AROUND THE POOLHALLS OF DENVER during World War II a strange looking boy began to be noticeable to the characters who frequented the places afternoon and night and even to the casual visitors who dropped in for a game of snookers after supper when all the tables were busy in an atmosphere of smoke and great excitement and a continual parade passed in the alley from the backdoor of one poolroom on Glenarm Street to the backdoor of another—a boy called Cody Pomeray, the son of a Larimer Street wino. Where he came from nobody knew or at first cared. Older heroes of other generations had darkened the walls of the poolhalls long before Cody got there; memorable eccentrics, great poolsharks, even killers, jazz musicians, traveling salesmen, anonymous frozen bums who came in on winter nights to sit an hour by the heat never to be seen again, among whom (and not to be remembered by anyone because there was no one there to keep a love check on the majority of the boys as they swarmed among themselves year by year with only casual but sometimes haunted recognition of faces, unless strictly local characters from around the corner) was Cody Pomeray, Sr. who in his hobo life that was usually spent stumbling around other parts of town had somehow stumbled in here and sat in the same old bench which was later to be occupied by his son in desperate meditations on life.
Have you ever seen anyone like Cody Pomeray?—say on a street-corner on a winter night in Chicago, or better, Fargo, any mighty cold town, a young guy with a bony face that looks like it’s been pressed against iron bars to get that dogged rocky look of suffering, perseverance, finally when you look closest, happy prim self-belief, with Western sideburns and big blue flirtatious eyes of an old maid and fluttering lashes; the small and muscular kind of fellow wearing usually a leather jacket and if it’s a suit it’s with a vest so he can prop his thick busy thumbs in place and smile the smile of his grandfathers; who walks as fast as he can go on the balls of his feet, talking excitedly and gesticulating; poor pitiful kid actually just out of reform school with no money, no mother, and if you saw him dead on the sidewalk with a cop standing over him you’d walk on in a hurry, in silence. Oh life, who is that? There are some young men you look at who seem completely safe, maybe just because of a Scandinavian ski sweater, angelic, saved; on a Cody Pomeray it immediately becomes a dirty stolen sweater worn in wild sweats. Something about his tigerish out-jutted raw facebone could be given a woe-down melancholy if only he wore a drooping mustache (a famous bop drummer who looked just like Cody at this time wore such a mustache and probably for those reasons). It is a face that’s so suspicious, so energetically upward-looking like people in passport or police lineup photos, so rigidly itself, looking like it’s about to do anything unspeakably enthusiastic, in fact so much the opposite of the rosy Coke-drinking boy in the Scandinavian ski sweater ad, that in front of a brick wall where it says Post No Bills and it’s too dirty for a rosy boy ad you can imagine Cody standing there in the raw gray flesh manacled between sheriffs and Assistant D. A.’s and you wouldn’t have to ask yourself who is the culprit and who is the law. He looked like that, and God bless him he looked like that Hollywood stunt man who is fist-fighting in place of the hero and has such a remote, furious, anonymous viciousness (one of the loneliest things in the world to see and we’ve all seen it a thousand times in a thousand B-movies) that everybody begins to be suspicious because they know the hero wouldn’t act like that in real unreality. If you’ve been a boy and played on dumps you’ve seen Cody, all crazy, excited and full of glee-mad powers, giggling with the pimply girls in back of fenders and weeds till some vocational school swallows his ragged blisses and that strange American iron which later is used to mold the suffering man-face is now employed to straighten and quell the long wavering spermy disorderliness of the boy. Nevertheless the face of a great hero—a face to remind you that the infant springs from the great Assyrian bush of a man, not from an eye, an ear or a forehead—the face of a Simón Boívar, Robert E. Lee, young Whitman, young Melville, a statue in the park, rough and free.
The appearance of Cody Pomeray on the poolroom scene in Denver at a very early age was the lonely appearance of a boy on a stage which had been trampled smooth in a number of crowded decades, Curtis Street and also downtown; a scene that had been graced by the presence of champions, the Pensacola Kid, Willie Hoppe, Bat Masterson re-passirig through town when he was a referee, Babe Ruth bending to a sidepocket shot on an October night in 1927, Old Bull Balloon who always tore greens and paid up, great newspapermen traveling from New York to San Francisco, even Jelly Roll Morton was known to have played pool in the Denver parlors for a living; and Theodore Dreiser for all we know upending an elbow in the cigarsmoke, but whether it was restaurateur kings in private billiard rooms of clubs or roustabouts with brown arms just in from the fall Dakota harvest shooting rotation for a nickel in Little Pete’s, it was in any case the great serious American poolhall night and Cody arrived on the scene bearing his original and sepulchral mind with him to make the poolhall the headquarters of the vast excitement of the early Denver days of his life becoming after awhile, a permanent musing figure before the green velvet of table number one where the intricate and almost metaphysical click and play of billiard balls became the background for his thoughts; till later the sight of a beautifully reverse-Englished cueball leaping back in the air, after a cannonading shot at another ball belted straight in, bam, when it takes three soft bounces and settles back on the green, became more than just the background for daylong daydreams, plans and schemes but the unutterable realization of the great interior joyful knowledge of the world that he was beginning to discover in his soul. And at night, late, when poolhalls turn white and garish and eight tables are going fullblast with all the boys and businessmen milling with cues, Cody knew, he knew everything like mad, sitting as though he wasn’t noticing anything and not thinking anything on the hard onlooker’s bench and yet noticing the special excellence of any good shot within the aura of his eyeball and not only that, the peculiarities and pitiful typehood of every player whether some over-flamboyant kid with his eleventh or twelfth cigarette dangling from his mouth or some old potbellied rotation wizard who’s left his lonely wife in a varnished studio room above a Rooms sign in the dark of Pearl Street, he knew it all.
