everywhichaway and scourging them with his seldom whip.” (11).

“In any case, eat or be eaten—We eat now, later on the worms us.” (14)

“—Life, another word for mud.” (15)

“Why is everyone so mean?” (20)

…rectify hells…

“—His lips tsk tsk and pout—” (23)

“Sin is sin and there’s no erasing it—We are spiders. We sting one another.” (31)

“—The Holy Grease, and good enough—” (32)

“—sinner always right unto death, no help no hope, born—” (32)

“. . . it is what is and that’s all it is—” (32)

“. . . bending quick ear obedient and loaded with long afternoon—” (35)

“(‘He’ll make a priest’ he inner grins.)” (36)

“‘When all is said and done, why do we sit here and have to admit the sinningness of man.’” (36)

“‘Why cant we have what we want?’ but as soon as he says that the tears appear in his eyes, as he knows the selfish demand—” (44)

Tom Collins Moons (45)

ghost-hovel (48)

“—Artist or no artist, I cant pass up a piece of fried chicken when I see it, compassion or no compassion for the foul—” (49)

Dream: White wagon pulled by little white lamb… (52-4)

“‘. . . we’re all in heaven—but we dont know it!’” (54)

“. . . play good and slide far—” (58)

Manuel to Emil: “‘Drunkards take their time,” (63)

“The the bleak January, the friendless February with his iron fingers in your grill of ribs—” (66)

“Nothing to do in the long pain night, but hurt.” (68)

Song: “You’ll Have It” (76)

“It’s the time of the juices—” (83)

“. . . old time movie stars with their prim painted lips set grim—” (86)

Old Bull Baloon, Charley/Jim Sagely

“‘How ‘bout a little swiggle a Mother Macree’s ancient revitalizing monkey juice, Mister Emil?’” (89)

“‘Sometimes known as continental bug joy juice, or joie de vivre’ . . .” (89)

Aftertheater wind (90)

Picotée carnation of his nose, swim of wrinkles (91)

“‘. . . better to be jocund with the fruitful grape, as sadden after none, or bitter fruit’ (quoting Omar Khayyam) . . .” (91)

Two bottles of whiskey: “‘I’ve had come a long way and a lot of snowy country to want that much heat . . .” (92)

“‘You cahd shahp! Pool Shahk!’” (93)

Summermoth night (95)

“. . . the Ace of Spades, Death.” (95)

“Samsara’s sorrow parade” (99)

“. . . roll me down the road in a barrel, if I’m lying . . .” (99)

“No use screamin. The Devil was a charming fool.” (103)

“‘God put these little things on earth to see if we want to hurt them . . .’” (104)

“‘Always be careful not to hurt anyone—never get mad if you can help it . . .’” (104)

Ethereality of pain (109)

“—I’m afraid to say what I really want to say.

I dont remember how Gerard died . . .” (109)

“. . . Our Salvation is Here and Now . . .” (110)

“ . . . (‘the scene behind the scene is always more interesting than the show,’ says J.R.Williams the Out Our Way cartoonist) . . .” (111)

“literary career”, “Write in honor of his death” (112)

“. . . she talked, things I can’t utter but I’d roll and broil in butter . . .” (112)

Angie: “I haven’t suffered like he did, that’s what breaks my heart!” (114) (little lame boy dying without hope)

“‘Dont you realize you are God?’” (118)

Shakespeare, Throwspeare, Disappear Spear (121)

“. . . more dead soul dusts than in all the words of this book.” (123)

“‘Why are you all crying?’” (129)

“. . . old gravedigger picks up his shovel and closes the book.” (129)

Dr. Sax (1959)

ammenyuosis

sibilant

lassitude

hallooing

“—the Lowell, the World, you find.

Doctor Sax hangs around the corner of my mind.” (11)

edgeblue (12)

“. . . king of the day. . .” (36)

“‘Drat it!” (37)

“. . . what phantom is pursuing you?” (43)

Murder by the Clock (44)

Never liked to see my bedroom door even ajar, in the dark it yawned a black dangerhole.” (44)

The Big Parade (45)

“‘What I’m going to do instead is sit around the green jungles of Guatemala.’

‘Watermelon?’

‘No, no, Guatemala—my brother’s going there.’” (47)

“I was the Black Thief . . .” (47)

Alan Ladd, This Gun for Hire (47)

pubertical war (48)

“‘Mwee hee hee ha ha’” (49) (124) (134) (155) (208)

“‘What foolish power had I discovered and had been possessed by?’ I asts meself . . .” (49)

Graffiti: “Jack is a big punk.’” (55)

waterfalls of foliage (56)

woo de ladies, playing with our ding dongs (59)

“. . . guy smeared shit on the rail of the pulpit . . .” (62)

“. . . ‘la religion–mais c’est la marde!’” (63)

Pubic hair porkchops: “‘They need a little spice . . .”

“. . . dreaming boys cant lean their chins on midnight windowsills any more . . .” (63)

Riot Loveliness (63)

“I gave up the church to ease my horrors–too much candlelight, too much wax.” (66)

“–The Shadow always knows–” (69)

“Zaza the sex fiend–” (70)

Saturday nights:

Film Your Eyebrows in My Song, Tears (71)

Tim Tyler’s Flying Luck (71)

Doc Savage or the Phantom Detective (71)

“The Shadow Magazine I saved for Friday nights . . .” (71)

“I threw a piece of slate . . . . caught Cy [Ladeau] at the throat.” (74)

“DiMaggio’s watching my apples grow–” (75)

The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers (91)

google giggled (104)

March Hare (106)

Edith Piaf

Animal Crackers (110)

The Big Parade, Dead Hero (111)

“I was lying in bed finding out that my tool had sensations in the tip– . . .” (121)

“. . . Beauty dies the night I discovered sex, they wonder why I’m mad–) . . .” (121)

“Blanche wanted Rachmaninoff in her teacups.” (23)

Moody Bridge: “. . . everybody in Pawtucketville had the perfect opportunity to commit suicide coming home every night–that is why we lived such deep lives–)” (127)

“A man carrying a watermelon . . .” (127)

Dr. Sax’s Manuscript:

“‘. . . don’t hurl your effeminate fury at me,’ . . .” (139)

“Soon sweat was pouring from her flesh like lust.” (139)

“It was an incident worth noting–that abyss cracking open.” (144)

Tommy Dorsey, “I Got a Note” (163)

Singing: “I got a nose, you got a nose . . .” (163) (173) (192)

“. . . spit and floodbubbles were at mylady’s boudoir.” (165)

“. . . the hungry lip of the River’s brown torrential roar–” (169)

Dr. Sax: “‘As a phantom of the night I get to know and see a lot of people.’” (194)

“‘Nevertheless one of the Code laws of the dark, is, never let yourself be seen by shroud or self, sands have messengers in that starlight ink.’” (196)

“They Can’t Take That Away from Me” (196)

“‘No need to worry–mix your mud with elephant flowers, adamantine boy–the hook and curl in the crook of eternity is a living thing.’” (197)

“All his statements knock me of the head Come In even though I don’t understand them. I know that Doctor Sax is speaking to the bottom of my boy problems and they could all be solved if I could fathom his speech.” (197)

“‘Moo-hoo-hoo-ha-ha-ha’” (199)

“. . . he lifted her dress of the goose pimples of her thighs . . .” (199)

“‘A hitch is called time in jail. You’ll come to rages you never dreamed.’” (202)

That is known as: Death, Socializing, Solitude, Nightmares, Love, Old Age, Maturity “‘. . . –but you’ll never be as happy as you are now in your quiltish innocent book-devouring boyhood immortal night.’” (202-3)

Gene (Argosy): “‘Edify ye mind, me bye.’”

“. . . in the shroud of Sax I am frozen into objective humility . . .” (205)

“. . .any old guardian angel will do . . .” (205)

“‘All your America,’ says Sax, ‘is like a dense Balzacian hive in a jewel point.’” (208)

“‘Bleu-heu-he-ha-ha-ha’” (208)

“‘–you’ll fan out in love-letters blown from an aeroplane forge in the center of my earth.’” (208)

Groan: Leda and the Swan (211)

“‘Doctor Sax!’ I cried, ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying! You’re mad! You’re mad and I’m mad!’” (211)

“‘Hee hee hee ha ya,’ he gaggled gispled, ‘this is the moan victory.’” (211)

The Blue Era (212)

“‘No time to wait son!–figs and Caesar do not mix . . .”“ (216)

“‘. . . No this woe and rain makes me want to sit down on a rock and cry.’” (217)

“‘. . .so foolishly I grope along in black life and folly my Shadow.’” (219)

“. . . like a worm in the apple since Adam and Eve broke down and cried.” (228)

“. . . Dovism was the idealistic left of the Satanic movement, it claimed that Satan was enamored of doves . . .” (230)

“. . . His next plan was to make blood illegal so the Vampires could be jailed to make it ten years’ mandatory for possession.” (232)

“. . . famous fuckface of history . . .” (235)

“. . . the enormous complexity of it all.” (235)

“‘Go offers man in the palm of his hand dove-like seminal love, embowered.’” (237)

“‘. . . they must be scared shitless.’” (237)

“‘I’ll be damned,’ he said with amazement. ‘The Universe disposes of its own evil!’” (245)

The Sea is My Brother (2010)

hipe

Acumen

Basso

Alacrity

Ennui

yen

bosun, boatswain

hawsers

Lester Young, Ben Webster, Roy Eldridge (4)

John Donne and the Bard (14)

Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost: “‘. . . high hope for a low heaven . . .’” (15)

“‘. . . no other worry in the world except Englishmen still prefer Shakespeare while the world reads Everhart!’” (18)

“‘Stick to teaching. I think you’d make a smelly writer.’” (18)

Battle Hymn of the Republic (29)

“‘That old cry ‘America! America’ What in heavens happened to its meaning.’” (32)

Moby Dick (34)

“. . . art [is] the revolt of the free . . .” (42)

“. . . the girl bit his ear and breathed warmly into it.” (45)

Tom Wolfe, Angel, Hill Beyond (52)

“. . .he wanted to tell her it was none of his doing and that would she kindly keep her dirty looks to herself?” (69)

“‘It is the damned fool, who, at that dark moment, laughs courage into you.’” (71)

Farm Bloc (77)

Wesley winked at the waitress: “‘. . . honey . . . . take care of them eyes.’” (83)

“‘A quarter . . .’” “‘Two beers and a cigar . . .’” (91)

“‘I’ll bet this is the first time Madame Butterfly was ever stood up!’” (91)

Bing Crosby, Please Don’t Take My Sunshine Away (92)

“‘Right!’”

“‘What’s on the docket?’” (93)

William Everhart: Messboy vs A.B., M.A., assistant professor of English and American Literature at Columbia University (102)

“Is man to be timeless and patient, or is he to be a pawn of time?” (104)

Led to the sea: Wesley-Conviction, Confusion-Everhart (105)

Nick Meade kicked out of Columbia: “‘I believe they said it was because I was a dangerous radical, inciting to riot and so forth.’” (114)

Nick: “‘Fight for the rights of man,’ he said quickly. ‘What else can one live for?’” (118)

“‘Like Rhett Butler, I frankly didn’t give a damn . . .’” (120)

“‘I always believed in the working class movement, even though I allowed it to slip my mind . . .’” (120)

“‘. . . each man to his own spirit, Meade, each man to his own soul.’” (121)

Bill: “‘Men will still deceive one another, cheat, run away with the other man’s wife, rob, murder, rape. . . . .’” (122)

Nick: “‘Your profound theories don’t arrest me in the least.’”

Bill: “‘Which makes you an iconoclast!’” (Bill a reactionary) (124)

Nick: “‘. . . here, let’s drink up the Scotch and argue some other time.’” (125)

Nick: “‘. . . I hate Socialists more than I do Capitalists.’” (125)

“Maybe she looked like an old hag now, a half-smooched debutante with cocktail rings around her eyes.” (130)

Soused (130)

Long ago moon (137)

“Her lips were fragrant, moving; he tore his mouth away and sank it into the cool waves of her hair. The same sweet hair! The same sweet hair!” (137)

“‘Jail the bums!’” (140)

Eathington: “‘Are you talking to yourself again?’”

Everhart: “‘Yes I am. It’s a habit of mine.’” (147)

“‘The glory that is Glory, indeed.’” (153)

Stevedore (161)

“. . . frantic haste found only in kitchens.” (161)

Glory: “‘Everybody want to go to heaven, but no one want to die!’” (162)

“hook and crook” (168)

“. . . a stage for his debaucheries and casual, promiscuous relationships.” (169)

“This was their medium, ships and the sea . . . it was no place for an academician.” (169)

Bill: “‘I found out ennui was my mortal enemy years ago, and I’ve learned since then how to avoid it to some extent. I slip shrewdly around it . . .’” (172)

Meade: “. . . the oiler with the Crown Prince mustache . . .” (?) (172)

Meade: iconoclast neo-Machiavellian materialist (175)

Bill of Danny: “‘Comrade!’ he spat. ‘What a priceless fool he turned out to be!’” (176)

“‘. . . a man can’t go through life sneering at his fellow men . . .’” (177)

“‘Tolerance!’ . . . . ‘Otherwise . . . . noting will ever change, not really. . . and change we must.’” (178)

Song: Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie (187)

“‘Seven years,’ howled Curley, ‘with the wrong woman . . . is a mighty long time . . .’” (191)

“‘I ain’t responsible for what I do when I’m drunk . . .’” (193)

Haines: “‘We want a good trip and we don’t want a jeep like you queering it all up.’” (195)

Torpedo danger: “‘The moon,’ Bill mused. ‘Lovers what it but we certainly don’t.’” (198)

Glory: “‘. . . I had them lowdown woman blues.’” (208-9)

“‘Lawise, Lawise, is the sweetest gal I know, hmmm, she made me walk from Chicago to the Gulf of Mexico . . .’” (209) (Way down blues, man) (Richmond blues!)

Coleridge “Ancient Mariner” (211)

“. . . was this an afternoon for death?” (211)

Bill reading in the engine room: “‘Words, words, words . . .’” (214)

The Town and the City (1950)

Brusque

Ebullient

Bier

Riven

Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson

Larry Clinton “Study in Red”

“Joe always has a job, always has money, and never seems to find time to mope or sulk.” (11)

“His brother, Francis Martin, is always moping and sulking.” (11)

“. . .the children saw religion saw religion as a kind of activity, like school, instead as a divine ordaining, and they never made comparisons.” (24)

The Shadow (27)

“‘They went that way, to the hills, they said they was going to the ocean and get a ship to Chine.’” (29)

“Tommy Campbell just lay back and kept spitting through his teeth in the breeze that made the grass wave.”

(32)

“‘Great God a’Mighty! Here they are!” (34)

“‘And, class, I want you to notice how Francis does his own thinking about poetry. You mustn’t only read, you must also read yourselves into it.’” (46)

“‘Yeh. Do you know anything about women, about love?’”

“‘Oh, I’m not interested in that, not now, I mean.’” (47)

“. . . first-class lady killer and handsome libertine.” (65)

“‘. . . to hell and back . . .’” (66)

“. . . wildcats and wranglers . . .” (67)

“But if you dig into a woman’s heart, deeply beneath whatever surface it presents, the deeper you go, the more woman there is; and if you’re looking for mysteries there, you’ll find that they don’t matter.” (69)

“And the men rage on in loneliness.” (72)

“‘Ruthey . . . . what kind of a highball did you mix your father?’” (85)

“‘All I’m gonna do now is eat! Then I’ll go out and wring that announcer’s neck!’” (85)

“‘I’m gonna hit the road, Ma! I don’t need any money!’” (96)

“‘You can’t go through life reading books!’”

“‘Don’t worry, I don’t intend to.’” (97)

Wilfred Engels: “‘You see, you’re not really alone in your opinions of modern life! You ought to get around more!’” (114)

Freud, Kraft-Ebbing, Kafka, Jung, Rilke, Kierkegaard, Eliot, Gide, Auden, Huxley, Joyce

Picasso, Braque, Cocteau, Heidigger, Tchelitchev, Henry Miller, Isherwood…

Frustration, compulsive neurosis, Oedipus complex, anxiety, economic exploitation, progressive liberalism, the facts

“‘The others [universities] exist primarily as processing plants for football players and dizzy coeds, really!’” (116)

Engels after meeting Peter: “‘I know you football players . . . . You always end up selling life insurance, that’s what you learn in college! You’ll join a fraternity, have a lot of admiring friends, and then sell policies at alumni reunions the rest of your life!’” (117)

Engels to Peter: “‘You’re the type who deliberately conceals his true self from the world.’” (118)

“There were ‘soreheads,’ the ungenial but still-as-yet fierce and mighty competitors in a world of lances and shields American style . . .” (120-1)

“‘Do we ever remember our true selves?’” (134)

“‘That crazy bastart Alex!’” (135)

“‘What a guy!’” (135)

“‘Ah, well,’ he thought, ‘there’s a saying about wearing old shoes gracefully.’” (141)

“‘I’m not bumming money off you!’ he yelled anxiously. ‘I only wanted a light! I’m no bum, I’m no bum!’” (142)

Liz: “She had nothing but contempt for the fluttering little girls who gave up easily and resorted to feminine wiles.” (164)

Joe: “‘Somebody ought to shoot that cop Warner . . . ‘“ (167)

“‘They used to hell around together . . .” (185)

Danny: “‘Man, don’t you realize it’s New Year’s Eve? Don’t you realize that this is a tough life, that there’s a whole lifetime of worry ahead of you? Why should we always be in a hurry in this world?’” (186)

Francis: “But the moment Francis saw what it was going to be like . . . . he decided to go home and go to bed. Without a word to anyone, he went down the stairs, winding his scarf around his neck, and started up the narrow snowy street.” (187)

“‘What an unbelievable gallery of imbeciles that brother of mine parades around with!’” (187)

“‘Love your wife and kiddies, forward the sub-human race.’” (188)

“‘I wonder how many fellows like me have wasted away, fretted, written poetry in a thousand chaotic American towns like this one until they decided to get out!’” (188)

“‘That’s what the old man principally hates about me–that silence.’” (191)

“‘Awake the dawn!’” (193)

“‘What am I doing here?’ he suddenly thought. ‘Who am I?’” (194)

George Martin: “‘By God, I just don’t want to be bothered any more!’” (197)

Elizabeth: “‘What’s so horrible about leaving school! . . . . What do I care about history and books. I want to make some money and have a good time. Phooey!’” (205)

Liz: “‘I don’t care what you’re on . . .’” (219)

Song: Black and Blue (224)

Liz: “‘I’m going to learn to smoke tonight.’” (233)

Starwealthy darkness (234)

“. . . the farewell song of his trees . . .” (239)

dark fury (246)

“How the little ones are always kept waiting in a car . . .” (247)

“‘How’s Hamlet today?’” “‘Thirsty.’” (250)

“‘Don’t call me Hamlet. Hamlet never studied like Faust in his dungeon with skeleton heads.’” (250)

“Ten minutes later he was running across the campus to the laboratory and up the long stairs, his coat flying behind him, his hair all wild, his lips stained with kisses and wine, all fever and excitement.” (250)

Danny: “‘Between the mills and this new job of mine I have three weeks with nothing to do but enjoy life, so I went and got married to a huge beautiful quart of whiskey . . .’” (259)

“‘Everybody believes in me because I’m in college.’” (259)

[Bombing] news of Pearl Harbor (272)

“‘You’re family’s behind you and loves you. Give thanks to the forces of nature that bind us all through life.

You’re lonesome old pop.’” (262)

“‘That’s what a father has to go through in his life? He must lose all his children one by one, because God wants them till they get old, then he’s going to throw them away.’” (269)

“‘You’re just playing with words, sonny, words you learned in books.’”

“‘Do you know there’s war coming!’” (271)

“‘Now they’ll start passing out the buttons, and then when it’s good and bloody they’ll start passing out the medals.’” (273)

“. . . long moody penetration of great books . . .” (274)

“. . . bleary-eyed and satiated . . .” (274)

“‘Gothic immensity, don’t you see, placed next to Byzantine sensitivity.’” (275)

“‘Don’t you see that we must learn to discriminate? There are greater and finer things than dallying around with mad strumpets!’” (276)

“‘. . . the war is breaking up everything in colleges . . .’” (279)

“‘. . . the kids we know, will get killed in this war . . .’” (281)

Panos at the lunchcart: “‘This is the way it will eventually end. . . . .’” (300)

Deathflowers: “‘Full fathom five my father lies!’ called Peter in the Gale. ‘Pearls be his eyes, his bones of coral made.’” (309)

“drunk and maudlin” (317)

“‘. . . quite astonishingly one of the prisoners called out, quoting from Thoreau: ‘You are the prisoners, not I.’” (317)

“‘The liver is the killer.’” (325)

“‘. . . the absolute relationship between officers and enlisted men is a fascistic set-up . . . . it’s precisely such a system we’re supposed to be wiping out.’” (328)

The Tombs (348) (like Melville, Bartleby)

Awake and Sing! (366)

“. . . he had weeks and weeks with nothing to do but abide and dwell on the land.” (359-60)

“. . . this world in which he wandered haunted.” (360)

“The occasional crooks and thieves and murderous hoodlums who passed in silent, arrogant, gum-chewing groups.” (361-2)

“All the cats and characters, all the spicks and spades, Harlem-drowned, street-drunk and slain, crowded together, streaming back and forth, looking for something, waiting for something, forever moving around.” (362) hick, square…

Leon: “‘I wanted to talk to you about that Alexander friend of yours . . . . I wanted to ask you not to class me with that–that sentimental fool, you might say.’” (366)

(like the earlier comment about Hamlet and Faust)

“‘. . . all these evil figures of decaying families.’” (367)

(?? “‘. . . all these decaying figures of evil families.’”??)

Waldo, Kenny, geeks (369)

“‘Everyone in the world has come like a geek . . . can’t you see it?’” (369-70)

“‘College professors will suddenly go cross-eyed and start showing their behinds to one another.’” (371)

“‘Everybody’s radioactive and don’t know it.’” (373)

“‘. . . vibrations of paranoid persecution.’” (376)

“‘. . .it was Levinsky that was mad, not they . . .’” (377)

“‘. . . children cannot recognize madness.’” (378)

“‘. . . they haven’t had the time to burden themselves with character structure and personality armors and systems of moral prejudice . . .’” (378)

“‘I hate all these intellectuals around here. Why do you have to hang around intellectuals?’”

“‘Who’s an intellectual?’” (381)

“‘The hell with women. I’m not women, I’m me.’” (382)

“‘Every time I go in a bar someone wants to buy me a drink and then fight.’” (385)

Wood: “‘Don’t you know what’s so utterly sad about the past? It has no future. The things that came afterwards have all been discredited’” (386)

Shark feed (386, 391)

The Shadow (387)

“‘. . . one drop of perfect essence . . .’” (390)

“‘. . . we wouldn’t dream . . .’” (393)

“‘[Waldo] hanged [the cat] from the lamp [with his own necktie]!’” (393-4)

Waldo: “‘The lady is indiscreet . . .’” (396)

Arms akimbo (397)

“‘. . . people do that nowadays. Times have changed.’” (406)

George Martin: “‘Last month I got a book out of the library . . .’” (410) (sissies, mature, immature)

Vin ferre (412)

“‘This country doesn’t mean anything to you kids, it’s just a big dumb place where you happen to be helling and spoofing around, that’s all it is!’” (422)

“‘Be a good son and you’ll be a good father and that will keep going all the time.’” (431)

“City-time and city-talk and city-life and city-sarcasm and city-weariness” (431)

“‘Ever moreso gentle am I than death.’” (436)

“‘I have kept faith, I have remembered-Alexander.’” (439)

“‘Do you know I like that picture? She laughed. It shows you just as you are, it’s the picture of a young character who’s been slapped in the face and doesn’t know what to make sense of it.’” (449-50)

“‘That’s the picture of a whipped dog dog, a dog who’s given up his right to snap back.’” (450)

“‘Now you’re talking how to how to win friends and influence people, but the Chamber of Commerce, a great social rebel like you.’” (450)

“‘Can anyone be anything but a rebel in a conventional world like this?’” (450)

“ . . . all of it divided into neat little categories through which existence kicked along.” (450)

Moby Dick pouts (450)

Kicks, beat, loot, gold, living, drag (451)

One foot in the gave (452)

“‘And look at that silly Liz guzzling the booze like a Bowery hobo. Hey, I got an idea! When we shoot up join huh?’” (456)

“ . . . The Army lined up against the Navy . . . . Peter join the Army-” (457)

Pistol Pete

Honkytonks, and claptrap? (458)

Djuna Barnes

“‘Well, isn’t that triangular somehow!’” (459)

Rippling world (462)

“‘If you’re going to try to seduce me, I wish you’d let me know in advance . . . ‘” (464)

“It was rather amusing to find myself in the chalk and crayon atmospheres of a grammar school again, you know, but at the same time you can imagine my horror and feet and everything. The whole experience just shattered me.”

Nietzsche’s remark: Nothing is true, everything is allowed.

Francis’ remark: Nothing is true, everything is equally absurd? (466)

George Martin dying of cancer . . . (467)

“‘Do you know how men are? They play down their women . . . ‘” (469)

“‘And one morning in May he died.’”

Tschaikowsky cries . . .

“‘I cry too! I cry too! his father was shouting in the other room. ‘Remember that, my fine-feathered young son thought your fancy books!’” (473)

Stunned wonder (475)

Lonesome death rattle (476)

“‘. . . everything’ll be all right any minute now.’” (478)

George Martin: cock of the walk . . . (485 )

Jesus, fisherman, nets, sea . . . “‘This is what happens to all of us, this is what happens to all of us!’” (493)

“‘. . . Salvation through sensibility . . . . he’s doomed for certain suffering.’” (494)

Francis: it’s alright, he’s only meddling in God’s system . . .

Fortitude . . . Soap opera talk . . . Quiet desperation . . .

“‘Jesus warned against the sin of accusing any man of madness, Francis, he even said that no man was mad!’”

“‘Did you know, for instance, Jesus always got angry when they brought a lunatic before him?’” (495)

Maggie Cassidy (1959)

Maggie Cassidy (28)

Pauline: “‘Hey I like you! – you’re bashful, I like bashful people!’ and drew me tremblingly excitedly to the floor, great eyes in mine, and pulled my body and hers and squeezed me interestingly and made me ‘dance’ to talk, to get acquainted – the smell of her hair was killing me!” (39)

“The shadows of the ancestors, they’ve all walked in the dust of 1900 seeking the new toys of the twentieth century just as Celine says – but it’s still live has found us out, and in the stalls was nothing, eyes of drunken wolves was all. Ask the guys at the war.” (41)

“. . . they grinned in dirty holes on top of tenements.” (42)

“Ah the poetry I’d written at ten . . .” (42)

“At the last minute I’d stand undecided in my room . . . “ (Glen Miller, Jimmy Dorsey, My Reverie, Heart and Soul, Bob and Ray Eberle) (47)

Immerelensum (52)

“. . . I had to stand there assuming for myself all the gloomy guilts of the soul . . .” (58)

Poor purring (62)

“The vultures were feeding on all our chimneys, tempus. I stopped at the phosphorescent crucifix of Jesus and inwardly prayed to sorrow and suffer as He and so be saved.” (62)

“Ride the bus, guiltish, depressed, looking down, always the dross and dirty loss spine ribbing down life’s poor gold and it so short and sweet.” (71)

“In my ear, warm, hot lips, whisperings, ‘. . . .’” (74)

“‘When you’re young you wanta cry, when you’re old you wanta die.’” (85)

Magic tricks: “I’m bored (like by television),” (86)

“. . . eyes more beautiful than all the sun-eyed blondes of MGM, Scandanavia and the western world . . .” (87)

Pauline: “All I had to do was stand there like a post and let her go. . . . . I just smiled, she made love speeches.” (99)

“But I couldnt have Mary and Magdalene both so I had to decide my mind.” (100)

“. . . so your exotic is just a farmer . . .” (101)

“‘. . . I’m through with all this love shit’–” (117)

“‘Big leaguers always lob the ball easy’” (125)

“. . . I’m going to look like and absurd child whose gray dream of vanity even love cannot penetrate.” (127)

Jack’s party: “Maggie is the star.” (136)

“‘Pauline’s deeply in love with you, Jack, no shit!’” (138)

“. . . I’m going to dream up some black angels in my nice white pillow now you babe – What a storm for sleep!” (139)

standing bystanders (146)

“. . . South Lowell, source of my arrow.” (147)

“work, war, or whorehouse door–” (153)

“. . . it was my turn to be a man–and I didn’t know what to do, no idea . . .” (159)

Patria, land of birth (160)

“. . . it had rained on a lot of things since Maggie had spurned me in sweet Lowell, a bleary new barrel was filling, and all would drown in it–” (170)

“Have pity on the next girl you take on.” (171)

“‘Mens sana in corpora sano–’ ‘A healthy mind in a healthy body . . .’” (173)

“. . . big climax kisses of movie magazine photos . . .” (174)

Beautiful honey-colored girl, wrestle and moan, she has nothing on underneath, charming, juicy (175)

“. . . the waves of dawn are enormous.” (176)

“New Year’s Eve Maggie wants me to do to her what I did to ‘them girls in New York’–” (177)

Wheel of nature (177)

“Ah, terribly sad the look of her writing on envelopes. In the dust of my black boots I saw the moons of death.” (178)

“. . . he directed my affairs and influenced my mind.” (179)

Vanity of Dulouz (1968)

“. . . everybody’s begun to lie and because they lie they assume that I lie too . . .” (13)

“Oh you’re putting me on.” (13)

“. . . I am not ‘I am’ but just a spy in somebody’s body pretending I’m an elephant going through Istanbul with natives caught in its toes.” (15)

“I’ve never gotten over the guilt of dropping that pass. If there had been no pigskin in football but just a good old floppy sock like you play with at ten.” (20-21)

“. . . hooray, my dream of going to college ws in like Flynn.” (23)

“You kill yourself to get to the grave. Especially you kill yourself to get to the grave before you even die, and the name of that grave is ‘success’, the name of that grave is hullaballoo boomboom horseshit.” (23)

“. . . just reading to show off to myself that I was reading. Yet this led to actual interest in reading.” (27)

“. . . playing hookey at eight fifteen after reading at leisure in the library till eleven, hey?” (28)

“Fact was, I wasn’t popular at all but hated by most . . .” (28)

“She not only told me to leave Maggie Cassidy at home and go on to New York for school . . .” (28)

“What a stink in [the subway] . . .” (31)

“. . . I’m playing hookey to study other facets of life. It’s like, I could have called this book ‘The Adventurous Education of Jack Dulouz.’” (40)

“The moral of what I’m saying is, as when I said ‘Adventurous Education’, let a kid learn his own way, see what happens.” (41)

“. . . let the kid pick out exactly what he wants to do . . .” (41)

“Who the hell could be St John’s?

“Why, St John Dulouz and the boys, naturally . . .” (44)

“That other time written about in Maggie Cassidy . . .” (44)

“. . . well, I dont know where I got the idea that Jesuits are not to be trusted, but I’ve been reading about that in history these past years, the only hitch being, lo and bingo, I’m now one of the world’s worst secret Jesuits, everything I do is based on some kind of proselytization, everything I’ve written, just take a close look.” (46)

“our awesome reputation” (46)

“‘If you not eat so many hot fudge sundaes this morning, you score six more touchdowns.’” (48)

Letter: “‘Dear F – face . . .’” (54)

“. . . so I just sat in the grass in the back of the gym and read Walt Whitman with a leaf of grass in my mouth . . .” (56)

“. . . the arts of kindness.” (61)

Furzy

“‘They cant feed you for free, it’s against the Ivy League rules against preference for athletes.’” (66)

Billion-year-old Dinosaur Egg: “I registered actual amazement . . .” (67)

“. . . hell be damned, up on the ceiling, EAT.” (67)

“. . . I do a complete turnaround twist and hear a loud crack and it’s my leg breaking.” (71)

“. . . I had been spending a week running on a broken leg.” (72)

“You just can’t run off a broken leg.” (72)

“For years afterward, however, Columbia still kept sending me the bill for the food I ate at training table.

“I never paid it.

“Why should I? My leg still hurts on damp days. Phooey.

“Ivy League indeed.

“If you don’t say what you want, what’s the sense of writing?” (75)

“. . . no need for me to try imitate what [Tom Wolfe] said, he just woke me up to American as a Poem instead of America as a place to struggle around and sweat in.” (75)

Maggie Cassidy (77)

“Barnard girls growing bursty like ripe cherries in April, who the hell can study French books? A tall queer approaching my on the Riverside Park bench saying ‘Ho you hung?’ and me saying ‘By the neck, I hope.’” (78)

Tom Wolfe (79)

Chemistry: “I said to myself ‘Ugh, I’m never going to attend this class again.’” (83)

“Funny too, because in my later years as more or less of a ‘drug’ expert I sure did get to know a lot about chemistry and the chemical imbalances necessary for certain advantageous elations of the mind.” (83)

“As we drank whiskey further I saw the Green Mountains move, to paraphrase Hemingway in his sleeping sack.” (84)

Argufyings (85)

“. . . the wildest daydream of my life.” (86)

“(Hah!) But then I also, in mad midnight musings over a Faustian skull, after drawing circles in the earth, talking to God in the tower in the Gothic high steeple of Riverside Church, meeting Jesus on the Brooklyn Bridge, getting Sabby a part on Broadway as Hamlet (playing King Lear myself across the street) I become the greatest writer that ever lived and write a book so golden and so purchased with magic that everybody smacks their brows on Madison Avenue.” (86-87)

“. . . it wouldn’t matter anyway in the intervening space between human breathings and the ‘sigh of happy stars’, so to speak, to quote Thoreau again.” (87)

“. . . corrupt their sacred graves in the name of sacred-grave corruption.” (87)

“. . . go after being an American writer, tell the truth, dont be pushed around by them or anybody else or their goons.” (92)

“This was the most important decision of my life so far. What I was doing was telling everybody to go jump in the big fat ocean of their own folly. I was also telling myself to go jump in the big fat ocean of my own folly! What a bath!” (93)

“‘No Dulouz was ever a great writer . . . there never was such a name in the writing game.’” (95)

“You’d think after showing them how to swim I coulda shown them how to swim all the way.” (95)

Atop an Underwood: “. . . rented an Underwood portable typewriter . . .” (96)

Bartleby (96)

“. . . I wanta be a writer . . .” (98)

“When does youth take No for an answer?” (99)

“Then, as now, I was proud I had written something at least.” (100)

“I wont bore the reader with the story of my writing development, can do that later . . .” (100)

“Eve Star (some call it Venus, some call it Lucifer)” (103)

Ah poetic: “. . . in 1967 as I’m writing this what possible feeling can be left in me for an ‘America’ that has become such a potboiler of broken convictions, messes of rioting and fighting in the streets, hoodlumism, cynical administration of cities and states, suits and neckties the only feasible subject . . . . instead of Ah dreamy real wet lips beneath an old apple tree?” (103)

Redwoods: “. . . only occasionally looking up at the trees and if so probably thinking ‘O how nice that redwood would look as my lawn furniture!’” (104)

“That’s how writers begin, by imitating the masters (without suffering like said masters), till they learn their own style, and by the time they learn their own style there’s no more fun in it, because you cant imitate any other master’s suffering but your own.” (107)

“‘By the time I’m done,’ I was vowing, ‘I shall know everything that ever happened on earth in detail.’” (107)

“. . . disregard of your beau regard . . .” (108)

“. . . not he ‘angry young man’ but the ‘infuriated old man’ of the sea.” (108-109)

“‘Study mongrel America? And the gradual Pew York? Do you think you can do what you feel like all your life?’” (109)

“rotting in Lowell” (109)

“. . . on the road.” (110)

“. . . the guy lets me out on Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the Nation’s Capitol, during the day some work’s torn off the front part of my pants, I have to hold them together or my thing’ll wave.” (112)

“I mean, weirdest nip of gin a man ever took in old Washington DC.” (112)

“. . . ‘Jack you jess doin me to dayeth’ . . .” (113)

“. . . as I said in On the Road book . . .” (115)

Melville (119)

“. . . I saw the flowers of death in the eyes of most of my shipmates.” (119)

. . more of a semiromantic fancy than a necessity . . .”(120)

“Yessir, boy, the earth is an Indian thing but the waves are Chinese.” (121)

Glory (123): “. . . a Negro baker conducted a religious sermon on the afterdeck.” (121)

“‘S-n-ucc-Q-z’ as I sneezed, ‘what time is it?’

‘What you wearing your life jacket for?’

‘You told me to wear it, you and the chief steward.’

‘Well you’re makin bacon.’

‘Well sure I’m makin bacon,’ I said, ‘but I’m thinking of that kid on that German submarine who’s also makin the bacon. And who is now choking to death in drowning. Buy that, Glory.’” (126)

“Three silver nails in a blue field, turned gray by sea.” (127)

“. . . ‘T’sa look make the whores of Amsterdam not onl quake but give up their knitting . . .” (127)

“. . . Do you know what Jesus meant when he cried out on the cross ‘Father, Father, why hast thou forsaken me?’ . . . He was only quoting a Psalm of David like a poet remembering by heart: He did not repudiate His own kingdom, it’s a crock to believe so, throw the Shield of David in the garbage can with the Cross of Christ if that’s what you think, let me prove it to you: Jesus was only quoting the first line of David’s Psalm 22 with which he was familiar as a child . . .” (127)

‘. . . His bacon like the proverbial pigs who’d been handed Satan’s walking papers by Jesus to go jump in the lake . . .” (131)

Sabbas: “‘In the morning brothers, sympathy!’” (133)

Asoul

Astern

Cundrom

“. . . clusters of wildflowers, however, greeted my tired sea eyes . . .” (135)

“Mountainclimbing was a difficult feat for me that day because I still had my sea legs, O Gary Snider.” (136)

Mount Duke-Dulouz (Mount Ford-Kerouac) (136)

Pillowfight, AWOL, ‘watch’ (138)

Trade: Number 2 Horace Man football jersey for a fish harpoon (141)

Neptune’s heart, silver nails, blue field, boat named “We’re Here” (142)

“There oughta be a better way to die in this world than in the service of Ammunitioneers.” (144)

“‘Who’s this Dulouse who’s supposed to run so good?’” (145)

“Silver nails and sawdust.” (146)

“To think that we werent besieged by airline hostesses with smiles of mock teeth . . .” (147)

Dream: “. . . it means that I am now going thru life carrying more burdens than I can carry. And that no one cares.” (147)

The Sea is My Brother (148)

“. . . not to do this, that, or thatta.” (153)

“And then we all came in the first day the doc says, ‘Okay, pee in that tube over there’ this kid said, right next to me I tell you, ‘From here?’ and practically nobody got the joke.” (153)

“I say ‘What the shuck is this, a nuthouse?’

‘You asked for it, you said you had perpetual headaches.’” (155)

Big Slim: “And he showed me his fist. Big as a nine pound steak.

“I said ‘Don’t ever hit that with me . . .’” (156)

“‘. . . here comes a Coast Guard cutter with FBI men aboard and drag me off telling me I’m dodging the draft. I don’t even have a mailin address.’” (156)

“‘Slim don’t hit me with that, will ya?’” (156)

“‘Fucketh you, man . . .’” (158)

Anzio: Churchill’s goof (160)

A man of letters is a man of independent thought. (162)

“‘Again I’ve failed in explaining myself.’” (162)

“Honorable discharge, indifferent character.” (163)

Johnny Greensleeves (163)

“I was just about the least military guy you ever saw and shoulda been shot against a Cuban wall.” (163)

“‘Go droppeth a turd.’” (164)

“He asked me how come I knew so much about hell, not being a denizen. I said ‘Dante has appraised me of my heroes. And Goethe laid the path out. Pascal wept it thru. And the good gray poet Whitman outlined, Melville poeticized, and my friends discussed it at night.’” (164)

“Does it matter to five thousand sneering college writing instructors that I wrote seventeen novels after a youth of solitary practice amounting to over two million words, by the window with the star in it at night . . .” (167)

“Is it true that the greatest admirals are the ‘bulliest’ . . .” (168)

“. . . the only place to learn was in my own mind and in my own real adventures: an adventurous education, an educational adventure-someness, name it.” (168)

Pascal: “‘WHAT SHALL WE GATHER FROM ALL OUR DARKNESS, IF NOT A CONVICTION OF OUR UNWORTHINESS?’ And he adds, to show you the right path:

‘There are perfections in Nature which demonstrate that She is the image of God’ . . .” (171)

dynamite flag, red (173)

“. . . jumped off for a coolin swim . . .” (172)

“What a horizon! The sea is my brother . . .” (173)

“. . . considering Nature and all her borning and dying.”

“Who put the plug in the bottom-room floor of THAT tub?” (174)

“Thank God the sea isnt my mother and never pecks at me, nor my wife and never hens at me, the sea is my brother . . .” (174)

Vestigitabbibles (174)

What a crocka horsewater (174)

Purser’s typewriter, trying to finish “The Sea is My Brother” (175)

Galsworthy Forsythe Saga: “. . . gives me an idea about sagas, or legends, novels connecting into one grand tale.” (175)

“It’s wartime blackout regulations” (175)

“‘Come in, Spencer Tracey!’” (175)

“I think after I spotted that mine, after I did what the first mate wanted without a word, the crew began to respect me, because after that they let me sleep in . . .” (177) (The sleeping beauty)

“. . . the guilty and the innocent soul side by side on the same ship.” (177)

“. . . I realized I was listening to depth charges going off I a submarine attack. I just turned over and went back to sleep.” (178)

“I mentioned all this to redeem myself from the curse of being accused of slacking in the US war effort.” (178)

“Everything is romantic when you’re twenty-one in 1943.” (178)

Captain: “. . . looked like a worried executive Johnny Carson at his desk . . .” (178)

Liverpool, 1943: “The year the Beatles were born, ha ha ha.” (180)

SS George Weems, 500-pound bombs, flying the red dynamite flag: “. . . that rotten wooden wharf and completely demolished it . . .” “Now, if it had been a modern concrete job, goodbye Du Louse, this book, the whole crew and nothing but the crew, and ‘alf and ‘ald of Liverpool.” (180-181)

“This took me by Hyde Park and kept wondering if it was named after Mr Hyde and where was Dr Jekyll? It’s fun when you’re a kid in a foreign country . . .” (188)

“Applause, ‘No! Concert!’ So they continued the concert.” (188)

“I lost everybody and finally one fur coat said its name was ‘Lillian’ and so we went off together into a cozy little inn.” (188)

“[England has] tried too much to become like ‘us’.” (189)

The Dulouz Legend (190)

“‘Hey, a beer wants to come out of the icebox . . .’” (193)

Murder (193)

“. . . in start coming the new characters of my future ‘life’.” (194)

On Claude: “‘Looks to me like a mischievous little prick . . .’” (195)

“Now I’m not a queer, and neither is Claude, but I’ve got to expand this queer tale.” (196)

“So begins our kind of apartment club.” (197)

“‘Trouble with you Dulouz is, you’re a hardhearted mean old tightfisted shitass no good Canuck who shoulda had his ass froze in the hearts of the Manitoba where you and your bad blood belong, you Indian no-good bully.’