The first to notice him was Tom Watson. Tom was a hunchbacked poolshark with the great moon blue eyes of a saint, an extremely sad character, one of the smartest well-known shots of the younger generation in the locality. Cody couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old when he wandered in from the street. It was only that many years before, in 1927, that Cody was born, in Salt Lake City; at a time when for some Godforsaken reason, some forgotten, pitiably American, restless reason his father and mother were driving in a jalopy from Iowa to L.A. in search of something, maybe they figured to start an orange grove or find a rich uncle, Cody himself never found out, a reason long buried in the sad heap of the night, a reason that nevertheless in 1927 caused them to fix their eyes anxiously and with throat-choking hope over the sad swath of brokendown headlamps shining brown on the road…the road that sorrowed into the darkness and huge unbelievable American nightland like an arrow. Cody was born in a charity hospital. A few weeks later the jalopy clanked right on; so that now there were three pairs of eyes watching the unspeakable road roll in on Pa’s radiator cap as it steadfastly penetrated the night like the poor shield of themselves, the little Pomeray family, lost, the gaunt crazy father with the floppy slouched hat that made him look like a brokendown Okie Shadow, the dreaming mother in a cotton dress purchased on a happier afternoon in some excited Saturday five-and-ten, the frightened infant. Poor mother of Cody Pomeray, what were your thoughts in 1927? Somehow or other, they soon came back to Denver over the same raw road; somehow or other nothing worked out right the way they wanted; without a doubt they had a thousand unspecified troubles and knotted their fists in despair somewhere outside a house and under a tree where something went wrong, grievously and eternally wrong, enough to kill people; all the loneliness, remorse and chagrin in the world piled on their heads like indignities from heaven. Oh mother of Cody Pomeray, but was there secretly in you a lovely memory of a Sunday afternoon back home when you were famous and beloved among friends and family, and young?—when maybe you saw your father standing among the men, laughing, and you crossed the celebrated human floor of the then-particular beloved stage to him. Was it from lack of life, lack of haunted pain and memories, lack of sons and trouble and humiliated rage that you died, or was it from excess of death? She died in Denver before Cody was old enough to talk to her. Cody grew up with a childhood vision of her standing in the strange antique light of 1929 (which is no different than the light of today or the light when Xerxes’ fleets confused the waves, or Agamemnon wailed) in some kind of livingroom with beads hanging from the door, apparently at a period in the life of old Pomeray when he was making good money at his barber trade and they had a good home. But after she died he became one of the most tottering bums of Larimer Street, making futile attempts to work and periodically leaving Cody with his wife’s people to go to Texas to escape the Colorado winters, beginning a lifetime swirl of hoboing into which little Cody himself was sucked later on, when at intervals, childlike, he preferred leaving the security of his Ma’s relatives which included sharing a bedroom with his stepbrother, going to school, and altar-boying at a local Catholic church, for going off to live with his father in flophouses. Nights long ago on the brawling sidewalks of Larimer Street when the Depression hobo was there by the thousands, sometimes in great sad lines black with soot in the rainy dark of Thirties newsreels, men with sober downturned mouths huddled in old coats waiting in line for misery, Cody used to stand in front of alleys begging for nickels while his father, red-eyed, in baggy pants, hid in the back with some old bum crony called Rex who was no king but just an American who had never outgrown the boyish desire to lie down on the sidewalk which he did the year round from coast to coast; the two of them hiding and sometimes having long excited conversations until the kid had enough nickels to make up a bottle of wine, when it was time to hit the liquor store and go down under ramps and railroad embankments and light a small fire with cardboard boxes and naily boards and sit on overturned buckets or oily old treestumps, the boy on the outer edges of the fire, the men in its momentous and legendary glow, and drink the wine. “Wheeoo! Hand me that damn bottle ‘fore I knock somebody’s head in!”
And this of course was just the chagrin of bums suddenly becoming wild joy, the switchover from all the poor lonely woe of the likes of Pomeray having to count pennies on streetcorners with the wind blowing his dirty hair over his snarling, puffy, disgruntled face, the revulsion of bums burping and scratching lonely crotches at flophouse sinks, their agony waking up on strange floors (if floors at all) with their mad minds reeling in a million disorderly images of damnation and strangulation in a world too unbearably disgusting to stand and yet so full of useless sweet and nameless moments that made them cry that they couldn’t say no to it completely without committing some terrified sin, attacked repeatedly by every kind of horrible joy making them twitch and marvel and gasp as before visions of heart-wrenching hell penetrating up through life from unnumberable hullabalooing voices screaming in insanity below, with piteous memories, the sweet and nameless ones, that reached back to fleecy cradle days to make them sob, finally bound to sink to the floor of brokendown pisshouses to wrap around the bowl and maybe die—this misery with a bottle of wine was twisted around like a nerve in old man Pomeray’s brain and the tremendous joy of the really powerful drunk filled the night with shouts and wild bulging power-mad eyes. On Larimer Street Cody’s father was known as The Barber, occasionally working near the Greeley Hotel in a really terrible barbershop that was notable for its great unswept floor of bums’ hair, and a shelf sagging under so many bottles of bay rum that you’d think the shop was on an oceangoing vessel and the boys had it stocked for a six months’ siege. In this drunken tonsorial pissery called a barbershop because hair was cut off your head from the top of the ears down old Pomeray, with the same tender befuddlement with which he sometimes lifted garbage barrels to city disposal trucks during blizzards or passed wrenches in the most tragic, becluttered, greasedark auto body shop west of the Mississippi (Arapahoe Garage by name where they even hired him), tiptoed around a barber chair with scissor and comb, razor and mug to make sure not to stumble, and cut the hairs off blacknecked hoboes who had such vast lugubrious personalities that they sometimes sat stiffly at attention for this big event for a whole hour. Cody, Sr. was a fine. gentleman.
“Well now say, Cody, how’ve been things in the hotel this summer; anybody I know kick the bucket or which, or seen Dan up at Chilean Jack’s?”
“Can’t talk right now Jim till I get the side of Bob’s head done—hold on just a second whilst I raise up that shade.”
And a great huge clock tocked these dim old hours away as young Cody sat in the stove corner (in cold weather) reading the comic pages, not only reading but examining for hours the face and paunch of Major Hoople, his fez, the poor funny easy chairs in his house, the sad sickening faces of his hecklers who always seemed to have just finished eating at the table, the whole pitiful interesting world in back of it including maybe a faint cloud in the distance, or a bird dreamed in a single wavy line over the boardfence, and the eternal mystery of the dialog balloon taking up whole sections of the visible world for speech; that and Out Our Way, the ragdoll rueful cowboys and factory workers who always seemed to be chewing wads of lumpy food and wrapping themselves miserably around fenceposts beneath the great sorrowful burdens of a joke; yet most blazing of all the clouds, the clouds that in the cartoon sky had all the nostalgia of sweet and haunted distance that pictures give them and yet were the same lost clouds that always called Cody’s attention to his immortal destiny when suddenly seen from a window or through houses on a June afternoon, lamby clouds of babyhood and eternity, sometimes in back of tremendous redbrick smokestacks that were made to look like they were traveling and toppling on the first and last day of the world and its drowsy butterflies; making him think, “Poor world that has to have clouds for afternoons and the meadows I lost”; sometimes doing this or looking at the sad brown or green tint pictures of troubled lovers in sensual livingrooms of True Confessions magazine, his foretaste of days when he would grow up and spend useless hours looking at nudist magazines at the corner newsstand; sometimes, though, only fixing his eyes on the mosaic of the tiles on the barbershop floor where he’d long imagined each little square could be peeled back endlessly, tiny leaf by tiny leaf, revealing in little microcosmic encyclopedia the complete history of every person that ever lived as far back as the beginning, the whole thing a blinding sight when he raised his eyes from one tile and saw all the others like the dazzling crazy huge infinity of the world swimming. In warm weather he sat on the sidewalk on a box between the barbershop and a movie that was so completely beat that it could only be called a C- or a D-movie; the Capricio, with motes of dusty sunshine swimming down past the slats of the boxoffice in drowsical midafternoon, the lady of the tickets dreaming with nothing to do as from the dank maw of the movie, cool, dark, perfumed with seats, where bums slept and Mexican children stared, there roared the gunshots and hoofbeats of the great myth of the American West represented by baggy-eyed riders who drank too much in Encienega Boulevard bars galloping in the moonlight photographed from the back of a truck in California dirt roads, with a pathetic human plot you sometimes think is worked in to make everybody overlook who the riders really are. What disappointment little Cody felt never having a dime, or eleven cents to see the show; not even a penny sometimes to spend all the time he wanted selecting a chocolate candy from a lovely becluttered counter in a poor dim candy store run by an old Syrian woman in a shawl where also there were celluloid toys gathering dust as those same immortal clouds passed over the street outside; the same disappointment he felt on those nights when he sat amidst the haha-ing harsh yellings of those bums under the bridge with the bottle, when he knew that the men who were rich tonight were his brothers but they were brothers who had forgotten him; when he knew that all the excited actions of life which included even the pitiful getting of the night’s wine by his father and Rex led to the grave, and when suddenly beyond the freightyards towards the mountain darkness inhabited by great stars, where nevertheless and amazingly in a last hung dusk a single flame of the sun now making long shadows in the Pacific lingered high on Berthoud’s mighty wall as the world turned silently, he could hear the Denver & Rio Grande locomotive double-chugging at the base of a raw mountain gap to begin the train order climb to the dews, jackpines, arid windy heights of the mountain night, pulling the sad brown boxcars of the world to distant junctions where lonely men in mackinaws waited, to new towns of smoke and lunchcarts, for all he knew as he sat there with his ragged sneakers stuck in the oily yard and among the sooty irons of his fate, to the glittering San Francisco fogs and ships. Oh little Cody Pomeray if there had been some way to send a cry to you even when you were too little to know what utterances and cries are for in this dark sad earth, with your terrors in a world so malign and inhospitable, and all the insults from heaven ramming down to crown your head with anger, pain, disgrace, worst of all the crapulous poverty in and out of every splintered door of days, if someone could have said to you then, and made you perceive, “Fear life but don’t die; you’re alone, everybody’s alone. Oh Cody Pomeray, you can’t win, you can’t lose, all is ephemeral, all is hurt.”