“‘I’m no bully.’

“‘Well bully for you, give me a drink.’” (197)

“. . . he was seein flaws in me I shoulda seen myself.” (197)

“Celts can spot each other. Pronounce that.” (198)

“. . . I’ve worked harder at this legen business than they have . . .” (200)

The Real Devil: Claude, Franz, and Will Hubbard (the three of them together) (201)

Marvel (201-202)

unwristwatchable, 1935 (203)

Will Hubbard: “‘It’s a finkish world.’” (204)

“‘EEE dif y your mind, my boy, with the grand actuality of Fact.’” (204)

“. . . I looked proudly and defiantly on the world of un-like-us ‘finks’ . . .’ (204)

“. . . kind of a funny imbecilic saint.” (204)

“‘My GAWD, I’m not going to buy you another drink if you get LITERARY!’” (206)

“‘. . . why when I was your age . . .’” (206)

“‘Discretion is the better part of valor.” (211)

“‘WHEN THEY PUT CATTLE IN CARSTHEY COPULATE!’” (212)

Hang Jack’s cat (212)

Claude: Pillow in the oven, gas on (213)

“It was a very nostalgic Season in Hell.” (213)

“‘Hey,’ I’d yell, ‘my steak!’” (215)

‘. . . ciel ou infer, qu’importe?’ . . . . “. . . Heaven or Hell, what matter ?” (217)

Symbolist Isadore Ducasses and Apollinaires and Baudelaires and ‘Lautreamonts (218)

“Whattaya Do with a Drunken Sailor Ear-Lie in the Mawning?” (218)

“‘I stabbed [Meuller] in the heart twelve times with my boy scout knife.’” (221)

“‘. . . ‘I handed him a bloody pack of Luckies and said ‘Have the last cigarette.’” (222)

“ So this is how Franz Meuller ends.’” (222)

“‘Easy young lady. Anything else around here?’ asks the cop looking at me with frank blue eyes.

‘Just a simple case of self-defense. Nothin to hide.’” (226)

Detective: “‘O he’s okay, he’s a swordsman.’” (228)

Bronx Opera House: “‘. . . Where pigeons sing arias . . .’” (228)

Material witness: “‘. . . we understand that not only you dont, or didn’t, know this aspect of the law, but most guys would act the same way . . .’” (228)

Brooklyn Murder Incorporated (231)

“‘No Dulouz ever got involved in a murder.’” (233)

“Every time I’m involved the police of New York seem to take more interest in my girlfriend.” (233)

“. . . her one eye glaring at me, as John holmes would say, banefully.” (233)

Hit men (Joey Angeli, Vincent ‘Falcon’ Malatesta): “‘We’re just professionals’ . . . . ‘We’re like soldiers, you get it?’” (236)

“‘No I told you, Vincent, he’s just a regular kid who’s good-looking who got set up by a homo. It’s been happening even to me all my life. You remember when you were young . . .”“ (238)

“But the Gospel truth was simply that Claude was a nineteen-year-old boy who had been subject to an attempt at degrading by an older manwho was a pederast, and that he had dispatched him off to an older lover called the river . . .” (239)

“. . . like the last day of the world (which it oughta be sometime) . . .” (240)

Jaundiced toolbag sorrow (240)

“. . . a card game like Cezanne’s which is more sorrowful than sources of disenchanted soul itself.” (240)

“[The big Irish dick’s] carrying a thick gat under his coat.” (242)

“The wife of my youth I married anyway.” (242) (Johnnie) (Cecily: bourgeois kitten/doll)

“‘Absurdity? Of course there’s someplace to go! Go mind your own business.’” (243)

Johnnie’s aunt: “. . . she began to realize I might be serious about the ‘writing game’ . . .” (248)

Cecily and Claude: “She was after all the symbol of his nineteen-year-old year.” (250)

“I waded into him with a series of little slaps . . .” (250)

“. . . wept on her belly all night.” (251)

“. . . go cry on Cecily’s slippy belly.” (252)

“I’ve always had the feeling the FBI is watching me.” (253)

Charley Bloodworth, Maggie Cassidy (254)

“. . . when she left [I] settled out my new notebooks and embarked on a career as a literary artist.” (255)

Nietzscheanism: Nothing is true, everything is allowed (256)

“But now our impulses exist in a society civilized by Christianity.” (257)

“. . . then I devised the idea of burning most of what I wrote . . .” (257)

“Having read what he offered up, he nodded his head . . .” (258)

“. . . the city intellectuals of the world were divorced from the folkbody blood of the land . . .” (262)

“Mother Nature giving you birth and eating you back.” (263)

“. . . the ‘God is Dead’ movement . . . . the most tearful and forlorn philosophical idea of all time.” (263)

Buddha: “. . . ‘Be ye lamps unto thyselves’ – last words – ‘work out thy salvation with diligence . . .’” (265)

“. . . I decided to become a writer . . .” (266)

“Of Uncle Vincent you could not say that he was a victim of the vanity of Dulouz.” (267)

“‘When this book is finished, which is going to be the sum and substance and crap of everything I’ve been thru throughout this whole goddam life, I shall be redeemed.’” (268)

“No ‘generation’ is ‘new’.” (268)

Big Sur (1962)

“‘Come on out and get drunk”, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy!’” (4)

“One fast move or I’m gone . . .” (7)

Mirror: “. . . you cant even cry for a thing so ugly, so lost, no connection whatever with early perfection . . .” (8)

“. . . like a man in the presence of a dangerous idiot he doesnt want to annoy . . .” (11)

“. . . and there’s the booming surf coming at you whitecapped crashing down on sand as tho it was higher than where you stand . . .” (14)

Slaverous lips (15)

“. . . the automobile that crashed thru the bridge rail a decade ago . . .” (15)

“. . . and yet the biggest danger being just hoodlums out throwing rocks on Sundays . . .” (17)

The bat: “. . . and such silent wings, how would you like to wake up in the middle of the night and ask yourself ‘Do I really believe in Vampires?’” (18)

Serene Jekyll, hysterical Hyde (18)

“. . . writing down what the sea was saying . . .” (18)

Owls hooted ooraloo (18)

Why?: “Worth the telling only if I dig deep into everything.” (19)

“‘They, yes, have bats in Mien Mo valley . . .” (19)

“Ending the last elegant sentences at dawn . . .” (20)

“When you say AM ALONE and the cabin is suddenly home because you made one meal and washed your firstmeal dishes . . .” (20)

“‘Allow me to stay here, I only want peace . . .’” (23)

“. . . I had to rehearse my reading of prose a third time under the hot lights of the Steve Allen Show in the Burbank studio . . .” (24)

Big brow Garden of Eden eyes (26)

A primordial mule owning a whole valley (26)

“. . . here I am with 60-foot redwood under my arm . . . . ‘You only think I’m strong . . .’” (27)

“I pass a cow which turns to look at me as it takes a big dreamy crap . . .” (27)

“‘I see as much as doors’ll allow, open or shut . . . ‘” (27)

“. . . there’s the nightly moth to his nightly death at my lamp . . .” (27)

“And I just sit there listening to the waves talk uop and down the sand in different tones of voice . . .” (32)

“‘Blessed s the man who can make his own bread . . .’” (33)

“. . . it’s the little things that count (clichés are truisms and all truisms are true) . . .” (34)

Sea: “Is Virgin you trying to fathom me– I go back to make a pot of tea.” (34)

“. . . in fact I also realize I have to make lunch and it wont be any different than the lunch of those olden men and besides it’ll taste good . . .” (35)

“‘A donde es me sockiboos?’” (39)

“‘I took a pee, into the sea, acid to acid, and me to ye . . .’” (39)

The signposts of something wrong (39)

“. . . I have been fooling myself all my life thinking there was a next thing to do to keep the show going and actually I’m just a sick clown and so is everybody else . . .” (41)

“. . . a ride to Monterey . . .” (43)

Unguent (46)

“‘Your mother wrote and said your cat is dead.’” (49)

“‘Attends pour mue kitigingoo. . . ‘“ (50)

“. . . he died the night after I left!” (50)

Tyke: Ma Wow (50)

“All the premonitions tying in together.” (51)

“. . . everybody in America was walking around with a dirty behind . . .” (56)

Antisepticism (57)

“. . . all walking around with dirty azoles – Isnt that amazing? give me a little nip on that tit . . .” (57)

“Do you realize that until we tell poor Lorenzo Monsanto the famous writer that he is walking around with a dirty azzole he will be doing just that? – “Let’s go tell him right now!” (58)

great yawning guilt

“Hey what did the Bodhidharma say to the Second Patriarch?” “He said go fuck yourself, make your mind like a wall, dont pant after outside activities and dont bug me with your outside plans . . .” (59)

Kitchen: clutter of dishes and ashtrays (60)

cityCityCITY: “. . . raving babboons we’ll all be piled on top of each other or one another or whatever you’re sposed to say . . .”(63)

a whole big on-the-road of his own (64)

Timmy John: partly named after me (67)

“. . . too many people now want to talk to us and tell us their stories, we’ve been hemmed in and surrounded and outnumbered – The circle’s closed in on the old heroes of the night . . .” (68)

Dean Morarity, On the Road (68)

pupup nip bottle hidden in my coat (68)

Lecturing at Quinten and Cody: “And I would begin by telling them I had been in jail myself once and that I had no right nevertheless to lecture them on religion . . .” (68-69)

Dave Wain of Cody: “Expecting to see a bitter ex con he sees instead a martyr of the American Night . . .” (70)

“. . . apparently I’ve harangued him till dawn about Buddhism – some Buddhist.” (72)

“. . . he has faith in any direction he may take with anyone just like Christ I guess.” (73)

a sort of pilgrimage (73)

‘. . . walking on water to the other shore.” (73)

The four day drunk, delirum sets in (74)

Slaky hungry sex slave, intelligent, well read, writes poetry, is a Zen student, knows everything, big healthy Rumanian Jewess (75)

a chain of illusions (77)

“. . . if He was travelling to New York or just the car . . .” (78)

Pernod Martini, erogenous Buddha, Yum Yum (78)

profoundly deep Japanese skepticism (79)

whore candy, perfumed beautiful cotton (81)

Bruce: the greatest driver in the world whoever he was and I never saw him again – Bruce something or other – What a getaway.” (85)

“. . . or honestly, Jack, ah, lend me a hundred dollars willya?” (87)

“. . . he’s just following me like I often follow people myself . . .” (88)

go visit Henry Miller (88)

hauntingly kidlikeness I think all ex cons get when they’ve just come out (91)

expert twitch and twist, years of winoing in alleys east and west (93)

“‘This is the kind of place where a person should really be alone, you know?’” (94)

upended old chassi in the sand (94)

everything is indifferent (99)

“. . . the little Arab shepherd boy hugged the babylamb to heart while the mother bleeted at his bay heel . . .” (101)

Cody log chopping: “He that axe down so hard his feet left the earth when it his . . .” (105)

“. . . my otter, my dear otter I’d written poems about . . .” (106)

Reason for coming to Big Sur: to get away from “. . . I’m supposed to be the King of the Beatniks . . .” (109)

one last quart of port (110)

my mouse (110)

dancing a dervish

turning my Sur into something seachange – something brainchange (110)

final horrors (111)

Hummingbirds = vultures (113)

“. . .The pathway to wisdom lies through excess . . .” (113)

new reasons to groan (114)

“. . . here he is enjoying his big weekend with the big writer he was supposed to tell all his friends what a great swinging ball it was and what I did and said . . .” (114)

‘. . . the champion on-the-roader wont even hitch hike anymore . . .” (115)

“. . . all a big bunch or witches . . .” (115)

“. . . everybody in the world is making fun of me and I don’t know it because . . .” (116)

“‘Peculiarly attractive to certain shallow types . . .’” (118)

“‘You don’t have to torture your consciousness with endless thinking . . .’” (119)

‘‘. . . turn your mind inwardly, and then you’ll find your way . . .’” (120)

“The more Ups and Downs the more Joy I feel – The greater the fear, the greater the happiness I feel . . .” (121)

Myth appearance of Billy the Kid (123)

“‘. . . a lot of us dont LOOK like writers . . .’” (123)

“‘. . . I’m a language spinner and you’re idea man . . .’” (124)

“. . . Behold, the sun! and Behold, the angels! . . .” (125)

gushy and girly (126)

superbomber joints (126)

Cody’s grave: “He Lived, He Sweated” (128)

extremely tiny flower, “It’s for you.” (for some reason the poor thing she thinks I need a flower . . .) (128)

fascinated by the upsidedown car wreck (129)

Joy bubblebath, same old clunker car in shifts (130)

Evelyn: “And Evelyn always maintaining that she and I were really made for each other but her Karma was to serve Cody in this particular lifetime, which I really believe and I believe she loves him, too, but she’d say “I’ll get you. Jack, in another lifetime… And you’ll be very happy” (130)

“I wanta be chased for eternity till I catch her.” (130)

Evelyn: “‘. . . her pants got wet in the beach . . .’” “‘. . . By now they oughta be steamin . . .’” (131)

Drivers: Wain vs Cody: (conversation and smooth sailing vs a crisis about to get worse) (133)

Hiss-the-villain play (133)

Cody’s Willamine: Soulmate and confidante and mistress (134)

“. . . the fantastic thing is that HE reminds ME of MY father so that we have this strange eternal father- image relationship that goes on and on sometimes with tears . . .” (134)

Duluomeray, Dulouz and Pomeray: double husbands (135)

“. . . where men can really be angelic friends and not be homosexual and fight over girls . . .” (135)

Marijuana sharing: “‘Our original agreement had nothing to do with the dust!’” (136)

Canuck and Okie: “. . . the whole question of us, the two most advanced men friends in the world still fighting over money after all being . . .” (135)

Evelyn of Cody and Ron: “. . . Really the way Cody presses people on me it’s awful, at least I should have my own choice . . .” (137)

“. . . I shudder sometimes to think of all that stellar mystery of how she IS going to get me in a future lifetime, wow . . .” (137)

Cody: “. . . the greatest writer the world will ever know if he ever gets down to writing again like he did earlier . . .” (140)

sleeping in my bag in the backyard, my idea (142)

“. . . Billie and I go for each other . . .” (143)

“Her voice is the main point – she talks with a broken heart . . .” (146)

“. . . A little blonde well experienced in all the facets of lovemaking . . .” . . . . “. . . a great big four way marriage with Cody and Evelyn . . . (146)

“. . . it makes you wonder why men have termed God antisexual somehow . . .” (148)

“Doesnt he bother you with all these questions? . . .” “. . . jealous of Elliott.” (148-149)

Perry Yturbide, Basque: “. . . confidant and sometimes lover of all Cody’s gals . . .” (151)

“. . . that’s why he’s always put away in prison this type of man . . .” (151)

Negroes: intense and crazy and intellectual, “. . . they all talk as tho the end of the world depended on their words . . .” (152)

“Me just an innocent lost hearted meditator and Goop among strange intense criminal agitators of the heart . . .” (152)

intense, suspicious, momentous (153)

“There’s some vast conspiracy to make me go mad anyway . . .” (155)

“I dont understand anything . . .” (155)

“. . . I realize everybody is just living their lives quietly but it’s only me that’s insane.” (156)

“. . . ‘Fuck you, I eat the way I like’ splashing gravy everywhere . . .” (156)

“. . . I realize Billie is insane and I’m not as insane as I thought . . .” (157)

Kerouac to Perry about the “little cans”: “‘Did you ever kidnap one?’”

Perry: “. . . the squares are puttin us down . . .” (158)

“‘Whattayou mean He Man, dont you realize I’m crazy?’” (159)

“‘Stop thinking about yourself, will ya, just float with the world’” (162)

“‘Whatever I say Ben, dont mind it, I’m just a fool” — “You said in 1957 in the grass drunk on whiskey you were the greatest thinker in the world” — “That was before I fell asleep and woke up: now I realize I’m no good at all and that makes me feel free” — “You’re not even free being no good, you better stop thinking, that’s all’… “I’m glad you visited me today. I think I might have died . . .’” (164)

swan-rich neck, lay for a lemon (166)

“. . . I feel guilty for being a member of the human race . . .” (166)

“In my youth leaning my brow hopelessly on the typewriter bar, wondering why God ever was anyway?” (167)

Goldfish dead in bowl: “. . . why do they do this? otters and mouses and every damn thing dyin on all sides Billie, I cant stand it, it’s all my goddam fault every time! . . .” (167)

“‘. . . I wanta go home and die with my cat. “ I could be a handsome thin young president in a suit sitting in an oldfashioned rocking chair, no instead I’m just the Phantom of the Opera standing by a drape among dead fish and broken chairs — Can it be that no one cares who made me or why? . . .’” (168)

“. . . And meanwhile Perry comes in for a minute and I pointblank say to him ‘I don’t understand you Perry, 1 love you, dig you, you’re wild, but what’s all this business where you wanta kidnap little girls? “ but suddenly as I’m asking that I see tears in his eyes and I realize he’s in love with Billie and has always been, wow I even say it, “You’re in love with Billie aint ya? . . .” (169)

“. . . But nevertheless the fish are dead and the chair is broken.” (169)

“All the muscular gum of sex is such a bore . . .” (170)

“‘. . . I’ll make love to you always” “But you wont even have to because we both realize we’re bugs… our lodge will have truth written all over it but tho the whole world come smear it with big black paints of hate and lies we’ll be falling dead drunk in truth . . .’” (171)

“‘. . . O the sad music of it all, I’ve done it all, seen it all, done everything with everybody” I say phone in hand, “the whole world’s coming on like a high school sophomore eager to learn what he calls New things, mind you, the same old singsong sad song truth of death . . .’” (172)

“‘. . . I’m down in the mouth, I’ve been sitting here for a week drinking and the chair broke and the fish died and I’m all screwed up again” — “Well you shouldnt oughta drink that sweet stuff all the time and you never eat” . . .’” (173)

“. . . “But that’s so sick and tired to call life a problem that can be solved . . .’” (173)

hands hang helpless, stop all that staring at the floor (175)

“. . . when you make those big final statements it doesnt help you . . .’” (175)

“And this is the way it begins.” (175)

“Nothing is gained or lost also by the fact that I insist we stop at Cody’s en route so I can pick up some clothes I left there but secretly I want Evelyn to finally come face to face with Billie.” (177)

“‘What’s Cody so worried about? “ — “You’re spoiling all his chance to be real secretive . . .” (177)

“So Willamine climbs out (I remember just then Evelyn telling me seriously that Cody always calls his women by their full first names, Rosemarie, Joanna, Evelyn, Willamine, he never gives them silly nicknames nor uses them).” (178)

“. . . I see that Cody is really very sick and tired of me bringing gangs arbitrarily to his place, running off with his mistress, getting drunk and thrown out of family plays, hundred dollars or no hundred dollars he probably feels I’m just a fool now anyway and hopelessly lost forever but I dont realize that myself because I’m feeling good . . .” (178)

“. . . now it’s dummier and dimmer and getting blurreder damnit as tho even my own star be now fading away from concern for me as I from concern for it . . .” (179)

“. . . languid waving of one brown thigh over the mass of Dave’s nylons indicative of an early morning love

scene . . .” (180)

“‘I cant light a fire any more!’ I yell . . .” (181)

“‘I suddenly remember James Joyce and stare at the waves realizing “All summer you were sitting here writing the so called sound of the waves not realizing how deadly serious our life and doom is, you fool, you happy kid with a pencil, dont you realize you’ve been using words as a happy game — all those marvelous skeptical things you wrote about graves and sea death it’s ALL TRUE YOU FOOL! Joyce is dead! The sea took him! It will take YOU!’” (182)

Billie walking through the undertows: “. . . Someday I’m going to commit suicide . . .” (182)

“I see the rocks wobble as it seems God is really getting mad for such a world and’s about to destroy it: big cliffs wobbling in my dumb eyes: God says “It’s gone too far, you’re all destroying everything one way or the other wobble boom the end is NOW.’” (183)

“. . . what a dirty look I get from the elderly lady who’s apparently heard about the “author” who was secretly invited to Mr Monsanto’s cabin but instead brought gangs and bottles and today worst of all trollopes” (184)

“. . . I’m silly with a big footlong wizard pipe in my mouth trying to light it in the wind . . .” (184)

See Henry Miller (185)

“I almost yell, “I mean I’m so exhausted I dont wanta do anything or see anybody’… (already feeling awful guilt about Henry Miller anyway, we’ve made an appointment with him about a week ago and instead of showing up at his friend’s house in Santa Cruz at seven we’re all drunk at ten calling long distance and poor Henry just said ‘Well I’m sorry I dont get to meet you Jack but I’m an old man and at ten o’clock it’s time for me to go to bed, you’d never make it here till after midnight now’) (his voice on the phone just like on his records, nasal, Brooklyn, goodguy voice, and him disappointed in a way because he’s gone to the trouble of writing the preface to one of my books) (tho I suddenly now think in my remorseful paranoias ‘Ah the hell with it he was only gettin in the act like all these guys write prefaces so you dont even get to read the author first’) (as an example of how really psychotically suspicious and loco I was getting).” (185)

“‘. . . you’re just tired of life and wanta sleep . . .’” . . . . “‘O I realize you’re a writer and suffer through too much but you’re really ratty sometimes . . .’” (186)

“. . . why dont you follow through with what your heart knows is Good and best and true, you give up so easy to discouragement . . .” (186)

“All I feel is the invisible stab from her — She’s hurting me!” (187)

“‘. . . Then there’s something wrong with ME!’ I yell . . .” (188)

“She comes and offers herself to me softly and gently but I just stare at my quivering wrists . . .” (188)

Billie of Elliott: “‘DO I have to beat you again?’” (188)

“. . . insisting I’m her last chance (which isnt true)… “Let’s go to a monastery together, “ she adds madly… “Evelyn, I mean Billie you might go to a nunnery at that, by God get thee to a nunnery, you look like you’d make a nun, maybe that’s what you need all that talk about Cody about religion maybe all this worldly horror is just holding you back from what you call your true realizing,” (189)

“. . . [Elliott’s] the most insane of them all . . .” (190)

“. . . saying “Jack” sadly a lot like Jarry Wagner used to do on our Dharmabumming mountain climbs where we’d confide dolors . . .” (193)

“‘. . . Jack in a way we might even start having fun here and make a great week out of it! “ — “Week? “ — “I thought we was coming here for a week” — “Oh I said that didn’t I… I feel awful about everything… I don’t think I can make it… I’m going crazy with Billie and Elliott and me too… maybe I’ll have to, maybe we’ll have to leave or something, I think I’ll die here’” (194)

“(also remembering in my distress Edgar Cayce’s advice “Drink a lot of water’) but “There’s kerosene in the water! “ I yell in the wind, nobody hearing — I feel like kicking the creek and screaming . . .” (195-196)

“What’s all these bites they keep throwing at me, poison? — and what’s wrong with my eyes, they’re all dilated black like I’ve had drugs, all I’ve had is wine, did Dave put drugs in my wine or something? thinking it will help or something? or are they members of a secret society that dopes people secretly the idea being to enlighten them or something?” (196-197)

“. . . having fun such as soldiers dream the day away imagining, dammit – But the venoms in the blood are asexual as well as asocial and a-everything . . .” (197)

“‘Billie’s so nice and thin, like I’m used to Romana maybe I should switch around here for variety’” (197)

“‘. . . I HAVE to get out of there… But I have no right to STAY AWAY — So I keep coming back but it’s all an insane revolving automatic directionless circle of anxiety . . .’” (199)

“From the woods I see those three shadowy heads whispering me by the stove — What’s Dave saying? — And why do they look like they’re plotting something further?” (199)

“Dave Wain is jealous because I wrote 10 novels?” (199)

“Still they sit there by the fire in dead silence, when I tromp into the cabin in fact they all start up again talking: sure sign — I walk out again, “I’m going down the road a ways” – “Okay” (199-200)

“‘Sure you dont wanta go to Nepenthe for a Manhattan Jack? “ — “No” (‘Yeh and you’d dump poison in it” I think darkly . . .” (200)

“. . . Irwin knew this from observing his mother Naomi who finally had to have a lobotomy – Which sets me thinking how nice to cut away therefore all that agony in my forehead and STOP IT! STOP THAT BABBLING! — Because now the babbling’s not only in the creek, as I say it’s left the creek and come in my head, it would be alright for coherent babbling meaning something but it’s all brilliantly enlightened babble that does more than mean something: it’s telling me to die because everything is over” (201)

“. . . I start cursing Dave “Bastard’s got the only decent spot there is to sleep in anyway, right there in that sand by the creek, if he wasnt here I could sleep there and the creek would cover the noise in my head and I could sleep there, with Billie even, all night, bastard’s got my spot . . .” (202)

“‘First I’ll try to take a nap by myself here then when I wake up I’ll feel better and come over to you’” (202)

“If I try to turn over the whole universe turns over with me but it’s no better on the other side of the universe . . .” (203)

“. . . I remember my cat for the first time in three hours and let out a yell that scares Billie . . .” (203)

“. . . Suddenly as clear as anything I ever saw in my life, I see the Cross.” (204)

“‘. . . We’ll all be saved . . . . now I can sleep.’” (106)

A hum, a bat (206)

Elliott: “I suddenly realizing he’s staring at the moon and there he goes again, thumping his foot: he’s sending messages — He’s a warlock disguised as a little boy, he’s also destroying Billie!” (206)

“. . . hundreds of slowly fornicating vulture couples on the town dump . . .” . . . . “. . . you can see all their feathery rainbow behinds slowly dully monotonously fornicating on the dumpslopes . . .” (208)

“What on earth have I brought these people for and why just this particular night of that moon that moon that moon?” (210)

“‘. . . Garradarable narm!’ yells the creek . . .” (211)

Coffinshaped grave garbage hole (for Elliott?) (213-214)

“‘What’s the matter he wont let me go near that hole! why did you make it look like a grave? “ I finally yell . . .’” (214)

“I’ve fallen asleep in a strange way . . .” (215)

“. . . I’ll forgive them and explain everything (as I’m doing now) . . .” (216)

“The corner of the yard where Tyke is buried will be a new and fragrant shrine making my home more homelike somehow . . .” (218)

“There’s no need to say another word.” (218)

Sea:

naver fois (225)

“–I’ll have a daughter, / oughter, wait and see–” (230)

“. . . Go to your desire . . . . / and laugh . . .” (234)

“. . . be home to fried fish & beer b’five . . .” (234)

gray, gunboat blue (234)

“. . . aft, or oft, the osprey / in its glee’s agley–” (237)

Satori in Paris (1965)

Raymond Baillet, cab driver (8-9)

“Vieux voyou!” (Old hoodlum!) (13)

“Guenigiou” (ragpicker) (13)

“. . . I inaugurated my first night with a wild sexball with a woman my age (43).” (16)

“She also wants to marry me, naturally, as I am a great natural bed mate and nice guy.” (16)

“I gave her $120 for her son’s education . . .” (16)

“. . . the next day I didn’t want to see her no mo because she wanted more money.” (17)

“It’s hard to decide what to tell in a story . . .” (19)

“I gaze into her eyes – I give her the double whammy blue eyes compassion shit – She falls for it.” (19)

“What I woulda done to her shall not be allowed in this Bible yet it woulda been spelled L O V E.” (20)

“I get so mad I go down to the whore districts.” (20)

Swiss Army knife, French muggers and thugs, cuts self, bleeds all over (21)

Kerouac Motto: Love Suffer and Work (21), “Aimer, Travailler et Souffrir” (104)

Library: “. . . the Nazis done bombed and burned all their French papers in 1944, something which I’d forgotten in my zeal.” (22)

“You spend all day in the damn beauty parlor?” “Oui.” (23)

“I teach her Christianity.

“We neck a little later . . .” (24)

“. . . I’m a fool in Love With God. Yes.” (25)

Kerouac: Russian for Love (25)

“Paris is a tough town.” (26)

Manners and refinement: “As I grew older I became a drunk.” (27)

“. . . 8 A.M. screaming over fresh bread . . .” (28)

“I go down to the corner bar to have a cognac alone at a cool table by the open door.” (30)

Smell of liquor (33)

Centuries of genealogical wars (34)

“. . . like Peter Sellers get banged in the mug in a Dublin Pub.” (35)

“Paris is a place where you can really walk around at night and find what you dont want, O Pascal.” (37)

Breakfast: break of fast (39)

Romantic raincoats (41)

Poem: “SEA, Part Two, the Sounds of the Atlantic at X, Brittany . . .” (43)

“. . .modern Parisian French, tho dandy, has really been changed by the influx of Germans, Jews and Arabs for all these two centuries . . .” (45)

“. . . what an amazing Tower of Babel this world is.” (47)

“. . . test Wits Transatlantique but they’re not interested.” (50)

Rue de les Francs Bourgeois: Street of the Outspoken Middleclass (50)

“. . . that ravishingly beautiful, unforgettable raunchily edible Breton girl . . .” (50)

French publishers: “The girl whether believed that I was one of the authors of the house, which I am to the tune of six novels now, or not . . .” (53)

“There were no great outcries of please come back . . .” (55)

“. . . thinking of my mother who has to clean the house while I yell insults at the T.V. from my rockingchair.” (56)

“The Inferno White Owl Sainte Theresia!” (56)

Ague

Pascalian

“Was that my satori, that look [from the priest] . . . ?” (65)

Kerouac, bivouac (72)

“I joined the Navy

To see the world

And whaddid I see?

I saw the sea.” (73)

“. . . I scribble this 4,500 miles away safe at home in old Florida with the doors locked . . .” (75)

50 francs: “. . . it was only a tip – But you don’t ‘tip’ the police in France.” (76)

“. . . this pinner of flowers and mocker at thorns . . .” (77-78)

“. . . I smur (like Van Gogh’s butterburls) fresh creamy butter . . .” (82)

“Satori there in Victor Hugo Inn?” (82)

“(I ingrained his thought there for your delectation, and if you didn’t like it, call it beanafaction, in other words I beaned ya with my high hard one.” (83)

Winston Churchill: weird wield weir (84)

“. . . the French refuse responsibility of their explanations . . .” (85)

W.C. Fields: Life is “Fraught with imminent peril . . .” (89)

“. . . while you’re alive on earth the very hair of your cats on your clothes are blessed . . .” (90)

Lebris: the sea captain (92)

Lebris the Restaurateur (O Proust): aristocrat in bed (94-95)

Romancier de police, detective novels (95)

Ravissantes, ravishing (95)

“. . . watch bustles bounce under chandeliers, had affairs in rare cemeteries . . .” (96)

“For a man like this armies would form.” (97)

“. . . Where else but in a book can you go back and catch what you missed, and not only that but savor it and keep it up and shove it?” (98)

With Lebris: “. . . I’m home . . .” (100)

“His daughter comes in again and said she’s read some of my books . . . . In fact his daughter wants my autograph.” (101)

The shield: “(. . . Blue with gold stripes accompanied by three silver nails.)” (104)

“Why change your name unless you’re ashamed of something?” (105)

“. . . missed my train to Paris by, count it, three minutes.

And I had to wait eight hours . . .” (106)

“‘Ouvre donc maudit!’ (OPEN UP DAMN YOU!!)” (107)

“‘Le roi Kerouac’ (the king Kerouac)” (107)

Corpulence, sonumgun (108)

Nap: “. . . clover on top of a cliff . . .” (108)

“‘Le roi n’est pas amusez.’” (The king is not amused.) (108-1-9)

“Brittany . . . . a land of Druids and Witchcraft and Warlocks and Feeries . . .” (109)

Caterpillar’s fate (109)

“‘Hoodlums are what gave Hitler his start.’” (110)

Proletariats vs Unemployed Disenchanted Ghetto-Dwelling Misfits vs Mods and Rods (111)

“. . . a blade of grass in your belly, which cuts finest.” (111)

“. . . he wouldnt care if you roasted your grandmother over coals long as he could get her earrings and maybe gold teeth.” (116)

Raymond Baillet: “The Satori taxidriver of page one.” (118)

Pic (1971)

Well dog my cats and cat my dogs . . .

“‘I seed the Lawd . . .’” (125)

Pictorial Review Jackson (that’s me) (126)

“. . . I cry, and shame ever’body.” (133)

“. . . dust up the sand slow with his ARMY BOOTS . . .” (151)

“. . . You aint even scarce eleven years old . . .” (158)

Jim Crow laws: “‘We can sit up front now because we crossed the Mason Dixie Line . . .’” (171)

Sheila: “. . . I went and lost my job day before yesterday . . .” (181)

“Lord a mercy . . .” (183)

Slim: “‘It’s so hard to get a job that you can stick to all your life,’ Slim said, I wish I could get a job playin tenor in a club . . .’” (183)

Slim working at cookie factory:

“The sweat jess fell from Slim’s head and fell in the fudge . . .” (191)

“‘Oh Lord a mercy, I’ll never eat a cookie again.’” (191)

Pink Cat Club: “‘I didn’t really get goin on that horn tonight . . .’” (202)

“Sheila was going to have her first baby before six months . . .” (206)

Moving: “‘Look it this place we’ve been livin in. We leave it, someone else comes in, and life is jess a dream. Don’t it remind you of cold cruel world to look at it? Those floors and bare walls. Seemed we never lived here and never loved you inside of it.’” (207)

“Jess like the Bible said, A fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth, only [Sheila] was a girl.” (208-209)

Tall white haired ninety year old man: “‘Go moan for man’” (212)

Slim hitch hiking with raised pant leg: “‘Have pity on a poor young girl on the road.’” (223)

Lost: “. . . [the old man] was a ghost.” (228)

Slim: “. . . he found a horn in his little brother’s voice.” (235)

“Father McGillicuddy was s’tickled he was sunrise all over.” (235)

Book of Dreams (1960)

Opening chapter of “On the Road”. (12)

Engine like mallet like hammer like penis (19)

The Martins, “Town and the City” (18)

“…Halvar Hayes holds a kitten by the neck choking it…” (24)

“‘Something that was supposed to happen just didnt happen. ‘“ (25)

“… soon everyone realizes that the party is a sad failure…” (28)

“… I’m a little worried because all the efforts of my good mother to give me a nice birthday party have gone in vain…” (28)

“…but no, I’ve laid off tea, it alienates my soul from me…” (29)

“…the blonde danced on…” (32)

“… and here a short businesslike little showbusiness blonde cuttin’ along in slacks…” (32)

“. . . blood red, night blue, ink pink, jade green . . .” (35)

Organo Street whores: “. . . Cody or somebody just went, says, ‘Ah but they’re really filthy’ but which I know they’re not really, being Indian Beauties with greasy hair is all . . .” (36)

Dinah Shore, Olivia De Haviland (36-37)

“. . . I’m watching like a masturbator in the bathroom . . .” (38)

Jacky Keresky: (I remember her bedroom near the bathroom when she was 17, 1939, now she must just be a randy old pet bitch of time with a demand for minks turning over whole industries) (39)

“There were other dreams, sagas of them . . .” (39)

Murk, Milquetoast Jones the Sucker is a poor cunteater, forment (41)

“‘This father and son business has gone far enough!’ —(What do I mean?)” (41)

“Who am I?” (42)

“finally I get a nice bagful of tea and feel it with my hands, smiling…” (46)

“…and stand in the yard, dew wet, pink from eraser sun just come up over the school hill…” (47)

“…me with a huge well not huge medium sized bag of tea in which I’m running my hand as the gold but it’s just weed…” (48)

“What if the name of our death?

All that we lost will come back to us in heaven.” (50)

“. . . Then I resume my hegira in the woods . . .” (50)

semi-sissified (51)

“. . . huge roaring gettogethers, Mel Torme was there even and played piano and I leaned my head eyes closed on the upper keyboard to hear him play, Mel didnt mind, played wild and good on the rest of the keyboard—” (51)

“FINALLY I’M AN OLD WHORE waiting in my bed, sexless, knowing the only time I’ll wake up is when young boys are brought to me—instead of the usual round of old ladies—apparently I’m a male—I wake up surprised—there is no scene, just my bed, me in it, 11 o’clock Sunday morning—dismal like the ‘beat brother’ on the little gray street with the house, but my sister’s not around, and from a horrible tired-out brother I’ve turned in my shame into a Silly Dylan Thomas old whore. . .old whore alcoholic and told everybody so. . .a silly Jack Kerouac whore with that same old gasafaycagoo.” (53)

“. . . —God the mangled impossibility of those ‘bicycles’!—” (55)

“no commentish” (58)

“—’Try some Westchester beer, Jack, that’s good beer!–’“ (62)

“…—I go in there cockdangling naked—…” (63)

“—It’s all happening in the same bone weary bleak—” (65)

“Then there was Lowell…” (66)

“—this is the happiest dream of my life—” (66)

throwing gin bottles over the moon

my child’s soul

The Sea is My Brother, The Town and the City (67)

“…drowning my delicate blood in caffeine…” (71)

“…perfect little hourglass shape and black Italian cunt and on jump her…”

Phony Literatteurs, sexy Italian girlfriend with hips (76)

“EXCUSING MYSELF FROM DINNER I rush up to make a scheduled phone call—-The colored girl is watching me from her bedroom door—as soon as I finish the call I rush into her room and we wrassle & love & soon she’s on my lap black & naked & I’m working up—-then I turn her over to her back & we work—-ecstatically, madly, gladly—-I wonder what the people downstairs will think of my long ‘phonecall’—-”(78)

“I’M IN FRANCE, tryin to be amazed—-in a bed in a room, Seymour has the other bed, we’re traveling with his mother—-I’m looking at wallpaper, thinking about France, the waiters downstairs, etc.—-earlier it had been long motor trips over mountains and along canyon rivers somewhere—” (78)

“—madly I reach back and feel his package, it’s solid like meat no marijuana—” (80)

“—-O Lord what shall I write? how bend these sinews of my art & on what anvil? what harp? what frosty window Beethoven hope secure? what SEA draw? and the mind inbend?—-” (83)

“Irwin Garden—somehow always a vague aura of murder around him—” (83)

“…myself a train…” (83)

Hound of the Baskervilles (85)

“…’I look like a hoodlum too when I’m dressed sharp’ He doesnt believe me, looks at me, an older jerk talking crap—-I feel silly—” (85)

“…the little girl wants to go into the house with me, I say ‘You’re too young” but is she ever pretty!—-and really not too young (urgh) in India—-” (86)

“I woke up realizing I have no more enthusiasm” (88)

Charley Low (89)

“I’m having an affair with a colored girl like that heroin girl in Frisco—” (90)

Arrange to have a fuck, joy room, (she loves me, she loves me not) (90)

Old Bull Hubbard Jurroughs (91)

“—ot’s the same as Lynn-Ma Evans Brooklyn redbrick vase house of that Mel Torme piano old-lady party dream—” (92)

“I’M WALKING ACROSS SOME PARK, there are children playing, by fountains—one little girl stops me in a copse, says ‘Mister will you tie my buttons on top?’—she is about 7 but with little breasts or a breast, it seems— I am dark and lascivious as I look at her, her honey color, the little body—I start to tie her top bottoms as she talks—I am going to try her innocence—I feel guilt as deep as the sea—I wonder if there are any mothers around– I prepare to kiss, or take her to kiss her little thighs, gently but right on the cunt—gonna be careful not to tip her over—she vaguely senses my intentions with a blithe blabbering smile—I dont move—I am old.

Who am I?