Old Bull Balloon (speaking of loneliness and the diaphanous ghost of days) a singularly lonely man, and most ephemeral, along about one of these years went broke and became so poor that he went in on a ridiculous partnership with Pomeray. Old Bull Baloon who usually went around wearing a poker-wrinkled but respectable suit with a watch chain, straw hat, Racing Form, cigar and suppurated red nose (and of course the pint flask) and was now fallen so low, for you could never say that he could prosper while other men fell, that his usually suppositious half-clown appearance with the bulbous puff of beaten flesh for a face, and the twisted mouth, his utter lovelessness in the world alone among foolish people who didn’t see a soul in a man, hounded old reprobate clown and drunkard of eternity, was now deteriorated down to tragic realities and shabbiness in a bread line, all the rich history of his soul crunching underfoot among the forlorn pebbles. His and old Pomeray’s scheme was well nigh absurd; little Cody was taken along. They got together a handful of greasy quarters, bought wire, screen, cloth and sewing needles and made hundreds of flyswatters; then in Old Bull’s 1927 Graham-Paige they headed for Nebraska to sell door to door. Huge prairie clouds massed and marched above the indescribable anxiety of the earth’s surface where men lived as their car belittled itself in immensity, crawled eastward like a potato bug over roads that led to nothing. One bottle of whiskey, just one bottle of whiskey was all they needed; whereas little Cody who sat in the rattly back seat counting the lonely pole-by-pole throb of telegraph lines spanning sad America only wanted bread that you buy in a grocery store all fresh in a happy red wrapper that reminded him speechlessly of happy Saturday mornings with his mother long dead—bread like that and butter, that’s all. They sold their pathetic flyswatters at the backdoors of farms where farmers’ wives with lone Nebraska writ in the wrinkles around their dull bleak eyes accepted fate and paid a nickel. Out on the road outside Cheyenne Wells a great argument developed between Pomeray and Old Bull as to whether they were going to buy a little whiskey or a lot of wine, one being a wino, the other an alcoholic. Not having eaten for a long time, feverish, they leaped out of the car and started making brawling gestures at each other which were supposed to represent a fistfight between two men, so absurd that little Cody gaped and didn’t cry. And the next moment they were embracing each other, old Pomeray tearfully, Old Bull raising his eyes with lonely sarcasm at the huge and indefatigable heavens above Colorado with the remark “Yass, wrangling around on the bottom of the hole.” Because everybody was in a hole during the Depression, and felt it. They returned clonking up Larimer Street with about eighteen dollars which was promptly that night hurled downward flaming in the drain like the fallen angel—a vast drunk that lasted five days and was almost humorous as it described crazy circles around town from the car, which was parked on Larimer at 22nd, little Cody sleeping in it, to an old office over a garage in a leafy side street that Old Bull had once used as headquarters for a spot remover venture and where pinochle at a busted dusty rolltop desk consumed thirty-six hours of their fevered reprieve, to a farm outside town (now abandoned by some family and left to Old Bull) and where drinking was done in barns and ruined livingrooms or out in cold alfalfa rows, finally teetering back downtown, Pomeray migrating back to the railyards to collapse beneath Rex in a pool of urine beneath dripping ramps while Old Bull Balloon’s huge pukey tortured bulk was finally reposed on a plank in the county jail, strawhat over nose. So when little Cody woke up in the car on a cold clear October morning and didn’t know what to do, Gaga, the beggar without legs who clattered tragically on his rollerboard on Wazee Street, took him in, fed him, made him a bed on the floor like a bed of straw and spent the night thundering around in bulge-eyed sweat trying to catch him in a foul hairy embrace that would have succeeded if he’d had legs or Cody hadn’t lowered himself out the transom.
Years of hopping around with his father like this and on freight trains all over the West and so many futilities everywhere that he’d never remember them all, and then Cody had a dream that changed his life entirely. It was in reform school, after the theft of his first car and when he hadn’t seen his Pa for a year. He dreamed he lived in an immense cosmic flophouse dormitory with the old man and Rex and other bums, but that it was somehow located in the Denver High School auditorium; that one night he was walking across the street in an exhilarated state, carrying a mattress under his arm; all up and down the street with its October night lights glittering clear swarmed the bums, with his father off somewhere doing something busy, excited, feverish. In the dream Cody was thirty years older; he wore a T-shirt in the brisk weather; his beer belly bulged slightly over the belt. His arms were the muscular arms of an ex-boxer growing flabbier. His hair was combed slick but it was thinning back from bony frowns and Mephistophelean hairlines. His face was his own but it was strangely puffed, beaten, the nose in fact was almost broken, a tooth was missing. When he coughed it sounded harsh and hoarse and maniacally excited like his father. He was going somewhere to sell the mattress for wine money: his exhilaration was due to the fact that he was going to succeed and get the money. And suddenly his father wearing his old black baseball hat came stumbling up the street with a convulsive erection in his baggy pants, howling hoarsely “Hey Cody, Cody, did you sell the mattress yet? Huh, Cody, did you sell the mattress yet?”—and ran clutching after him with imploration and fear, a dream that Cody woke from with a repugnance that only he could understand. It was dawn; he lay on the hard reformatory bed and decided to start reading books in the library so he would never be a bum, no matter what he worked at to make a living, which was the decision of a great idealist.