STAVROGIN

**************************” (93)

Hegiras and megiras (96)

“—He’s on the first floor, the lucky usual bastard—” (97)

“I’m saying ‘There they are in all pulsing life going by the symbols of their past and dont realize it but are enriched by it’—” (97)

“…Cassidy watching two whores who are standing against the rail watchin and waitin to be propositioned, one of them a brunette with imperfect features, the other her fat ugly pal that you have to buy also, like girls in the sailor park—the brunette applies rouge and suddenly looks much prettier, her eyes and eyebrows stand out exotically like Indian beauties of Organo Street—I look at Maggie, she is unbelievably cute with her rosiness and dark hair and eyes like black agates—’Maggie’ I say, the whores pretending not to listen, ‘this is one of those times when your eyes are black’ —Maggie is interested in digging whore life and goes on chewing her gum in rapt absorption—” (101)

“JUNE OGILVIE AND I GOING TO WORK, earlier, for a woman in the sweat shop, we sat at the same table and started, my job was easier than her folding job so I offered it to her—she is frightened and sad and bitter to work and because we have to work, I’m amused— I’d been (I know it’s a dream) considering going to Albany to work the railroad but decided I wouldnt have time for anything—our furnished room is dreary, our lives dim, unfriendly—the place where we’re working was scene of a big carousal the night before, it’s where the Liverpool bombs dropped also—” (101)

Slum suburbs (102)

Kerouac Hook and Ladder Company (103)

Brothers Karamazov (103)

“—By this time I have a7 foot salami on my shoulder, it’s shaped crooked like a twisted branch…” (110

“…the television program announcing Jack Kerouac reading Children’s Tales…” (112); gin an gypsum; GIN & GYPSUM

“…the mist of meskimoxo’s ladymouf—” (113)

“—Cant worry about every gull in the sea—” (113)

Jolt of heroin, no Kerouacism, “…he was the one said I should drink Caribou Blood—Le Sang du Caribou—” (118)

“…blow us buddha damn up…” (121)

“T’aint nothin but the sound of celestial farmers snappin their susspenders in the dawn of an already ended day…” (122)

“…what is the Omening of it?” (123)

“…I’m standing by a barrel and a dumbwaiter—wildhaired, big headed, hydrocephalic, stupid, an insane idiot in a madhouse not knowing what to do with my hands—” (123)

“—Dead kitties are poor—” (124)

“…I was journeying across water…” (125)

“…everyone’s in ecstasy-anticipation of the actual final stroke of death—Everything disappears in disintegration, I with it—but my consciousness doesnt seem to disintegrate—” (126)

buddybuddy (128)

“—I uncover the old Cannastra Finistra paper roll of Sal Paradise ON THE ROAD novel—” (129)

pinpoint soul dementing (129)

Visions of Cody (130)

“His transformation into a Fiend does not surprise me, now I understand everything that had happened and the reason for his strange angry dependence on me—” (131)

Spencer Tracy continually high on T (132)

“—the bellhops and pumps of eternity—I dont care” (138)

“…I picked up on shit in a sinister I miss your mirrors…” arm marks, injections (140)

“We have low pressure clouds in Carolina…” (142)

“‘Talk about the brotherhood of man, Kerouac!’“ (143)

“‘Go to Mexico with your last $100—–the peace of the roofs in the afternoon…” (143) “sour frame of mind”

“Ah the world itself ends up saving you—” (144)

“Three nuns pass but the Conductor lets put four loud farts…” (146)

Mother: “…with head lowered in long widow’s despair—she whose face last night I saw bending over my sleep with an expression of unfathomable meaning I know is love on earth—and who was ironing all my clothes while I had these tragic dreams—” (148)

BARBARA DALE AND HER HUSBAND at their new home in Lowell on the first floor of the Lilly-Hildreth house where I’d lived in my childhood of 6, Irwin and I go visit—same house, I am amazed, it’s Christmas—from the yard B’s husband (ostensibly Marlon Brando) calls down ‘Get some gin and water’ but in trying to give us money I reassure we have it—and Irwin and I softly go to ‘Ralph’s’ store which is ‘still there’ (25 years! on the corner)…” (148)

Bible bestseller, agony in the garden

I’m eating June Beauty (154)

Show of rages (157)

Mental note, Restaurateur hustlers (162)

tan as a greek berry (163)

WH Auden, joke drink, woman’s piss/urinary (164)

Destouches’: “…where I thought of writing the ‘wrinkly tar’ corner of Dr Sax fame…” (164)

“—I’d just been reading an article about how there is going to be Prohibition of smoking in America and vert soon—in a loud gleeful voice I say ‘Just like in the Twenties when people went to Europe to get soused—they’ll all start going to North Africa and places to smoke—and you know what they’ll smoke—haw haw haw!’“

top part, pop tart

(167)

“…when I do open chute I feel I’ve made a mistake and will spend all afternoon floating down to earth—I’ve my cat in my arms—” (168)

“—what stain of sorrow is’t fills a grave in Nashua now— along side the other vast stain of sad spot of Pop— and the little inheriting one, Gerard—” (169)

May Day Boisvert accepted Town & City (170)

Snake Hill, comets, fireworks (170)

“…for Holocaust and Armageddon…an old dream…” (171)

My cat Rhondu, “— I see the cat in there masturbating…” (171)

“—fuckit I’ll just go back to New York and collect my advance on the ROAD and write at home…” (171)

“…a bag of marbles (big bag)…” (172)

“—At some point some little girl is saying she heard of a disease called ‘Neb’ characterized by the fear of your mouth and head catching on fire—” (175)

Movie: “Death of Mad and Hatchet Cranshaw” (175)

“…great dream of Doctor Sax’s haunted house…” (176)

“‘Wow!’ I say ‘Doctor Sax the actual now real flesh Doctor Sax or heir apparent to that mad title…’“ (176)

Eternity Mansion at Cocktail Fireplace Hour (177)

Bicycle race in sand: “…the puffing lone racer!” (177)

“…finally in a horrible burlap canvas bag prop icebox like a horror bag of the Kafka nightmare hero dragging his dragon green be-buttoned to caterpillar machine burden back across the gray strange stage of eternity racks and dust…” (178)

Bottle glass lip, scatterdamalia reality (179)

“(written long after I was awake and therefore not evocative of the haunt of the dream, not worthy of this book )” (181)

“…cockroach people impersonating as flying snakes…” (182)

“‘Hysteria in America has reached that Hate Love pitch’“ (183)

Baruch on TV: “Just because a man keeps bad company it doesnt mean—” (183)

Red Witch Hunters (Anti-Communists)

“…I have the TV in my bedroom and I suddenly realize I dont want it there…” (184)

“—it snows, it’s holy, there’s color television.” (183)

Pa: “…the bleak recognition of the bitch of existence…” (185)

“—Jawbleak gumming irons o no-hope morns, shit on the branch of peace—” (185)

“—I do get to talk to the champ Tenorman who seems interested until I use the fancy non-musician word atonal and his face and the others’ faces blank up—I dont belong, I’m trying to be a poet in the wrong medium—” (188)

“…heavy slow thumping—’The beating of a giant heart—A monster is hidden here!—They’re building structures for it!’“ (189)

“…I dont see why the West should suffer itself the indignity of living on the same globe with those Mongolian Idiots of the East…” (190)

“…the ground of the prunefields is all bare and cracked open in a terrible drought and makes me sad because I’d thought recently of farming in this railroad valley—” (191)

“…I stand raging in the yard of the noble old house saying ‘I’ll buy it myself!’“ (192)

wearoutable (192)

“—I am pleased that a man can always get laid in a Latin American country—” (192)

“—The travails, hassles and nervous hagglings of it all!—-I wish I dreamed of the Pure Wilderness—” (195)

“…I learn that Zaza or the socialite man is sick and been ordered by the doctor to drive every day to New Jersey and eat pure cream ice cream, quarts of it and immediately I wanta go along or get some too, be sick too—Had a chance to get up at 8:30 and slept till Noon instead, for fear of what to do with all that morning—” (195-196)

Livid lips of television (197)

“—Find some way to unlock the levels of my mind and get on in—” (202)

“…immortality in a hut–”. (202”

“…’I havent seen anything of worth….the rest are all awful & imitators of the so called modern style’…” (204)

“Dont beware

The anger of

The hare” (205)

“SEX DREAM—Marie Fitzpatrick or somebody, and I, hot, go down the cellar stairs holding each others’ organs—I have hers, she mine, as we descend steps slowly—We’re gonna look (of a place to work—It’s the basement of the Fortier Hugehouse on Salem—I pick a little sidecellar coal room, gray with ashes, dank, and stand her against the wall as we wake up—Just sweet immediate wanting—she’s slicking up breath in her hiss hot teeth—I’m grinding my molars in bighard girlholding grash—r-r-o-pt—We’re gonna find a place to gnash our hot and juicy parts pole into hole in some hideout craphole of the great cellar, no one’ll know, we’ll wave bare thighs and write on chalk on the wall and smack “…goosy flesh and have hot jumping juices in the ecstatic secret liplicking lollswallowing lip-lolling suckcellar hole, droop—I’ll grab her bare rumps and squeeze and dump in, standing, the straight pole, up her roamous slit, deep, she’ll part warm breath to huff—I’ll grang her—spew spill flood her inside belly womb—flutter my knees—tickle her top—accidently plop in, God.” (205-206)

“THE HATEFUL SHIP IN THE HATEFUL MISSISSIPPI, I’m late returning to it and finally on top of that it’s not the right ship and I stumble around the early dawn deck—my bunk in the messmen foc’sle—after sad bad events in presumably New Orleans, drunkenness—my own real ship’s gone upriver—” (206)

“…watch the teacher and his asskissing sarcastic prototype…” (206-207)

Ti Jean the happy Saint: “…God the fist mashed face of my redhaired English Canadian enemy—” “—That’s why…” (207)

‘…the girls ogle and wiggle…” (208)

“…my roar makes him understand….he floats back, whitened—” (210)

“—not a happy or even interesting dream—So I am loath to even write it…” (211)

“WRITING DREAMS, TAKE NOTE OF THE WAY THE DREAMING MIND CREATES” (211)

“— and because I’m not drinking or smoking tea my mind is very clear and I’m very friendly and direct with everyone and play with the kids with a spirit of serenity etc.—” ; double crappier, dreamcrap, tasteless peanut butter, annals of Jack Kerouac (213-213)

“…causally helping myself to the park coconut pile—” (214)

“—My mother and I are arm in arm on the floor, I’m crying afraid to die, she’s blissful and has one leg in pink sexually out between me and I’m thinking ‘Even on the verge of death women think of love & snaky affection’—Women? who’s dreaming this?” (214)

“Seurat—the boomcloud of pang pock boats” (215)

“—I’ve been in the room all night, ages, gray anxiety…” “—only final contemplation will upheave the details of that lost life and I write it—” (215)

“‘I’ve dream’d it & so here I am…”‘ “…what a toil tub and morons everywhere—” (215)

“casting my tears everywhere” (216)

Rhondidindu: “—in this case he just wanted to sleep with me (or stop my snoring?) “ (217)

Moonsqueak, mixupery, “…it’s November in the soul (my soul)—” (217)

“…skip’t the Army, ran out of town, saluted no flags, hid in the basement, made love to dark dolls, practiced dhyana in a Burma cave—”, war redhead, Snodgrass eating pussy, night followed sun (218)

“—blamming around this World of Clams…” (223)

“‘I’ll bring my own machete Monday’” (229)

“‘All that hateful bunch of men in one trap, no wonder I hated going to sea.’” (230)

“(here I tried to write clairvoyant subconscious prose but looked from time to time at Giants and Dodgers on TV screen—pfft) (231)

“…and as I usually do I pay no attention…” (231)

“…bloodsoaked in lore sun in my brain—” (232)

“‘Go ahead you old interfering fool!’“ (234)

“—The girl throws two quarters on the table saying ‘Anybody wanta f–k?’—I leap at the chance…” (235)

“…I gather all my junks…” (235)

“—So I up and shove my heel in his face just as everybody’s going to scream in the bus is going to careen—and wake up, my heel kicking in the air—of the bed—” (236)

“—I’m all tangled in the molasses of self dream—wake up wishing I could be Buddha and have no fear of selfhood, of the dissolution of self, of pain and insult and death—

If God were real everything would be honey

And so everything is honey truly” (237)

“…I’m the Company Joker Imbecile who’s always losing his gun…” (237-238)

“‘Where’s my gun hey?’” (238)

“—My sadsack soldier role—” (238)

“—I’m lost and cant find my company,no one cares, it’s a huge new war—” (238)

“…(dream) device taking pictures…” (238)

“…offering to sell me 2 lbs. tea for $200—I tell him that’s a good price—” (241)

“The cop leaves and all the while we’d been talking and checking the papers I had a super long joint right in the palm of my hand, I’d just rolled it in my room—I even gestured with it in my palm and the cop saw it but wasnt sure it was a white thingamajig or other—” (241-242)

dream-slap-recap (243)

“…suddenly he’s a respectable woman imitating a slut…” (245)

Candy bars, Deni Bleu: ‘Kerouac you slay Me’—Something about a half an Almond Joy and Half a Fifth Avenue—” (247)

“…neighborhood party like in Chicago Mel Torme (I keep identifying that way, Mel Torme for some reason . . .)” (247)

“vulgar faux pas” “… I feel that ‘I’ve conquered my fear of knives’ and wake up, spectrally neither victor nor saint in this hasslish mystery of emptiness” (248)

“…emptying my pockets of old roaches…” “—I live in the Fortier cellar in a dismal damp room furnished like a vampire’s castle—People visit me—” (248)

“…the leer of bone teeth…” “…makes me sick shudder to think Ive grown so old-&-decayed & am such a skeleton—I snap my jaw back in” (250)

“…raise the curtain on the first rainblear brownmoth mask—” (251)

“—I’ve been wreagling myself all night to wrongle myself a wrass to get in—Write!” (251)

Mickey Mantle (252)

“…realizing I only want a life of inaction and adventure every day—” (254)

“—I get furious at the world with its goddam rules…” (260)

“IN A POOLHALL I HAVE A FULL LENGTH SWORD somewhere like grim dismal Lowell I don’t want and also on the floor’s my machete blade, unhandled and rusty—the Negro Cook of the Poolhall says ‘I cut myself on that thing’ meaning the old blade & meaning to be funny (because it’s dull) but for sentimental reasons I want to keep it and start tugging at it from him—He wont let go—-He’s the Wiseacre Chief Cook of the S.S.Dorchester who made me get up and re-mop the Galley, the big Negro with his huge cook knives whom I’d told ‘Take your hands off me’ when he tried to start pushing me down the alleyway—It’s that guy, and grinners watch again—-I wake up with horror of ships, wars, jail, compound terrors of this compounded terrible world—I dont think to use my sword—” (254-255)

“JERRY LEWIS THE COMEDIAN is sick in bed in my apartment, my studio room in Upper New York and June is there, when I go out to do something quick, while June is out, O come back and find her gelatinously dream-ly half-inventedly necking with Jerry, you see the little lips, the heads bent over, but it’s only when I knock over my drink at their feet which I’d left on my desk when I went out that I realize June has been drinking it and ‘wasting everything’ (she had just spent our last $50 on some futile self-serious absurdity)…it’s now I realize her betrayal, indifference and unconcern for me and so I cut out from the dream—Never even laid a hand on her while I had er—” (255)

“‘SHE LIKES TO ROMP AROUND’ the jealous sister is saying of the pretty young 15 year old sister (or 16-) and I look at her, she’s wearing lil rompers that are tight and white to her tan legs and running off, shirt tails a hangin low—I rush out the house to watch more, it’s in a pine wood settlement somewhere, like Maine, there are lil brothers and tricycles around and other houses—as I watch Rompey now her shirts’ inside the rompers, she’s cute—I aint no George Sokolsky (when it comes to girls in rompers)…” (255)

“GOING THROUGH AN ABANDONED HOUSEBOAT or muddy apartment on the side of the river with Danny Richman I steal an old victrola top and take it with me to town, where it’s played but doesnt work too good and has to be wound—goes unnoticed in the general rack and ray of city excitement—There are movies, Ma and I get in—I’m sitting on the ground, a guy goes by staring at me curiously then sees my mother and they fly into greetings—he wears glasses—Going back up the river with Danny along the bank I’m mindful of how when the Yangtse floods you cant tell a horse from a cow on an islet and I look out to the Mississippi islets—dots—it’s warm, the grass and bankside is warm, bugs, I worry about tics, we cut along the levee grass, walking back America—we go through that houseboat again and I think of stealing the victrola but I’ve already done that—Afternoon sun rays in goldenly through the ruined windows—” (256)

“BACK IN LOWELL BUT DISMALLY trying to work on the paper, where also Boisvert is and I get his promise that soon ‘someone’ll’ publish Beat Generation and I go to San Jose and gladly tell this to Nin and Irwin Garden and Evelyn but Cody’s asleep and doesnt care—In Lowell I also see good old G.J. but there’s a dismay, a cloud, it’s that warm radiant Lowell where I’m back and I’ve been everywhere and I use Lowell to back up my dreams which isnt what it’s for—helplessness, wrong choice—Nin is apparently reading some of the first lines of Beat Generation in the San Jose parlor but, it’s also the parlor where Watson and the piano was and the piano table I didnt want dirtied and he’s around somewhere displeased—This is all because I went to sleep before I was really tired—I woke up miserably aching with over-ness—I loft a big stiff gin and tonic and drink it all up and start getting drunk and suddenly I’m alone in the front room and want more—-” (256-257)

“LONG HASSELS ALL NIGHT long over some little redhead auburn-beauty living with apparently Mary Palmer and me & Irwin Garden and Bull, such a raving little one we’re all in love with her and finagle around—I’m a drunk, I go down and run errands and make phonecalls—Ma & Nin are around too, earlier, it’s all in New Jersey but all the time we’re supposed to be getting ready to go to New Yrok and never gits underway—Finally Mary and I are all dressed, we’re going to NY with Pretty One to see her Russian dramatic coach but (and other things, Mary’s, my affairs) but at the last minute The Redhead lays in bed overlooking New Jersey (which is like that Deni Bleu suburba of Gray Towers recently, that Chirico line design of sunshine afternoon houses)—says she hates to see that old dramatic coach, sounds like Josephine, petulant, wasteful, egocentric—Bull meanwhile, has got tired in midday and’s typically laid up in his room in bed as I go there and take my New York pants off the hook—Mary’s on the bed with the girl, she’s all dressed, she’s trying to talk and persuade and like an old nanny mama and I’m disgusted because I wanted to yak with the girl and now I’ll be alone with the old one with her baggy eyes and anxieties about Pretty—’O I wish Pretty would this’—and ‘that’—no fun—’Sneak back and go up the fireplace and see what she’s really gonna do,’ I think later, remembering Bull in bed in the next room—But’s a dismal group, household—Julien was around earlier, gettin me drunk—The pad has a front room and two bedrooms and is in the 2nd floor and has outdoor wooden steps— The streets outside are narrow and twisting, like Pawtucketville around Gershom Ave., a triangle block with little houses and fire hydrants and silence, eerie—The girl had auburn hair, a little bit of a strange definite bulbous and pub and snub nose, dark eyes, a petulant personality, a young fulsome body— Irwin Garden is the one she loves and we’re all jealous—” (257-258)

“I GO UP TO KIND LOU LITTLE’S HOUSE to have my sore foot cleaned and bandaged, he has a nice home like wealthy 2nd generation Italians in the suburbs, daughters, pianos—It’s back in Lowell and I have a red rubber ball and I’m planning to go out in the backyard and wham it pitching it against my old backbarn boarded window and by God to see if it’s still there I look out the window and everything is too dim to tell—-But later the little fat kid wants to play ball and I tell him ‘Let’s go out in the street, it’s a softball and might break a window’—He complains about the neighbors living at the Desilets location—I have reveries about the old park and think of going to it—”(258)

“MONTREAL, RUSSIA. Big scenes with parents in a building, involving the shiftless brother-in-law Eddy Tones, who is a taxidriver lush in this strange dark Northern Gloomtown —All drizzly and gray it is, as Eddy and I who am 18 years old and still kid-like, start out in his cab to get something—Eddy’s like a thin W.C. Fields—’Boy’ he says ‘wait here till I get me a shot of whiskey—Now the trouble with your folks is, they’re always pesterin somebody to do dis and do dat—What I like is my freedom, see?—’ He goes driving all over town and finally at drizzly dawn on some street in the Russian Flats and whorehouse district outside town he comes up to a gigantic Street Paver Machine that takes up the whole road and is four foot high with racks for tar, run by an old workman—Eddy rams his cab right into it, brangs, and the whole thing shakes and quivers and moves forward, not heavy—Eddy’s having a big time and laughing and is drunk & crazy—Next he rams up against a panel truck and keeps pushing it back (it’s empty) towards a pedestrian who’s trying to walk in the street—and because the wheel is turned the truck follows the man in an arc—a panel truck or cab earlier also pushed, out of which leaps now a visored driver drawing out an evil looking revolver with a wood handle—’Hey’ I say from the back of the cab ‘I’m only a passenger, take it easy’—he holds it by the barrel to use it as a slugger while the pedestrian has already rushed up and hauled Eddy out of the cab and is bopping him hard and professionally on the chin with his fists so I rush up to stop it and do so by yanking Eddy from the punches and holding him at my side—Just as the taxidriver’s about to lodge his complaint the pedestrian to my surprise removes a gun from his pocket and calmly shoots Eddy one shot in the chest —Eddy is surprised and feels the pain only afterwards, and falls—I’m suddenly alone with him on the dismal windswept drizzly street of dawn, not a working street and so not a person in sight up and down the gray reaches of its dimness— Eddy is writhing and crying ‘Get me a shot of whiskey’—’But where? how?’—I find myself all alone with a man whose injury may be serious but I cant tell and he wants whiskey and lies in the road in pain, sentimental, my crazy drunken uncle-in-law—I’m so embarrassed I wish I could go away—(But on the corner there’s an allnight whore and gambling cocktail lounge, with blue curtains in the plush door)—-I’ll go there and get a shot of whiskey Eddy?’—Yea, yea, but get a whole bottle, you’ll spill the shotglass bringin it back—’—I feel in my pocket, I have just a $5 bill and I think ‘For poor wounded Eddy I can spend that final fin’ but I get twinges of guilt and remorseful fear and greed-anxiety and hear myself saying ‘Have you got $5’—’Yea, yea, in my pocket, get it there’ and he can, I have to feel in his pockets because he cant turn over and I look up to see if anybody sees me, thinking ‘They’ll think I’m a mugger rolling a guy’—bills fall out, I take a 5 and rush to the corner in the gray mist, go in the bar—They wont sell me a bottle—’Its too late, what the hell’s the matter with you, dont you know that?’—It’s dark in there, plush, blue, gold bar bottle lights and a dim piano in back and a few voices of people who’ve been drinking all night till dawn—I want to tell them why I need the bottle—They’re talkin among themselves—’Gotta wait till 8, city ordinance’—I get furious at the world with its goddam rules and comment about rules and there’s my uncle dying for a drink in the rain with a bullet wound in his chest, I grab a bottle off the shelf at the end of the bar and run out fast—- ‘Let em chase me! Eddy’ll get his drink!’ but as I reach the partitioning curtains I dont hear a commotion on the other side, they’re still commenting about the city ordinance and there’s even someone chuckling so that instead of being chased and shouted and shot at, I’m completely in the clear with the quart of whiskey and Eddy’s $5 bill!—I run out silently and up the street to Eddy—But he’s dead—” (258-260)

dimness and streetmoil, molly vitriolic (262)

“‘J ava sho’ (I was hot)” (262)

“Cabooses on a winter morning spurt sweet comfortable smoke—” (163)

“She says she’s going to a party of six, at a cop’s house—’Are you the seventh?’ I say…” (263)

“…the blonde guy identified me to a plainclothesman…” (263)

“…the auditorium has become my room and I want to take her up there but she’s going to her party” (264)

“Chloroforming myself, trying to commit suicide in the bed…” “…just made the mother come with a masturbation…” “all young beatie bob the darlin moon” (264)

happified, obliviso

“—Embracing this love I seek to sleep and sleep more, dream on, till, seabells toll my eyelids’ lash obliviso—-Methinks with this chiseled death-profile I must be Gerard—” (265)

Bull’s big gang of dope pushers:

Palming a big roach, suspicioning: “…that house where I’m married to Dusty in the old paramoured-to-a-dike-dream—–Better to go to a Sinaloa hut boy…(as live in the same house as old TiNin and expect to be free to hide roaches)” (266)

Spilling piss (266-267)

“…wife who says ‘You drink too much’ and I look at Nin and she says ‘Of course he does—’“ (269)

“Horrible nightmare murders” “—the police investigated, interrogated, mopped up the mess but Man I tell you it dont help, it’s what you got inside the dark that murders & mares night…” (271)

“…so old the Machine, to register letters ya gotta hit it one finger at a time, hard, which I do—” (272)

“Who’s subjective? Who’s objective?” (272)

“…the seas saw terribly…” (272)

“‘…your silly outcries about the Days of Armageddon and your Bible, making everyone quake because you’re crazy’“ (273)

“…to see his wife Marie for a f., I hope—” (274)

Cat: Pinky (the coolest cat that ever lived) (275)

“—-lots of sand and new construction and wild excitement in the wind whipped day with puffclouds racing in the glitter blue—” (275)

“…God—When Autumn wins my heart again and makes me lose my love the trees will take the Dream, Roads, Dharma Railroads and Bubbles of the Mind Sea and crash them back to Eternity” (275)

Franklin Roosevelt Jr on TV (276)

“(Who the boy? Who chaser?) Who’s objective? Who’s subjective? Who real? What real? Al liquid phantomry in my mind essence dreaming, like life—-Ha!