At fifteen this child had the regimen of his life worked out in a confused and still and all pathetically practical way. He rose at 7 A.M. from Old Bull Balloon’s rolltop desk (his current bed); if the office was filled with poker players he slept in the bathtub of the Greeley or other hotels. At 7:15 he rushed downtown, washed at barbershop sink, if it was not available he used the YMCA sink. Then he delivered his paper route. Around nine he went to the Smith residence, where he knew a near-idiot maid that he made love to on the cellar cot, after which she always fed him a big meal. If this friendship with idiot maid sometimes failed he ran to Big Cherry Lucy’s at the Texas Lunch (ever since thirteen Cody was able to handle any woman and in fact had pushed his drunken father off Cherry Lucy Halloween night 1939 and taken over so much that they fist fought like rivals and Cody ran away with the five dollar stake). At ten he rushed to the library for the grand opening, read Schopenhauer and magazines (sometimes when he wasn’t reading funnies as a child he’d get a real book off the old Greeley Hotel shelf and read down over the first words of every line Chinese style in childly thought, which is early philosophizing). At eleven o’clock he asked to wash cars and sometimes asked to park cars at the Rocky Mountain Garage (already he could drive better than any attendant in Denver and in fact had stolen several other cars to try his skill since his time in the “joint” and parked them back on the same block intact except for change of position), noon hour he used a paper route friend’s bike to ride five miles out to friends’ families for big meals, then helped with chores till two. Back to library for afternoon reading, history, encyclopedias and the bloody sad amazing Lives of the Saints, and making use of the library toilet; four o’clock rest and meditation and connections in poolhall till closing time unless semipro twilight ballgame or other spectacles of interest sprung around town; eleven o’clock he stole nickels off newsstands for a Bowery beefstew and found the place to sleep.
* * *
IT WAS A SATURDAY AFTERNOON in Denver, October, 1942, when Tom Watson first saw pure-souled Cody sitting on that bench with his lower lip jutted up habitually in unconscious power that Watson thought was a gesture of profile power, a pose for somebody, when actually Cody was only dreaming there; wearing Levi dungarees, old shoes without socks, a khaki Army shirt and a big black turtleneck sweater covered with car grease, and carrying a brand new toy accordion in a box he had just found by the side of the road, perched among the usual great number of Saturday onlookers half of whom were waiting for tables and talking about everything that had happened during the week, the kind of things that made Cody feel like a sheepish fool with no news of his own and marveled to see them all curling their mouths in the derisive telling of interesting tales, even while Watson said to himself “Must be some young new punk.” Cody sat there, stunned with personal excitement as whole groups of them shouted across the smoke to other fellows in a tremendous general anticipation of the rapidly approaching almost unbearably important Saturday night in just a few hours, right after supper when there would be long preparations before the mirror and then a sharped-up city-wide invasion of bars (which already at this moment had begun to roar from old afternoon drinkers who’d swallowed their bar egos long ago), thousands of young men of Denver hurrying from their homes with arrogant clack and tie-adjustments towards the brilliant center in an invasion haunted by sorrow because no guy whether he was a big drinker, big fighter or big cocks man could ever find the center of Saturday night in America, though the undone collar and the dumb stance on empty streetcorners on Sunday dawn was easy to find and in fact fifteen-year-old Cody could have best told them about it; the premonition of this oncoming night together with the dense excitement of everything around the tables in the shadowy hall nevertheless failing to hide certain hints of heartbreaking loss that filtered in with chinks of daylight from the street (October in the poolhall) and penetrated all their souls with the stricken memory not only of wild wind blowing coalsmoke and leaves across town, and football games somewhere, but of their wives and women right now, with feminine purposes, with that ravenous womany glee trotting around town buying boxes of soap, Jell-o, floor-wax, Dutch Cleanser and all that kind and placing these on the bottom of their wagons, then working up to apples at the fruitstand, containers of milk, toilet paper, half crushable items like that, finally chops, steak, bacon pyramiding to eggs, cigarettes, the grocery slip all mixed up with new toys, new socks and housedresses and lightbulbs, eagering after every future need while their men-louts slammed around with balls and racks and sticks in the dimness of their own vice. And there in the middle of it stood melancholy Tom Watson, the habitue, the one always ready to take anybody on for a game, hunchbacked, meek, dreaming at his upright cue-stick as naturally as the sentry with his spear or the hull-bump of a destroyer that you see on the horizon with its spindly ghost of a foremast, a figure so familiar in the brownness of the room that after awhile you didn’t see him any more like certain drinkers disappear the moment they put their foot on the brass rail (Old Bull Balloon, Julien Love, others), just for the most part standing there chalking his cue in the gesture of poolhall nonchalance he and all the others always used for quick look-sees, reassured. When he saw Cody he raised his eyebrow-he was interested in this wild-looking kid, but like an old woman rocking on a porch noting storm clouds before supper, placidly, dumbly surprised. Tom Watson on this lonely earth was a crippled boy who lived in unostentatious pain with his grandmother in a two-story house under great sidestreet trees, sat on the screened porch with her till poolhall time, which was usually midafternoon; en route made the rounds of downtown streets, mild, sincere, dropping a word in the shoeshine parlor, another into the chili joint where his boys worked, then a moment on the sidewalk with that watchful, spitting, proprietary air of all young men of American daytime sidewalks (there’s more doubt of it at night); and then into the poolroom like a man going to work, where you could best judge his soul, as Cody did, seeing him standing stooped at his cue-stick with that unfathomable patience of an old janitor awaiting a thousand more nights of the debris of rotation, snookers and pinochle in the same brown meeting hall, his huge round eyes once they were fixed on you persisting like a baby’s who’s terrorstricken by life watching a stranger go by his part of the sidewalk. Then again you saw that he prowled like a fox in his atmospheres, a weirdy, a secret wise man, making his living at pool; if you looked closer you saw that he never missed a difficult shot once he finally got down to it; that when he did go down and propped his thin artistic hand with forefingertip and thumb joined in a lean, architectural rest for cue’s smooth passage, unfolding his sculptured fingers below for ornament and balance on the green, a gesture so sophisticated in America that boys see it in their dreams as soon as they’ve seen it once, at these times he was even less noticeable at work than when standing loafing in bunchy balled-up gloom at the rickety pylon of his cue-pole. Raggedy Cody sitting there watching this Tom Watson was the enactment of the drama of an American boy for the first time perceiving the existence of an American poet, this Tom Watson so tragically interesting, so diseased and beautiful, potent because he could beat anybody yet be so obscurely defeated as he slouched down in the press of the crowd, sometimes flashing a languid sad smile in answer to the shouts of dishwashers and dry clean pressers but usually just enduring eternity on the spot he occupied, his Pepsi-Cola unattended on the ballrack, his eyes dreaming upon sorrows that must have been as deep as an Assyrian King’s and notwithstanding that when Cody grew up learned they were nothing but the pure dumb trances of a sweet crippled poolshark. At the moment when this strange love for Tom Watson and the great American Image of beautiful sadness which he represented was leaping in Cody’s imagination, and Watson himself understood from the corner of his eye that this boy wasn’t only interested in learning pool from him but everything he knew and would use it for purposes of his own which were so much vaster than anything Watson had ever dreamed that he would have to plead for Cody’s guidance in the end, Cody immediately jumped up, ran over and made the first great conman proposition of his life. It had to be a fantastic proposition; the moment Watson looked amazed and dropped his superior pose out of sheer perplexity, in fact embarrassed pain because what was he expected to do with a kid rushing up to him and saying “Do you want to learn philosophy from me?” with a wag of the finger, sly eyes, neck popping with muscles like a jack in the box straining at the void of the world for the first time with a vigorous evil spring, Cody, his position established, leaped in. “Now further than that yet, and of course omitting to discuss the fact because already almost understood, i.e., you teach me how to beat pool” (pointing at himself) “and I teach you” (socking Watson in the chest with his forefinger and really hurting him) “I teach you further into psychology and metaphysics” (Cody mispronounced it “metafsicks” only because at this time he just hadn’t carefully looked at it yet and when he did several weeks later it caused him tremendous private grief to remember this) “and further beyond all that and in order to cement our relationship and in fact—of course if you agree, and only if you agree, as I do—in fact to establish a blood brother loyalty of our souls, if you wish to use clitchay expressions at this time or any other, and again just as you agree, always as you agree” (jabbing the iron finger again but this time careful not to touch, just holding it quivering powerfully within the tiniest fraction of an inch from Watson’s chest) “I propose now and without any further shillyshallying, though” (rubbing his hands busily, rocking back and forth with one foot in front of the other, his head down but watching Watson with an undertook that was very arrogant, cocky, suddenly sarcastically suggestive, the rocking deliberate not only like a boxer getting ready arranging his skip rope or a pitcher on the mound rubbing up the ball with a half-sarcastic expression on the catcher’s preliminary sign but almost hypnotic in the way it attracted Watson who watched entranced and just barely seemed to be wonderingly rocking with him)—“though I can whip a car into a going condition even if it’s awful old tin and I know buddies for free greasejobs plus where to steal cans of oil and even one tankful during the ballroom dance at eleven tonight on Broadway when I go around the cars parked in my boy’s lot with my siphon and mouth-suck up into cans on the average