(Close your eyes to al danger & dont be afraid to die. . . .it’s all imaginary & empty & great) (278)

“it’s the high cliff of moral anxiety—” (282)

Thoreau’s Walden Pond hut, marijuana seeds, powdered tobacco, “Thoreau was High” (283)

Huck is a Jew (283)

philistine pitiliness (284)

“You & your father both, you’ve never bothered to find out the topmost branches of the tree that fed you…” (284)

Great Sad Tree of Earth, reaching for higher branches (284)

“Hubbard is quiet and makes no comment because he couldn’t care less, is thinking of his next jolt—” (284)

“I feel tired of trying to keep up with the consequences of the Beat Generation…” (284)

11-21-1954: “…I saw: ‘the Beatific Generation’” (284)

“…I’m ready for action and wake up” (285)

“Meanwhile the doomed boys play basketball and even have gang fights.” (289)

“—At H-Hour fools with earphones will hysterically count off the seconds while people wait for death—” (289)

“—It is gray dusk, warm, withered flowers lay around—-” (290)

Eisenhower, president of America through gray decades: “Cant afford to hate him ‘cause I’m a child—” (291)

“Earlier Garden also have a theory, about snakes, worms, and for proof he takes a hairy caterpillar and eats it as I ack…” (293)

“Maybe the real reason why people don’t write to me anymore is because I’m such an out and out bum —” (293)

James Watson: “he’s been in there 2 years with his girl ‘holed up’ loving and writhing and writing—” (293)

Not a thief bit a strange gelatinous nameless mooch, a hanger onner, a parasite, a city wart, an apartment haunter, a sneaker-in-halls, a mattress-bug, a voyeur of orgies, a disgusting stale spectre—a dream drifter—” (293)

A boy at a booth: “‘I’ll suck your big juicy cock anytime’ and Our Hero jumps without shame over the counter & goes to sit seriously in the booth to discuss further, as all the men notice and smile—” (294)

Arcady of Ribs, Troy of Bones, Waterloo, wrong way on the Oneway, I make a neat proud U-turn (295)

“…nothing to do but write Visions of Gerard, wash the dishes and feed the cat!—and pop the Book of Dreams—” (295)

“—Garden, who never laughs, mines information—” (296)

‘meaty’ feel of the doorjamb, gypsy drapes (297)

“I’ll have to find a new special language now to begin describing the indescribable location-mystery of these dream-locations for they’re important—in each of these locations lurks a mystery of Character, a Vision—” (298)

A newly discover’d William Blake poem: “Is nature / proud?” and “Something not new, something not perfumed, something not new, something not perfumed” “. . . as he runs his cherubic fingers and counts the panes and missing-panes of the window by his crib with dusty glass—” “—Ah me—” (299-300)

“‘The squawk of the little very self which wanders everywhere. . . . . . . .’” (302)

“‘Ah even then I was a fool, a young fool Kerouac is all’” (303)

“‘He’s Sioux Sick!’” “—It was the only really horrible nightmare I ever had, got it from a bee-bite earlier in the day I think.” (307)

Digging graves in the yard: “‘Come spring the snow melts you see elbows sticking out of the ground, gad what a thing to be buried in a black suit’” (307)

“Fact is, if I tried to explain every tiny detail of these dreams there’d be no end—” (308)

“Graves, graves! I the Gravedigger!” (309)

“I woke up— / two flies were boffing / on my forehead” (309)

End of the world, tilty horizon, like on a ship’s deck, the Earth is moving, marvel at the Apocalypse (309-310)

“I prepare to drive his jaw thru with one mighty jab, my ‘Moses Blow’” (311)

Jack Parr show: televised universally naked (312)

“‘O why do these dreary sexual executioners always have to come on so dull with their tired-out straight jokes” “children paraded in my name” (313)

“Zap Ploufe never died!” (315)

Ladder exit from apartment, overhanging from the top of the Empire State Building: “I’m sick of the whole fucking thing and refuse to do it again . . .” (315)

“. . . what a leering smile I give her!” (316)

Bearded sick: “…cholera outbreak and they send the little 10 year old girl to get the doctor in town but he’d always raped her—” “delicious juicy beards and dramas” (316-317)

Holy goat in my arms, Lamb (white) (317)

Beautiful Revlon Announcer Girl Starlet: “. . . I want some too…” (319)

Coyocan, Eternal Mountain Temple: Griffins! “. . . but those flying horses are happy! how beautifully they claw slow forehooves thru the blue void!—” (321)

Firingsquad Photographers: “. . . you can spend the rest of your captive life just boffing these luscious thin blondes completely secure & safe from harm—” (323-324)

“O well, it’s the book of dreams” (325)

“—All I wanta do is get out of Europe, go to America, get out of America, go to Mexico, get out of Mexico, go to Morocco, get out of Morocco, go to Hell” (326)

“. . . I put-put down a long Princeton Boulevard-like street past schoolgirls who say ‘Is Jack Kerouac sposed to have a motor on his bike?’—’Sure’—” (329)

“. . . go in idly to see what they got in the way of cheap notebooks to write on in the ‘wilderness’—” (329)

“—I’m going back to the world, the sweet hopeful world, tortillas & beans in the smoky market & I wish I had a typewriter!” (329)

Sign: “Do not watch baseball from this sidewalk” (331)

Vulture people, Observer of the Story, bites of red meat and red mite, “ . . hundreds of slowly fucking Vulture couples on the town dump—” (333)

Vulture People Banquet Orgy (334)

“Blisters in our sugar”, Underground Slime, the Devil with long ears, Purple Magenta Square Stone, Atlantean Nightmare (335)

“. . . I explain my inner mental egoisms by saying ‘Like if I’m hammering a nail onto the end of the word ‘Perfection’ & the nail goes froosh as I miss, I say out loud ‘Ah, Perfection’s End’—” (336)

“I add that nobody appreciates this but myself, like all my books I’ve written—” (336)

“‘Sure she can podemos speaka espanol” (338)

“. . . I woke up amazed. . . . .” (339)

The Subterraneans (1958)

Adam Moorad: The Subterraneans: “‘They are hip without being slick, they are intelligent without being corny, they are intellectual as hell and know all about Pound without being pretentious or talking too much about it, they are very quiet, they are very Christlike.’“ (1)

“… I am developing or was developing, in my youth, such bad freeloading habits…” (1)

“-Angels, bear with me-I’m not even looking at the page but straight ahead into the sadglint of my wallroom…” (2)

Julien: apocalyptic angel or saint of the subterraneans (2)

Mardou Fox: “By god I’ve got to get involved with that little woman.” (2)

Rita Savage: “… I used to have daydreams of her between my legs while kneeling on the floor of the toilet…” (2)

“…the glad eye the sex eye…” n(2)

Ship, New York, Kobe, Japan: “…trouble with the steward and my inability to be gracious in fact human like an ordinary guy while performing my chores as saloon messman (and you must admit now I’m sticking to the facts), a thing typical of me…” (2-3)

thongs of sandals (3)

“…another confession must be made…” “…I am crudely malely sexual and cannot help myself and have lecherous and so on propensities as almost all my male readers no doubt are the same…”(3)

“…when you’re such an egomaniac all you do is take off on long paragraphs about minor details about yourself…” (3-4)

“…girl in boy slacks and stars in her eyes and hips that seemed so soft…” (5)

Roll a stick (joint), Jack Steen: “‘What for? I roll my own’” “…he hated me – “ (5)

“‘My name’s Julien Alexander, I have something, I conquered Egypt,’ and then Mardou stuck her hand out to Adam Moorad and introduced herself, saying, ‘Mardou Fox,’

but didn’t think of doing it to me which should have been my first inkling of the prophecy of what was to come, so I had to stick my hand at her and say, ‘Leo Percepied my name’ and shake – ah, you always go for the ones who don’t really want you – “ (6)

“…not in big paranoiac bums of ships and railroads and novels and all that hatefulness…” (6)

“…ten years younger than I seeing none of my virtues which anyway had long been drowned under years of drugtaking and desiring to die, to give up give it all up and forget it all, to die in the dark star – it was I stuck out my hand, not she – ah time.” (6)

“…’trying to (not make IT) but make her’…” (8)

But in eying her little charms I only had the foremost one idea that I had to immerse my lonely being (‘A big sad lonely man’ is what she said to me one night later, seeing me suddenly in the chair ) in the warm bath and salvation of her thighs – the intimacies of younglovers in a bed, high, facing eye to eye, breast to breast naked, organ to organ, knee to shivering goosepimpled knee, exchanging existential and loveracts for a crack at making it – ‘making it’ the big expression with her, I can see the little out-pushing piece to the little redlips seeing ‘making it’…” (7)

Mardou: “…’prepared to cut out of this group’ for her own reasons.” (7)

“…the new bop generation way of speaking…” (7)

“…coming down the street I’m some kind of hoodlum and then when they learn I’m not a hoodlum but some kind of crazy saint they don’t like it and moreover they’re afraid I’ll suddenly become a hoodlum anyway and slug them and break things …” (7)

noxious unbeachlike shirt, a foolish Crosby Hawaiian shirt with designs (8)

“…although at first, before the puffs, which were passed around Indian style, I had a definite sensation of being able to come close with Mardou and involved and making her that very first night, that is taking off with her alone if only for coffee with the puffs which made me pray reverently and in serious secrecy for the return of my pre-puff ‘sanity’ I became extremely unself-confident, overtrying, positive she didn’t like me, hating the facts – “ (8)

“…(and at home working furiously on a huge novel, mad, cracked, confident, young, talented as never since)…” (9)

“…pride vs. pride and beauty or beatitude or sensitivity versus the stupid neurotic nervousness of the phallic type, forever conscious of his phallus, his tower, of women as wells – “ (9)

“But from the first Mardou was indeed self-dependent and independent announcing she wanted no one, nothing to do with anyone, ending after me) with same – “ (9)

“…her little teeth are no longer mine but probably my enemy’s lapping at them and giving her the sadistic treatment she probably loves as I had given her none – murders in the air – and that bleak corner where the lamp shines, and the winds swirl, a paper, fog, I see the great discouraged face of myself and my so-called love drooping in the lane, no good – “ (9)

“…greatness is a big chill in the wind – for greatness does too – ah and who said I was great – and supposing one were a great writer, a Shakespeare of the pillow night?” (9-10)

Mardou on Baudelaire: “(It was Mardou finally said to me ‘I would have preferred the happy man to the unhappy poems he left us,’ which I agree with and I am Baudelaire, and I love my Brown mistress and I too leaned to her belly and listened to the rumbling underground)” (10)

hurling on at her….I wanted to be hurt (10)

“ – for now death bends big winds over my window, I see it, I hear it, I smell it, I see it in the limp hang of my shirts destined to be not worn…” (10)

“…we’d had Micky on there the three of us…” “…benny and a big sexball…” (10)

Mardou’s place: “…stuffy little place in Heavenly Lane on Telegraph Hill.” (11)

“…she’s a whole lot not a little crazy…” “…apparently very seriously flipped only very recently…” “…real hallucinations concerning nuns in the orphanage where she was raised…” (11)

“… I sat back cool to pretend to be cool hoping she would notice this with the result, when the lady entered the parlor I did not rise.” “I pretended to read. I pretended to pay no attention whatever.” (12)

“little hip-pretending weasel” (13)

Roxanne: “… (a woman of 25 prophesying the future of America the short almost crewcut with curls black snaky hair, snaky walk, pale pale junkey anemic face and we say junkey when once Dostoevsky would have said what? if not ascetic or saintly?…)…” (13)

Red Drum: “…the great new generation game wailing and gathering there…” (13)

Glee eyed, hightingled (14)

“…Bird, whom I saw distinctly digging Mardou several times also myself directly into my eyes looking to search really I was that great writer I thought myself to be as if he knew my thoughts and ambitions or remembered me from the other night clubs and other coasts, other Chicagos…” “…watching Mardou and me in the infancy our love and probably wondering why, or knowing it wouldn’t last, or seeing who it was would be hurt, as now, obviously, but not quite yet, it was Mardou whose eyes were shining my direction…” (14)

“…her heart leapt to smell the ‘sweetness of my breath’ (quote)…” (14)

“…striding Jesus coat…” (15)

“…the mystery, the silence of the subterraneans, ‘urban Thoreaus’…” “… All the students being interested in Whitman from a sexual revolution standpoint and in Thoreau from a contemplative mystic and antimaterialistic as if existentialist or whatever standpoint…” (15)

Favorite dishes: egg foo young (16)

“…ah. – Dancing, I had put the light out, so, in the dark, dancing, I kissed her…” (16)

“‘Yaa Calexico!’

“Quick to plunge, bite, put the light out, hide my face in shame, make love to her tremendously because of lack of love for a year almost and the need pushing me down—our little agreements in the dark, the really should-not-be-tolds—for it was she who later said ‘Men are so crazy, they want the essence, the woman is the essence, there it is right in their hands but they rush off erecting big abstract constructions.’—’You mean they should just stay home with the essence, that is lie under tree all day with the woman but Mardou that’s an old idea of mine, a lovely idea, I never heard it better expressed and never dreamed.’—’Instead they rush off and have big wars and consider women as prizes instead of human beings, well man I may be in the middle of all this shit but I certainly don’t want any part of it’ (in her sweet cultured hip tones of new generation).—And so having had the essence of her love now I erect big word constructions and thereby betray it really—telling tales of every gossip sheet the washline of the world—and hers, ours, in all the two months of our love (I thought) only once-washed as she being a lonely subterranean spent moningdays and would go to the laundry with them but suddenly it’s dank late afternoon and too late and the sheets are gray, lovely to me—because soft.—But I cannot in this confession betray the innermosts, the thighs, what the thighs contain—and yet why write?—the thighs contain the essence—yet tho there I should stay and from there I came and’ll eventually return, still I have to rush off and construct construct—for nothing—for Baudelaire poems—”

“Never did she use the word love, even that first moment after our wild dance when I carried her still on my lap and hanging clear to the bed and slowly dumped her, suffered to find her, which she loved, and being unsexual in her entire life (except for the first 15-year-old conjugality which for some reason consummated her and never since) (O the pain of telling these secrets which are so necessary to tell, or why write or live) now ‘casus in eventu est’ but glad to have me losing my mind in the slight way egomaniacally I might on a few beers.—Lying then in the dark, soft, tentacled, waiting, till sleep—so in the morning I wake from the scream of beermares and see beside me the Negro woman with parted lips sleeping, and little bits of white pillow stuffing in her black hair, feel almost revulsion, realize what a beast I am for feeling anything near it, grape little sweet-body naked on the restless sheets of the nightbefore excitement, the noise in Heavenly Lane sneaking in through the gray window, a gray doomsday in August so I feel like leaving at once to get ‘back to my work’ the chimera of not the chimera but the orderly advancing sense of work and duty which I had worked up and developed at home (in South City) humble as it is, the comforts there too, the solitude which I wanted and now can’t stand.—I got up and began to dress, apologize, she lay like a little mummy in the sheet and cast the serious brown eyes on me, like eyes of Indian watchfulness in a wood, like with the brown lashes suddenly rising with black lashes to reveal sudden fantastic whites of eye with the brown glittering iris center, the seriousness of her face accentuated by the slightly Mongoloid as if of a boxer nose and the cheeks puffed a little from sleep, like the face on a beautiful porphyry mask found long ago and Aztecan.—’But why do you have to rush off so fast, as though almost hysterical or worried?’—’Well I do I have work to do and I have to straighten out—hangover—’ and she barely awake, so I sneak out with a few words in fact when she lapses almost into sleep and I don’t see her again for a few days—

The adolescent cocksman having made his conquest barely broods at home the loss of the love of the conquered lass, the blacklash lovely—no confession there.—It was on a morning when I slept at Adam’s that I saw her again, I was going to rise, do some typing and coffee drinking in the kitchen all day since at that time work, work was my dominant thought, not love—not the pain which impels me to write this even while I don’t want to, the pain which won’t be eased by the writing of this but heightened, but which will be redeemed, and if only it were a dignified pain and could be placed somewhere other than in this black gutter of shame and loss and noisemaking folly in the night and poor sweat on my brow—Adam rising to go to work, I too, washing, mumbling talk, when the phone rang and it was Mardou, who was going to her therapist, but needed a dime for the bus, living around the corner, ‘Okay come on over but quick I’m going to work or I’ll leave the dime with Leo.’— ‘O is he there?’—’Yes.’—In my mind man-thoughts of doing it again and actually looking forward to seeing her suddenly, as if I’d felt she was displeased with our first night (no reason to feel that, previous to the balling she’d lain on my chest eating the egg foo young and dug me with glittering glee eyes) (that tonight my enemy devour?) the thought of which makes me drop my greasy hot brow into a tired hand—O love, fled me— or do telepathies cross sympathetically in the night?—Such cacoethes him befalls—that the cold lover of lust will earn the warm bleed of spirit—so she came in, 8 A.M., Adam went to work and we were alone and immediately she curled up in my lap, at my invite, in the big stuffed chair and we began to talk, she began to tell her story and I turned on (in the gray day) the dim red bulblight and thus began our true love—”

“She had to tell me everything—no doubt just the other day she’d already told her whole story to Adam and he’d listened tweaking his beard with a dream in his far-off eye to look attentive and loverman in the bleak eternity, nodding—now with me she was starting all over again but as if (as I thought) to a brother of Adam’s a greater lover and bigger, more awful listener and worrier.—There we were in all gray San Francisco of the gray West, you could almost smell rain in the air and far across the land, over the mountains beyond Oakland and out beyond Donner and Truckee was the great desert of Nevada, the wastes leading to Utah, to Colorado, to the cold cold come fall plains where I kept imagining that Cherokee-halfbreed hobo father of hers lying bellydown on a flatcar with the wind furling back his rags and black hat, his brown sad face facing all that land and desolation.—At other moments I imagined him instead working as a picker around Indio and on a hot night he’s sitting on a chair on the sidewalk among the joking shirtsleeved men, and he spits and they say, ‘Hey Hawk Taw, tell us that story agin about the time you stole a taxicab and drove it clear to Manitoba, Canada—d’jever hear him tell that one, Cy?’—I saw the vision of her father, he’s standing straight up, proudly, handsome, in the bleak dim red light of America on a corner, nobody knows his name, nobody cares—”

“Her own little stories about flipping and her minor fugues, cutting across boundaries of the city, and smoking too much…” (16-19)

“…you only have to dig his foot down to find a baby’s hand.” (21)

“‘…but seeing the horrible roads this your supposing goes to it took me to frights, if I wasn’t so damned persistent n ‘ and so on deep into the day, a long confusing story only pieces of which and imperfectly I remember, just the mass of the misery in the connective form – “ (22)

“…eyes round staring in a meditation so long and so mysterious…” “…the subterraneans their gloomy longthoughts enduring.” (22)

“…smoking the volcanic ash…” “…she was flipping – (the tense anxiety of improper sex additionally, the premature ejaculations of these anemic maquereaux leaving her suspended in tension and wonder)…” (23)

“‘Hey Ross you take Mardou home tonight I wanta make it with Rita for a change…” (23)

“ – She had no clothes on, she’d risen out of his satisfied sheets to stand in the wash of gray gloomtime what to do, where to go.” (23)

“Making a new start, starting from flesh in the rain…” “I quaked when the giver creamed, when my father screamed, my mother dreamed…” (26)

“‘…buy this brooch….the first symbol I was going to allow myself.’“ (26-27)

“‘Man don’t pluck those dirty notes at ME,’“

Fight with Jack Steen, shooting up with Pusher, “dancing” explanation to cops (27)

“‘But that day I’d seen this little iron thing, a little brooch with a beautiful dull sheen, to be worn around the neck, you know how nice that would look on my breast.’ – ‘On your brown breastbone a dull gold beautiful it would be baby, go on with your amazing story.’“ (27)