a half a gallon gas per car which is unnoticeable but awful hard work, etcetera on, I still have to find the car, you see, huge troubles natcherly as I consider energy and every and all contingency but listen carefully to me (and I will, no fear, to compensate, find, or steal a car, any time you agree, or say, whatever) if you want to go to the Notre Dame game this Saturday in South Bend, Indiana and REALLY want to see it and not just loafing the idea—stop a moment to understand!” he commanded Watson who’d started to speak. “All week I heard you and all the other fellows bettin, saying ‘Well now I sure would like to see that thar Notre Dame game by gawd’ and talking like people often do whose wish-plans never crystallize see because of lazy blocks that multiply on the back road of old delays yet I’m offering a real ji-nu-ine chance and I repeat if you really want to see it I’ll go get my Uncle Bull’s old Graham-Paige (!!!) if necessary” (this was such a tremendous concession Cody showed a stagger) “see? Which he won’t miss not only because it doesn’t run hor hor, but right now he’s freezing his assets in Montany ha ha ha hee hee hee” (staggering back with a high silly-gigling laugh for what he thought in those days was a tremendous joke and in fact bumping against others, one of them a gloomy C.B.&Q. brakeman who was just then bending down for an easy straight shot and missed completely on account of Cody in his foolish kid stupid excitement to be noticed, a sentiment that the brakeman, chewing his gum as fast as he could go while aiming now expressed by not removing his cue from where it finger-rested but just turning to look at Cody with his jaws chewing slowly) “and positively I can take you to the game and back in record time through chill winters and U. S. mails and all things and really blow the road wide open so long as you provide your ticket of course, after all, whoo!” (wiping himself in a parody of adroitness with a dirty handkerchief) “see? Whereas you watch the game but I’ll wait outside either in the car or in a diner listening on the radio or better try to see panoramic touchdowns from a roof or tree, or even better I’ll hustle around town while you’re enjoying and see if I can find some girls for us, money we can borrow with the promise we’re cousins say from Oopla, Indiana next door and come in every Saturday to attend the fair you see and tell them we usually have a lot of money but not this time on account Pa’s hard time with the hayin this fall and the pumpkins didn’t sell etcetera and then we come back possible the girls coming with us far as Nebraska or someplace where maybe they get money from their aunt or cousins, anybody. See? All that and most of it simple except as I say omigosh a ticket, a ticket to the Notre Dame football game one thousand miles away, six million feet deep with telephones and luminaries I can’t begin to even imagine, pity poor me and the big tickets to world stadiums, so I leave it to you…you…and also type of car, also anybody you want to bring. I be your chauffeur, you teach me pool, snookers, anything else comes in your mind, be my big brother, I be your helper. So it be! So it be! What say?”
It was too completely mad for flabbergasted dumb old Tom Watson, one of the kindest fellows in the world, who in any case could never be expected to even have the energy to face a thousand miles of deliberately absurd travel in a clonking old heap, no, Watson’s first, real, and genuinely kind impulse was to quiet Cody down.
“My land,” he said to himself, “he’s practically crazy from being hungry I bet!”
He took him home that afternoon to his grandmother’s house. They had a big snack from the icebox, Cody drinking two and a half quarts of milk in fear that he’d never see that much for several more years, and making sure not to tear the bread when he folded it over the butter, clutching his chest, actually clutching his chest when he realized Watson’s grandmother was only standing over them to refill their glasses from a fresh bottle of milk, not pleased or displeased but just a nice old woman with a rosy moon face, glasses, white hair, wearing cotton stockings over her piano legs that supported her so firmly and unmovably in the halos of her bright linoleum and a housedress that in the course of tender chores around the house which was as comfortable as an old pillow, had taken on the kindly, almost dear shapelessness of her herself, the simplicity and sadness of her stolid motherlike repose at the poor hunchbacked boy’s side as he bent to his supper, her grandson whom she served and honored, enough to make Cody feel like crying for his own mother whom he was positive now would have been something like Watson’s grandmother, just as calm, plain, humble, like old women who run rickety grocery stores in dumpy backyard neighborhoods of trees and woodfences. In Watson’s bedroom upstairs the boys spent a quiet hour facing each other at a folding cardtable set near the window where the lace curtains puffed in with the breeze and played over the flowery wallpaper and knickknacks of windowshelf, the mere sight of this graceful drowsy phenomenon making Cody marvel and enjoy life (always high at fifteen) to be in a real home that had lace curtains and little feminine lonely frills in it to beat harsh nature, as Watson, not realizing that Cody was thinking these kinds of thoughts, proceeded in a thorough explanation of the various first steps in cheating at cards.
“First off you see Cody you mark ’em best with your thumbnail like this, usin your own code if you like, to designate face cards, acies and deucies.”
“Yes!” cried Cody. “Yes indeed!”