“‘How warm the world is, all you gotta do is get little symbolic coins – they’ll let you in for all the warmth and food you want – you don’t have to strip your skin off or chew your bone in alleyways – these places were designed to house and comfort bag-and-bone people come to cry for consolation.’” (28)

Ten cents, two hours staring at a postcard swiveller: “. . . perfect private talismans of the new important meaning, personal omen emblems . . .” (28)

Leo flipping on benny in 1945: “‘Honey was a wild bitch . . .’” (30)

“‘…it reminded me too when I was a little girl in Oakland and this man would send us to the store and give us dimes then he’d open his bathrobe and show us himself.’” “‘…I remember I never used to stay there but my girlfriend did and I think she even did something with him one time.’” (33)

“‘Why did I allow myself to be bored ever in the past and to compensate for it got high or drunk or rages or all the tricks people have because they want anything but serene understanding of just what there is, which is after all so much, and thinking like angry social deals, – like angry – kicks – like hassling over social problems and my race problem…’” (33)

“…the youngest of the Fox sisters was alcoholic and made wild street and got arrested regularly by the vice squad, some nameless horrible yawning wrong…” (35)

“…beat on curbstones seeing symbols in the saturated gutter, the Rimbauds and Verlains of America on Times Square, kids – no girl had ever moved me with a story of spiritual suffering…” (36)

Mardou skips her therapy session, Adam blames Leo, (gray crazy outside), “…the girl with the short haircut saying later that I was so beautiful she couldn’t look…” (east coast saying of hers), Mardou jealous (37)

“ – so when Yuri bangs on my door the following night, and I’m not around, and hr’s drunk and insists, and jumps on her as he’d been doing, she gave in, she gave in – she gave up – jumping ahead of my story, naming my enemy at once – the pain, why should ‘the sweet ram of their lunge in love’ which has really nothing to do with me in time or space, be like a dagger In my throat?” (39)

WELL-BEING (39)

“…(sighing, turning over in the bed, hiding, burrowing little grape body around, so I go, turn her over, flop on bed, kiss straight line that runs from her breastbone, a depression there, straight, clear down to her bellybutton word becomes an infinitesimal line proceeds like as if ruled with pencil on down and then continues just straight underneath, and need a man get well-being from history and thought she herself said when he has that, the essence, but still)…” (39)

“…she in her sweet brown feet on sandals padding wifelike Ruthlike to follow me…” (40)

“‘Man you know I don’t have any eyes for that hysterical poverty deal’ – (statements of such pith and hip I get mad and go home and brood about it for days).” “I undress and stay another three hours…” (41)

“…the asexuality of the WORK – also the sudden gut joy of beer when the visions of great words in rhythmic order all in one giant archangel book go roaring thru my brain, so I lie in the dark also seeing also hearing the jargon of the future worlds – “ “(…– well-being believes he’ll go to heaven – a word to the wise is enough – ‘Smart went Crazy,’ wrote Allen Ginsberg.)” (42)

“At first I had my doubts, because she was Negro, because she was sloppy (always putting off everything till tomorrow, unwashed sheets – what do I really care for Christ’s sake about sheets?) – doubts because I knew she’d been seriously insane…” (43)

Door: moansqueak

Someone in the stairwell: “…sort of bum or hanger-on sort of faggish who kept coming up to her place on the strength of some old friendship…” (43)

“…thinking it might be him, or some of the subterranean, in the hall asking ‘Is anybody with you?’ and she naked unconcernedly, and like in the alley just stands there saying, ‘No man, you better come back tomorrow I’m busy I’m not alone,’” (43)

“ – What luxury it is to know that now I want her forever to my breast my prize my own woman whom I would defend from all the Yuries and anybodies with my fists and anything else, her time has come to claim independence, announcing, only yesterday ere I began thins tearbook, “I want to be an independent chick with money and cuttin’ around. – Yeah, and knowing and screwing everybody, Wanderingfoot,” I’m thinking, wandering foot from when we – I’d stood at a bus stop in the cold wind and there were a lot of men there instead of standing on my side she wandered off in little funny red raincoat and black slacks and went into a shoestore doorway (always do what you want to do ain’t nothin’ like a guy doin’ what he wants, Leroy always said) so I follow her reluctantly thinking, ‘Sure she has wandering feet to hell with her I’ll get another chick’ (weakening at this point as the reader can tell from ton but turns out she knew I had only shirt no undershirt and should stand where no wind was, telling me later, the realization that she did not talk naked to anyone in the hall any more than it was wanderingfoot to walk away to lead me to a warmer waitingplace, that it was no more than shit, still making no impression on my eager impressionable ready-to-create construct destroy and die brain – as will be seen in the construction of jealousy which I later from a dream and for reasons of self-laceration recreated. . . . Bear with me all lover readers who’ve suffered the pangs, bear with me men who understand that the sea of blackness in the darkeyed woman’s eyes is the lonely sea itself and would you go ask the sea to explain itself, or ask woman why she crosseth hands on lap over rose? no – “ (44-45)

Leo’s mother and sister would have nothing to do with he and Mardou because she’s Negro: “…preclude completely the possibility of living in the South, like in that Faulknerian pillar homestead in the Old Grandad moonlight…” lady wife a black Cherokee, “…it would cut my life in half…” (45)

Confessions: “‘I thought I saw you as some kind of black thing I’ve never seen before, hanging, like it scared me’(laughing)…” (45)

“…my love for Mardou has completely separates me from any previous phantasies valuable and otherwise – “ (46)

“…she was sexy and sweet and good for me…” (46)

“…the subterraneans who were becoming progressively deeply colder in their looks towards me…” “…I had taken over their play doll and one of their really if not the most brilliant gals in their orbit…” (46)

“…the Talking Class to which we all belonged, the Talking Class trying to rationalize itself I suppose out of a really base lecherous materialism – “ (46)

Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm, the clarity of personal modern grief of Celine, or, say the clarity of Carmody’s mind, the clarity of the poesy of Wolfe (46)

“…orgasms – the reflexes of the orgasm – you can’t be healthy without normal sex love and orgasms – I won’t go into Reich’s theory since it is available in his own book – but at the same time Mardou kept saying ‘O don’t pull that Reich on me in bed, I read his damn book, I don’t want our relationship all pointed out and f . . . . d up with what HE said…” (47)

“…Mardou did not gain orgasm from normal copulation and only after a while from stimulation applied by myself (an old trick that I learned with a previous frigid wife) so it wasn’t so great to me to make her come but as she finally only yesterday said ‘You’re doing this just to give me the pleasure of coming, you’re so kind,’…” (47)

‘I think we ought to break up, we never do anything together, and I want to be in dep-’ (47)

‘Leo, I don’t think it’s good for you to live with your mother always,’ (47)

Thinking: ‘Well naturally she, she’s just jealous, and has no folks herself, and is one of those modern psychoanalyzed people who hate mothers anyway’…” (47)

Saying: “‘I really do love her and love you too and don’t you see how hard I try to spend my time, divide my time between the two of you – over there it’s my writing work, my well-being and when she comes home from work at night, tired, from the store, mind you, I feel very good making her supper, having the supper ready and a martini ready for her when she walks in so by 8 o’clock the dishes are all cleared, see, and she has more time to look at her television – which I worked six months on the railroad to buy her, see.’” (47-48)

Leo’s mother: “‘You have your own life to live, I won’t interfere, Ti Leo, with anything you do, you decide, of course it will be all right with me…’” (48)

Dingdong essence

“I’VE GOT MY OWN LITTLE BANGTAIL ESSENCE AND THAT ESSENCE IS MIND RECOGNITION – “ (48)

Did she really steal the pornographic picture of Bernard? Claims no, no pockets in the suit she was wearing (48)

Doubt: that Mardou was really a thief and out to steal his heart (49)

Tennessee Williams story, Negro Turkish bath attendant and the little white fag (49)

“…Ross Wallenstein had called me to my face a fag…” “‘Man what are you, a fag?’” countering, “‘You’re on goofballs tonight? you ought to try three sometimes…’” (49)

“…brash newcomer stealing Mardou from his group and at the same time hoodlum-looking with a reputation as a great writer, which he didn’t see, from only published book…” (49)

Jack Steen: “‘Have you been going thru my bag?’ and she almost leaped up and cried YES because she HAD – ‘Man I had, in Mind, been going thru that bag all day and suddenly he was looking at me, with that look – I almost flipped’ . . .” (50)

“For now I want Mardou – she just told me that six months ago a disease took root deeply in her soul, and forever now – doesn’t this make her more beautiful? – But I want Mardou because I see her standing, with her black velvet slacks, handsapockets, thin, slouched, cig hanging from lips, the smoke itself curling up, her little black back hairs of short haircut combed down fine and sleek, her lipstick, pale brown skin, dark eyes, the way shadows play on her high cheekbones, the nose, the little soft shape of chin to neck, the little Adam’s apple, so hip, so cool, so beautiful, so modern, so new, so unattainable to sad bagpants me in my shack in the middle of the woods – I want her because of the way she imitated Jack Steen that time on the street and it amazed me so much but Adam Moorad was solemn watching the imitation as if perhaps engrossed in the thing itself, or just skeptical, but she disengaged herself from the two men she was walking with and went ahead of them showing the walk (among crowds) the soft swing of arms, the long cool strides, the stop on the corner to hang and softly face up to birds with like as I say Viennese philosopher – but to see her do it, and to a T, (as I’d seen his walk indeed across the park), the fact of her – I love her but this song is . . . broken – but in French now . . . in French I can sing her on and on. . . .

“Our little pleasures at home at night, she eats an orange, she makes a lot of noise sucking it –

“When I laugh she looks at me with little round black eyes that hide themselves in her lids because she laughs hard (contorting all her face, showing the little teeth, making lights everywhere) (the first time I saw her, at Larry O’Hara’s, in the corner, I remember, I’d put my face close to hers to talk about books, she’d turned her face to me close, it was an ocean of melting things and drowning, I could have swimmed in it, I was afraid of all that richness and looked away) –

“With her rose bandana she always puts on for the pleasures of the bed, like a gypsy, rose, and then later the purple one, and the little hairs falling black from the phosphorescent purple in her brow as brown as wood –

“Her little eyes moving like cats –

“We play Gerry Mulligan loud when he arrives in the night, she listens and chews her fingernails, her head moves slowly side to side like a nun in profound prayer –

“When she smokes she raises the cigarette to her mouth and slits her eyes –

“She reads till gray dawn, head on one arm, Don Quixote, Proust, anything –

“We lie down, look at each other seriously saying nothing, head to head on the pillow –

“Sometimes when she speaks and I have my head under hers on the pillow and I see her jaw the dimple the woman in her neck, I see her deeply, richly, the neck, the deep chin, I know she’s one of the most enwomaned women I’ve seen, a brunette of eternity incomprehensibly beautiful and for always sad, profound, calm –

“When I catch her in the house, small, squeeze her, she yells out, tickles me furiously, I laugh, she laughs, her eyes shine, she punches me, she wants to beat me with a switch, she says she likes me –

“I’m hiding with her in the secret house of the night –

“Dawn finds us mystical in our shrouds, heart to heart –

“‘My sister!’ I’d thought suddenly the first time I saw her – “ (50-51)

“…I would like to accuse myself of bastardliness – “ (52)

Arial Lavalina, Recognition of Rome, Carmody

“‘But wait, you go home and wait for me, I want to dig Arial and then I’ll be home.’ ‘But baby you said that the other night and you were two hours late and you don’t know what pain it caused me to wait.’ (Pain!)” (53)

To persuade her: “…I stood on my head…” (53)

“…my big world night adolescent literary vision of the world…” (53)

Great writers: “…tho not a great writer like me…” (53)

At Arials: “ – I wake up in the morning on the couch, filled with the first horrible recognition, ‘I didn’t go back to Mardou’s at all’…” (53-54)

“…she’s dressing up to go to the therapist. – Ah sad Mardou with little dark little dark eyes looking with pain and had waited all night in a dark bed…” (54)

“…two cans of beer to straighten up (‘To curb the fearful hounds of hair’ Old Bull Balloon would say) (54)

Writes an apology letter to Lavalina (54)

“Mardou returning…she forgives me or is humble enough in the wake of my crashing star…” writes Leo a letter (54)

“…a greater wavy glitter in streetlights – ” (54)

Example 2:

With Frank Carmody: “Mardou finally in the blur and roar of the night yelling at me ‘Its him or me goddamit,’ but not really serious (herself usually not a drinker because a subterranean but in her affair with Percepied a big drinker now) – she left, I heard her say ‘We’re through’ but never for a moment believed it…” (55-56)

“…I’d been a bad boy and again ludicrously like a fag…” (56)

“This is the confession of a man who can’t drink.” (56)

Mardou at age 13 or 14: playing hookey, “‘I’d get sexual phantasies…’“ “‘…I’d spend all day working them out as I walked, and my orgasms the few I had only came, because o never masturbated or even knew how…’“ “‘…I’d wake up with a funny convulsion and wetness in myself, in my thighs…’“ (56-57)

“‘…I bet I DID see you – I bet I did – you were thirteen and I was twenty-two – 1944, yeah I bet I saw you, o was a seaman, I was always there…’“ (57)

“…her aunt hysterically beat her or hysterically tried…” (57)

“‘…she talks like all of them, the city decadent intellectual dead-ended in cause-and-effect analysis and solution of problems instead of the great JOY of being…’” (57-58)

“Forgive the conjunctions and double infinitives and the not said”

“ – again I’m impressed and I think, she too there, for the first time self-conscious of writing to an author – “ (60)

“…suddenly seeing myself as William Blake . . . . but Blake is lost in the vision of the Lamb at breakfast leavings table…” (60)

“ – THE DREAM. Oh the bloody dream.” (61)

Bad reputation, fish, flies, “…tying in with our telepathies…” (62)

Madness humor futility, balloon contentment, goo away, sick with jealousy (64)

“… I had secretly told myself: ‘My work is more important than Mardou.’’ (64)

Yuri: “…seen him in a new light as a possible successor to me because of my continual betrayal and getting drunk.” (66)

Yuri Gligoric: a young poet, 22 (66)

“…a young unpublished unknown but very genius poet to destroy the big established gods and raise himself – wanting therefore their women too…” (66)

“‘Frank’s leching after Adam, Adam’s leching after Yuri’ and Yuri’d thrown in “And I’m leching after you.’“ (67)

Sitting at a counter with Sam, Adam, and limeades, “‘Since I saw you last I’ve fallen in love with that girl…’“ (67)

Younghustler, Faulkner portable, so cute, so edible, in our own secret dark together (68)

In bed telling ghost stories, Poe, madhouse eyes an round stares, catatonic, zombie-like and just thirteen, “I say sternly, ‘Mardou you must get your teeth cleaner at once…’“ eyes shining shining shining like the stars of heaven (69)

don’t break my heart radio with beautiful music, slue of candles, telepathies, Royal Chalice Tokay, “sitting on the bench there, lovers, loners pass, we pass the bottle, talk” “ over the bay is Oakland (ah me Hart Crane Melville and all ye assorted brother poets of the American night that once I thought would be my sacrificial altar and now it is but,who’s to care, know, and I lost love because of it – drunkard, dullard, poet)” “…with her by my side so young, sexy; slender, strange, hip…” Percepied is 31, (70)

big grimbrick hospital, sketchbooks and draw bug word pictures, analysis, cause and effect, why instead of what (71)

“…I gotta be home in time to make supper – and write – “ (72)

“…we had a shuddering come together…” “(Reich’s beclouding of the senses”) “…all our teachings in bed, I explain me to her, she explains her to me, we work, we wail, we bop – “ (72)

“…here she comes padding to me across the Garden of Eden…” (72)

loveshoulders (72)

“‘ps ps ps’ little kiss sounds” “her little litany of the night” (72)

“…she services the mad unthinking beast – I spend long nights and many hours making her, I pray for it to come I can hear her breathing harder, I hope against hope it’s time, a noise in the hall (or whoop of drunkards next door) takes her mind off and she can’t make it and laughs – but when she does make it I hear her crying, whimpering, the shuddering electrical female orgasm makes her sound like a little girl crying, moaning in the night, it last a good twenty seconds and when it’s over she moans, ‘O why can’t it last longer,’ and, ‘O when will I know when you do?’ – ‘Soon now I bet,’ I say, ‘you’re getting closer and closer’…” (72)

“…or The Shadow – my little Mardou whom I love, who’d never read my own published works only the first novel, which has guts but has a dreary prose when all’s said and done and so now holding her and spent with sex dream I dream of the day she’ll read great works by me and admire me…” (73)

“…old man me plots greatbooks for her amaze – all those good things, good times we had, others I am now in the heat of my frenzy forgetting but I must tell all, but angels know and record it in books – “ (73)

Bad times:

“…early in our love I was three hours late which is a lot of hours of lateness for young lovers…” (73)

“…I lunge out in the hall and down the stairs as fast as my thieves’ crepesoul shoes’ll take me, putt pitterpit, floor after floor reeling around me as o round the stairwell…” (74)

Alice: “…dike-like silent unpleasant and strange and likes no one…” (74)

“…kiss a quick peck in the malt of her ear, say ‘I’ll be back tomorrow’…” (74)

Mardou: “‘What does really think of me…’“

Leo: “‘…his not now wanting to get hung-up with you lovewise because you’re Negro…’“ (74)

John Golz: “…not a slinky snaky interesting subterranean but openfaced, jovial, plays with children…” “…came up to see Mardou, I was there alone…”

Mardou: “…she went out with a Negro boy she didn’t like too much but just for fun and told Adam she was doing it because she wanted to make it with a Negro boy again, which made me jealous…”

Adam: “…if she should hear that you went out with a white girl to see if you could make it again she’d sure be flattered, Leo…” (75)

Leo: “… I was at her place waiting, reading, young John Golz came in to borrow cigarettes and seeing I was alone wanted to talk literature – ‘Well I believe that the most important thing is selectivity,’ and I blew up and said, ‘Ah don’t give me all that high school stuff I’ve heard it and heard it long before you were born almost for krissakes and really now, say something interesting new about writing – putting him down, sullen, for reasons mainly of irritation and because he seemed harmless and therefore could be counted on to be safe to yell at, which he was – putting him down, her friend, was not nice – “ (75)

drinkingmoment, lovemouth, the womb (75)

“…you’ve got to fall down on your knees and beg the woman’s permission, beg the woman’s forgiveness for all your sins, protect her, support her, doing everything for her, die for her but for God’s sake love her and love her all the way in and every way you can – “ (76)

greatstrength, unstoppable screamingsudden pain, orgone accumulator, “…placing the nozzle of himself onto the nozzle of the can…”, “…she contracted mightily there…” “…psychoanalyst, I’m serious!…” (76)

Pushcart incident: Wallenstein “…always being beaten up by hoodlums…” “…turned around a stiff Death’s head gaze with big eyes glaring behind glasses…” To Yuri, “‘Man, don’t bug me, ‘“ (77)

Leo 170lbs, Ross 120lbs: “…I thought secretly ‘No you can’t fight this man he will only scream and yell and call cops and let you hit him again and haunt all your dreams, there is no way to put a subterranean down on the floor or for that matter put them down at all, they are the most unputdownable in this world and new culture…’“ (77)

Yuri: “‘Come on let’s go in the john and bust him up…’“

Leo: “…I get up to go with your Yuri not to bust up Ross rather to stop anything might happen there – Yuri having been his own in fact realer way than mine almost a hoodlum…”

Mardou: “‘My God if I hadn’t stopped you…’“ (77)

Yuri goes home with Leo and Mardou, finds a pushcart, “‘Get in, I’ll be a taxicab and push you both home up the hill.’“ (78)

Are the Stars out Tonight (78)

Mardou loses her only purse, left behind in the pushcart in front of her apartment, the purse and confiscated by the landlord (78)

Adam: “‘O you even if nothing’ll happen you screw up the security of my pad, come in making noise, leave a license vehicle out front, and tell me nothing’ll happen.’“ (79)

Leo: “‘To hell with that, you can give hell to these two but, you won’t give hell to me, I won’t take it from you that – was just a drunken prank,’“

Adam: “‘This is my house and I can get mad when it’s – ‘ so I up and throw his keys (the keys he’d had made for me to walk in and out any time) at him but there entwined with the chain of my mother’s keys…” (79)

“ – I feel great waves of dark hostility, I mean hate, malice, destructiveness flowing out of Adam in his corner chair, I can hardly sit under the weather ring telepathic black and that’s all that yage of Carmody’s around the pad, in suitcases, it’s too much – (it’s a comedy tho, we agree it will be a later)…” (79)

“…Adam suddenly flips the key back me…. I boy-like jump up and throw the key back in my pocket a little giggle…” (79)

Leo: “‘And in any case it was Yuri’s fault it isn’t at all it’s Frank says my unqualified masterminding’…” (79)

Leo’s letter: “…the letter, which was supposed to match the warmth of hers, her cuddly-in-October masterpiece, beginning with the inane-if-at-all confession: ‘ the last time I wrote a love note it turned out to be boloney…’“ (80)

“… I was out taking my hardworking and deserving mother to her bi-six-monthlial show and shopping on Market Street…” (80)

Mardou: “‘Man, you had no right to yell at him, really, it’s his pad, his right’ – but the letter a big defense of this ‘right to yell at Adam’ and not at all response to her love notes – “ (80)

Mardou to Yuri: OH YOU RASCAL as if goosed (81)

Leo: “ – I saw the first time their youthful playfulness which I in my scowlingness and writer-ness had not participated in and my old man-ness about which I kept telling myself ‘You’re old you old sonofabitch you’re lucky to have such a young sweet thing’ (while nevertheless at the same time plotting, as I’ve been doing for about three weeks now, to get rid of Mardou, without being hurt, even if possible ‘without her noticing’ so as to get back to more comfortable modes of life, like say, stay at home all week and write and work on the three novels to make a lot of money and come in to town only for good times if not to see Mardou then any other chick will do (81)

“…now I saw Mardou pushing Yuri with a O H Y O U and I shuddered to think something maybe was going on behind my back…” (81)

Leo: “…why that week I wasn’t drinking at all…” “‘If you keep on drinking like that you’ll die you can’t even hold a simple job anymore,’ so returning to Frisco and not drinking at all and everybody exclaiming ‘O you look wonderful’), telling that first night almost heads together with Mardou and Julien, so kidlike in their naive WHY when I told him I wasn’t drinking anymore, so kidlike listening to my explanation about the one can of beer leading to the second, the sudden gut explosions and glitters, the third can, the fourth, ‘And then I go off and drink for days and I’m gone man, like, I’m afraid I’m an alcoholic’ and they kidlike and othergenerationey making a comment, but awed, curious – “ (81-82)

“…from the pushcart time, to the night we went to Bromberg’s, most awful of all.” (82)

(Yuri and I’d had a long talk that week in a bar, over port wines, he claimed everything was poetry, I tried to make the common old distinction between verse and prose, he said, “Lissen Percepied do you believe in freedom?—then say what you want, it’s poetry, poetry, all of it is poetry, great prose is poetry, great verse is poetry.”—”Yes” I said “but verse is verse and prose is prose.” -”No no” he yelled “it’s all poetry.”—”Okay,” I said, “I believe in you believing in freedom and maybe you’re right, have another wine.” And he read me his “best line” which was something to do with “seldom nocturne” that I said sounded like small magazine poetry and wasn’t his best—as already I’d seen some much better poetry by him concerning his tough boyhood, about cats, mothers in gutters, Jesus striding in the ashcan, appearing incarnate shining on the blowers of slum tenements or that is making great steps across the light—the sum of it something he could do, and did, well— “No, seldom nocturne isn’t your meat” but he claimed it was great . . . . ) (82-83)

Yuri and Mardou start racing, pushing, shoving, wrestling on the sidewalk and finally she lofts a big empty cardboard box and throws it at him and he throws it back, they’re like kids again— (84)

. . . . Jimmy Lowell leans to me and says “I would like to make it with your chick,” (like in the old days Leroy and I always swapping so I’m not shocked), “would it be okay if I asked her?” and I saying “She’s not that kind of girl, I’m sure she believes in one at a time, if you ask her that’s what she’ll tell you man” (at that time still feeling no pain or jealousy, this incidentally the night before the Jealousy Dream)—not able to communicate to Lowell that’s—that I wanted her—to stay—to be stammer stammer be mine—not being able to come right out and say, “Lissen this is my girl, what are you talking about, if you want to try to make her you’ll have to tangle with me, you understand that pops as well as I do.” (84-85)

. . . . no sooner plops her ass behind me, jumps over seat and dives into backseat with Yuri who is alone back there, to wrestle again and goof with him and now with such intensity I’m afraid to look back and see with my own eyes what’s happening and how the dream (the dream I announced to everyone and made big issues of and told even Yuri about) is coming true. (85)

Mardou: “If you’re going down to Bromberg’s in Los Altos you two go out, Yuri and I’ll stay here”—my heart sank deep—it sank so I gloated to hear it for the first time and the confirmation of it crowned me and blessed me.
And I thought, “Well boy here’s your chance to get rid of her” (which I’d plotted for three weeks now) but the sound of this in my own ears sounded awfully false, I didn’t believe it, myself, any more.
But on the sidewalk going in flushed Yuri takes my arm as Mardou and Sand go on ahead up the fish head stairs, “Lissen, Leo I don’t want to make Mardou at all, she’s all over me, I want you to know that I don’t want to make her, all I want to do if you’re going out there is go to sleep in your bed because I have an appointment tomorrow.” (85-86)

Leo: “You jumped in the backseat with Yuri why’d you do that? and why’d you say you wanted to stay with him?”—”It was silly of me, I was just high baby.” But I don’t darkly any more now want to believe her—art is short, life is long—now I’ve got in full dragon bloom the monster of jealousy as green as in any cliché cartoon rising in my being, “You and Yuri play together all the time, it’s just like the dream I told you about, that’s what’s horrible—O I’ll never believe in dreams come true again.”—”But baby it isnt anything like that” but I don’t believe her— (86)

. . . . Sand having anticipated a gay talkative weekend now finds himself with a couple of grim lover worriers, hears in fact the fragment “But I didn’t mean you to think that baby” so obviously harkening to his mind the Yuri incident—finds himself with this pair of bores and has to drive all the way down to Los Altos . . . . (87)

O inconstancy!
So they try anyway to make the best of it in spite of my palpable unhappy brooding all over the place . . . . (88)

. . . . I’m beginning not to care so much any more because of this 105 pounds of woman and brown at that whose little toenails, red in the thonged sandals, make my throat gulp)—“O dear Leo, you DO seem to be bored.”— “Not bored! how could I be bored here!” —I wish I had some sympathetic way to tell Bromberg, “Every time I come here there’s something wrong with me, it must seem like some awful comment on your house and hospitality and it isn’t at all, can’t you understand that this morning my heart is broken and out the window is bleak” (89)

. . . . I became so drunk, disorderly, lost, I then too brooded and slept in fact on the floor in the middle of the room in front of everybody in the height of day— (89-90)

Mardou also being silent —one of the strangest guests ever to hit Bromberg’s, a poor subterranean beat Negro girl with no clothes on her back worth a twopenny (I saw to that generously), and yet so strange faced, solemn, serious, like a funny solemn unwanted probably angel in the house—feeling, as she told me, later, really unwanted because of the circumstances. (90)

. . . . as if I was a spider waking up in a dusty bin and the world wasn’t for me but for other airier creatures and more constant themselves and also less liable to the stains of inconstancy too— (90)

“Leo,” says Mardou, “I didn’t want to sleep with you because I didn’t want to wake up in Bromberg’s bed at seven o’clock in the evening, it would be too much to cope with, I can’t—” meaning her therapy (which she hadn’t been going to any more out of sheer paralysis with me and my gang and cups), her inadequacy, the great now-crushing weight and fear of madness increasing in this disorderly awful life and unloved affair with me, to wake up horrified from hangover in a stranger’s (a kind but nevertheless not altogether wholeheartedwelcoming stranger’s) bed, with poor incapable Leo. (90-91)

Leo: “Are you sincere?” (91)

. . . . all the hangover awakenings in my life, feeling now, “Boy, this is the real real beginning of the end, you can’t go on much further, how much more vagueness can your positive flesh take and how long will it stay positive if your psyche keeps blamming on it—boy, you are going to die, when birds get bleak—that’s the sign—.” (91)

Mardou: “Baby, let’s go home.” (92)

. . . . and so remembering myself now the pain I had caused Leroy that morning just for the sake of a little bit of sate for that worm and snake called sex)— (92)

Still I can’t look at Mardou straight in the eye—in my heart, “O why did you do it?”—sensing, in my desperation, the prophecy of what’s to come. (92)

. . . . the night I jumped out of Mardou’s cab and abandoned her to the dogs of war—the war man Yuri wages gainst man Leo, each one.— (92)

. . . . she receives this news with solemn lips—ah my love and lost darling (out of date word)— (93)

Leo: “I really do feel I must be getting a rummy nose”—anything I could think of saying to ease the pressure of what I really wanted to weep about — (93)

. . . . Mardou and I wandered among great sad sullen crowds in a confusion mass, as if we were suddenly lost in the actual physical manifestation of the mental condition we’d been in now together for two months, not even holding hands but I anxiously leading the way through the crowds (so’s to get out fast, hated it) but really because I was too hurt to hold her hand and remembering (now with greater pain) her usual insistence that I not hold her in the street or people’ll think she’s a hustler— (93-94)

. . . . towards Heavenly Lane, among the children, the young good-looking Mex chicks each one making me say to myself with contempt “Ah they’re almost all of ‘em better than Mardou, all I gotta do is get one of them … (94)

. . . . neither one of us speaking much, and such chagrin in her eyes that in the original place where I had seen that Indian warmth which had originally prompted me to say to her, on some happy candlelit night, “Honey what I see in your eyes is a lifetime of affection not only from the Indian in you but because as part Negro somehow you are the first, the essential woman, and therefore the most, most originally most fully affectionate and maternal” (94)

“Eden’s in Africa,” I’d added one time—but now in my hurt hate turning the other way and so walking down Price with her every time I see a Mexican gal or Negress I say to myself, “hustlers,” they’re all the same, always trying to cheat and rob you—harking back to all relations in the past with them—Mardou sensing these waves of hostility from me and silent.
And who’s in our bed in Heavenly Lane but Yuri—cheerful —“Hey I been workin’ all day, so tired I had to come back and get some more rest.” (94)

(while Mardou hides behind screen to change from party dress to home jeans)—“Leo hand me my pants.”—“Get up and get ‘em yourself, they’re right there on the chair, she can’t see you” (94-95)

The moment she goes to the bathroom I say to Yuri I’m very jealous about you and Mardou in the backseat last night man, I really am.”— “It’s not my fault, it was her started it.” —“Lissen, you’re such—like don’t let her, keep away—you’re such a lady-killer they all fall for you”—saying this just as Mardou returns, looking up sharply not hearing the words but seeing them in the air, (95)

“What did you tell Yuri—?” —I tell her word for word—“God the tenseness in here was unbearable”— (95)

I say to myself, “what good is a nice domestic chicken supper when you love Yuri so much he has to leave the moment you walk in because of the pressure of my jealousy and your possibility as prophesied in a dream?” (95)

Mardou: “But it always starts off like this, we always go away, we never stay alone.” (95)

. . . . I know he has suffered on four continents this way . . . . (96)

. . . . suddenly I tell her of my quick talk with Yuri the part I’d forgotten in the first report (and here too) “He said to me ‘Leo I don’t want to make your girl Mardou, after all I have no eyes—’.” “Oh, so he has no eyes! A hell of a thing to say!” (96)

. . . . I hear that junkey-like emphasis on the ings where she presses down on her ings like many junkies I know . . . . (96)

“From where? where did you learn all you know and that amazing way you speak?” but now to hear that interesting ing only makes me mad as it’s coming in a transparent speech about Yuri where she shows she’s not really against seeing Yuri again at party or otherwise . . . . (96)

Leo: “. . . . there you can get even with Yuri and tell him off—you’re so transparent.” (96)

Mardou: “Jesus . . . . now you’re calling me names, transparent.” (96)

. . . . both of us actually hysterically smiling and as tho nothing had happened at all and in fact like happy unconcerned people you see in newsreels . . . . (96)

. . . . the great tumescent turbulent turmoil alliterative as a hammer on the brain bone bag and balls, bang I’m sorry I was ever born. . . . (96-97)

. . . . Adam opens the door bowing solemnly but with a glint and secret in his eye and some kind of unwelcomeness I bristle at the sight of— (97)

. . . . the great moment has come when I’m to come face to face, or leave, with my arch literary enemy Balliol Mac-Jones . . . . we’d talked and exchanged and borrowed and read books and literarized so much the poor innocent had actually come under some kind of influence from me, that is, in the sense, only, that he learned the talk and style, mainly the history of the hip or beat generation or subterranean generation . . . . (97)

. . . . Adam and I had solemnly admitted, quote, “Jones is not of us—but from another world—the midtown sillies world” (an Adamism). (97)

. . . . didn’t even notice how poor Mardou had managed to position herself (here as at Bromberg’s as everywhere poor dark angel) (98)

. . . . Phyllis his woman who kept staring at me to see if it was still crazy . . . . (98)

. . . . tried to get Mardou to lie down with me but she said “Leo I don’t want to lay around in here in the dark.” (98)

. . . . I feel that because Jones does not move from his couch he really doesn’t want to talk to me and probably wishes secretly I’d leave . . . . (98)

Leo to Mardou: “What are you talking about in there, bop? Don’t tell him anything about music.”—(Let him find out for himself! I say to myself pettishly)—I’m the bop writer! (98)

. . . . So we become friends again bending over drawings and Yuri has to be showing his too (he draws) and Mardou is in the other room, again forgotten— (98)

Mardou and Jones: . . . . he’s listening to Mardou, who, impressed, forewarned, understanding everything, makes solemn statements about bop, like, “I don’t like bop, I really don’t, it’s like junk to me, too many junkies are bop men and I hear the junk in it.”—“Well,” Mac adjusting glasses, “that’s interesting.”—And I go up and say, “But you never like what you come from” (looking at Mardou).—“What do you mean?”—“You’re the child of Bop,” or the children of bop, some such statement, which Mac and I agree on— (99)

. . . . great further discourses and that particular noxious group-enthusiasm that you’re supposed to feel when like Mardou you’re with a star of the group or even I mean just a member of that constellation, how noisome, tiresome it must have been to her to have to appreciate all we were saying, to be amazed by the latest quip from the lips of the one and only, the newest manifestation of the same old dreary mystery of personality . . . . (100)

. . . . Mardou wasn’t impressed, as she wanted to get away from Paddy and all the other subterraneans of Dante’s anyway, whom I had just freshly annoyed by yelling again at Julien, “Come here, we’re all going to Paddy’s party and Julien’s coming,” . . . . “God that awful Percepied is screaming at me and trying to drag me to his silly places again, I wish someone would do something about him.” (100)

“Who let this guy in, hey, who is this? how’d you get in here! Hey Paddy!” in serious continuation of his original dislike and “are-you-a-fag” come-on, which I ignored, saying, “Brother I’ll take the fuzz off your peach if you don’t shut up,” or some such putdown, can’t remember, strong enough to make him swivel like a soldier, the way he does, stiff necked, and retire— (101)

I dragging Mardou down to a cab . . . . and she in her little voice I hear protesting from far away, “But Leo, dear Leo, I want to go home and sleep.” (101)

. . . . I’m really seriously hung-up on the undeniable fact that if I take her to Heavenly Lane first the cab will never make it to Sam’s waiting bar before closing time, so I argue, we harangue hurling different addresses at the cab driver who like in a movie waits, but suddenly, with that red flame that same red flame (for want of a better image) I leap out of the cab and rush out and there’s another one, I jump in . . . . Mardou left in the night, in a cab, sick, and tired, and me intending to pay the second cab with the buck she’d entrusted to Adam to get her a sandwich . . . . (101)

Well, I thought, this is the end—I finally made the step and by God I paid her back for what she done to me . . . . (101)

Letter from Mardou (102)

BUT THE DEEPEST premonition and prophesy of all had always been, that when I walked into Heavenly Lane, cutting in sharply from sidewalk, I’d look up, and if Mardou’s light was on Mardou’s light was on—“But some day, dear Leo, that light will not shine for you”—this a prophesy irrespective of all your Yuris and attenuations in the snake of time.—“Someday she won’t be there when you want her to be there, the light’ll be out and you’ll be looking up and it will be dark in Heavenly Lane and Mardou’ll be gone, and it’ll be when you least expect it and want it.” (102)

At Sam’s bar: . . . . I hurried to get drunk (through with my baby!) . . . . (102)

. . . . at home I wandered around, couldn’t stay in the house, couldn’t stop, had to walk, as if someone was going to die soon, as if I could smell the flowers of death in the air, and I went in the South San Francisco railyard and cried. (103)

. . . . cried because not only I had cast off Mardou whom now I was not so sure I wanted to cast off but the die’d been thrown . . . . (103)

. . . . suddenly now in the railyards weeping for my lost Mardou and so stupidly because I’d decided to throw her away myself, it had been a vision of my mother’s love for me . . . . (103)

. . . . the only man in South City who ever walked from the neat suburban homes and went and hid by boxcars to think— broke.—Something fell loose in me— (104)

. . . . because she knows that in your present state you can’t go out in the world and make a living and take care of yourself and even find and hold the love of another protecting woman and all because you are poor stupid Ti Leo—deep in the dark pit of night under the stars of the world you are lost, poor, no one cares, and now you threw away a little woman’s love all because you wanted another drink with a rowdy fiend from the other side of your insanity.”
(104-105)

Leo’s schedule (105)
. . . . with holes in the schedule left open on weekends for “possible going out”) (getting plastered) (105)

. . . . I rushed anyway to Mardou’s on Sunday night at 9 P.M., as scheduled, there was no light in her window (“Just as I knew it would happen someday”)—but on the door a note, and for me, which I read after quick leak in the hall john— (105)

. . . . ready at least to “throw a good one in her” in case it’s all bound to end this very night and sitting there eyes shifting around and plotting . . . . (105)

. . . . (“Leo,” later, she told me, “I really thought we were through, that you wouldn’t come back at all”) . . . . (105)

. . . . after we spend a night of “successful” sex, I tell her, “Mardou you’ve become much more precious to me since everything that happened,” and because of that, as we agree, I am able to make her fulfill better, which she does-twice, in fact, and for the first time . . . . (106)

Mardou: “But we should really break up, we’ve never done anything together . . . . I’ve missed my therapist for weeks.” (106)

. . . . All of this unreal from the moment I walked into Heavenly Lane after my crying-in-the-railyard lonely dark sojourn at home to see her light was out at last (as deeply promised), but the note, saving us awhile . . . . (106)

. . . . ending with another silly yelling conversation drunk night. —Mardou saying in the morning, “Do you remember anything you said last night to Mike and Rita?” and me, “Of course not.”—The whole day, borrowed from the sky day, sweet—we make love and try to make promises of little kinds . . . . (106)

. . . . so she puts on her black velvet slacks and some perfume and I go up and smell her neck and God, how sweet can you smell—and I want her more than ever, in my arms she’s gone . . . . (106)

Mardou on Leo getting out of the cab: “. . . . it was the most maniacal thing I ever saw.” —“I’m sorry.” —“I know you’re sorry but it was the most maniacal thing I ever saw and it keeps happening and getting worse . . . .” (107)

. . . . something is caught in both our throats, I don’t know what, she does.
“Baby I’m going to tell you something . . . .” . . . . “Okay.”—And naturally I add, after pause, “What is it?” (107)

“You know the other night” . . . . in any case we agree the night she means to tell me about is Saturday night, which was the night I cried in the railyards . . . . (107)

“Well I went to Dante’s and didn’t want to stay, and tried to leave—and Yuri was trying to hang around . . . .” . . . . “. . . . I cut on home, because I was tired—baby at two o’clock in the morning he came and knocked on the door—” “Why?”—“For a place to sleep, he was drunk, he rushed in —and—well—.”
“Huh?”
“Well baby we made it together,”—that hip word— (108)

. . . . I had (locomotive wise) to concentrate on getting up on the curb again and I didn’t look at her—I looked down Columbus and thought of walking away, rapidly, as I’d done at Larry’s—I didn’t—I said “I don’t want to live in this beastly world”—but so low she barely if at all heard me and if so never commented . . . . (108)

The show/movie: Brave Bulls (1951) (108)
(I cried to see the grief in the matador when he heard his best friend and girl had gone off the mountain in his own car, I cried to see even the bull that I knew would die and I knew the big deaths bulls do die in their trap called bullring)—I wanted to run away from Mardou (108-109)

(“Look man,” she’d said only a week before when I’d suddenly started talking about Adam and Eve and referred to her as Eve, the woman who by her beauty is able to make the man do anything, “don’t call me Eve.”) (109)

. . . . while she’s in the store I keep haggling with myself, shall I just go now, I have my fare, just cut down the street swiftly and go home and when she comes out she’ll see you’re gone, she’ll know you broke the promise to go to the movies just like you broke a lot of promises . . . . (109)

. . . . I feel stabbed by Yuri—by Mardou I feel forsaken and shamed . . . . (109)

. . . . In the movie I hold her hand . . . . (109)

. . . . ask not the sea why the eyes of the dark-eyed woman are strange and lost . . . . (109)

. . . . at the bus stop, she walked away from me to lead me to a warmer waiting place and (as I said) I’d mentally accused her of wanderingfoot. (109)

. . . . she talked about the war between men—“They have a war, to them a woman is a prize, to Yuri it’s just that your prize has less value now.” (110)

“. . . . I should have paid more attention to the old junkey nevertheless, who said there’s a lover on every corner—they’re all the same, boy, don’t get hung-up on one.”
“It isn’t true, it isn’t true, that’s just what Yuri wants . . . . I think you’re like me—you want one love . . . .” (110)

Finnegan’s Wake (James Joyce): . . . . Finnegan is always putting “buildung supra buildung supra buildung” on the banks of the Liffey—dung!) (110)

Oh what’ll we do? I think—now I go home, and it’s all over for sure, not only now is she bored and has had enough but has pierced me with an adultery of a kind, has been inconstant, as prophesied in a dream, the dream the bloody dream . . . . (110)

. . . . the glare of a jester angel who made his presence on earth all a joke . . . . (110-111)

“Baby it’s up to you,” is what she’s actually saying, “about how many times you wanta see me and all that—but I want to be independent like I say.”
And I go home having lost her love.
And write this book. (111)