From a closet next to a dark wood dresser with carved iron grips that swung on little hinges in rich significant clicks, and next to the right front bedpost of Watson’s fourpost manorial boxspring bed in which Cody imagined Watson slept like the little boys in fleecy nightgowns in mattress advertisements of the Saturday Evening Post, which he realized now he was confusing with a rubber tire ad that shows a little boy wandering out of bed with a candle on New Year’s Eve but expresses the same tender comfort of angels and vision of American children (ah poor Cody who’d seen this vision in those soaked magazines that have been dried by the sun and stand on tattered edges among weeds and cundrums of backlots), from that closet that seemed too rich because it was next to these things and inside had the luxuriant darkness of suits all flashing dim from starry moth crystals (and their starry odor) and the faint gold of shoetrees, Watson pulled out a fairly good brown tweed suit and, with a slight bow like a Viennese nobleman, like the Bela Lugosi vampire Count bowing to the young hero at the door of the rainy castle, he presented it to Cody to keep, Cody in turn offering his toy accordion as collateral anyway, with a smile and still bowing Watson saying he’d keep it for him. It was Cody’s first suit: he bulged out of the new clean underwear; bulged out of the starched white shirt that was handed to him with a laundry cardboard brace in the collar that made him wonder if he had to fiddle with it like irascible millionaire husbands tugging before last minute mirrors in B-movies, he bulged out of the necktie that wound foursquare around the pillars of his neck, but out of the suit he exploded, the buttons were in danger of popping, the trouser creases were stretched flat out of sight on his thighs, the back seams of the coat showed connective spinal threads, the sleeves took the shape of his forearms that suddenly looked almost as big as Popeye’s.
“Damn! Do I look sharp?”
He looked alright but strange. So awed by these new clothes that he could hardly turn his head when Watson talked to him, but only nodded up and down, his long hair bushy and uncombable, his thoughts all pompous sweaty astonishment like the cartoon characters they draw with bewildered perspirations raining from their heads, just as ludicrous as that, and yet as that bright afternoon that had shed its radiance unasked for so long now showed itself to be turned into old red afternoon when they stepped forth from the house, and piteous remorse among men, birds, and trees that had transpired while they were dressing still haunted the air with that hung silence that makes people ask themselves sadly “Oh what happened to the afternoon?” and later when the general autumn dying quietly like a brave soldier overwhelms them, “Oh what happened to the year?”, Cody, very like an Episcopalian farmer boy going to church the Sunday morning before his wedding and with the same absent-minded ignorance of the wide surroundment brooding over him that characterizes all mortal persecuted breath beneath this hugeness, literally had to be led stupidly and stiffly down the street by Watson as they hurried back to the pool parlor to meet the entire gang. It was going to be a big night, suit and all. It didn’t take long for Cody to quicken his steps with Watson’s and soon they had pinpointed down-street and were swinging around the corner to a big trolley line thoroughfare, hurrying for the big-traffic, ever-more-exciting, all-of-it-pouring-into-town Saturday night, both of them with the same bright fresh gleam in their eyes that you see on the shiny fender of a new automobile when it turns in from the darkness and outskirts of town and immediately reflects Saturday night Main Street neons where before it just sat black in a dark garage or else in the driveway collecting dim dressing lights from the upstairs of the house, vanishing like a comedy team rightward in a vision of ankles twinkling in the dusk with regardant bending figures pointed downtown plunging through the same pocket of excitement which was not only their point of sober discussion but raised little fogs from their mouths as they yaketty-yakked along (with lone envy Cody used to watch other guys cutting along like this, sometimes from Mission reading-room windows on nights when it was so cold he thought he could read what the buddies said before their intense voluminous talking-fogs whipped back to dissolve in wintry eternity); Cody finally forgetting he was wearing a suit, forgetting the high entrapment of the collar and the woolly stifling around his armpits and the unfamiliar scuffling cuffs out of which he soon in fact resumed telling Watson further things and all things about himself, gesturing out of the shiny round starch his big grimy cracked hands that were not at all the hands of an absorbed banker in the street but more like a dirt farmer’s at a funeral and worse like horny toads in a basket of wash. “Now in Gaga’s barbershop in back and setting way up high behind the water heater I have a bag of clothes, harkening to clothes, but to go and pick it up involves terrible divisions with Gaga over money my old man owed him even though it’s just old pants and belts and polkadot shirts, but further I have an extry pair of fairly good work-shoes settin way up high so nobody can notice on top of a locker in the Y and my plan, actually and no lie, was getting down to Colorado Springs or Raton or some such to freeze m’fingers off in construction camps or whichever”—and so on as Watson assured him he had plenty of clothes for him and not to worry. Excitement of hurrying downtown on foot for the big night reached a supreme peak when suddenly as they rushed arm-in-arm and came to cross Broadway the light instantly changed for them and they didn’t have to wait but just hustled right straight on across the street for the poolhall, that light that wouldn’t allow lulls in the rhythm of their joy holding up whole avenues of traffic exactly for them to sweep along, profound, bowed, bumping heads together; Cody so singing in his soul now that he had to talk on several levels to express himself to Watson: “Even though as you say there’s just as much work around here and why even go to Fort Collins where it’s so c-o-l-d (whee! zoom! look at that new Cadillac!) and I didn’t further finish about earlier speaking of Gaga and all the things I want you to know—”; his arm around Watson, tight armpits or no tight armpits, he the only one who’d ever put his arm around the hump of Watson’s sorrow; similarly in the moment, seeing, just as they reached the other curb, in the exciting shadows of a five-and-ten awning and to his deeper and simultaneously running amazement, a beautiful girl fixing on him from her casual one-leg-forward hand-on-hip position by the weighing machine waiting for the bus a cold arrogant look of sensuality done with misty eyes and something suggestive, impatient, almost too personal to understand, astonishing him in the realization that he was wearing a suit for the first time in his life and this was the first official sex-appeal look from a regular high-heeled downtown socialite honey (still finding room to yell “Watson watch that new Caddy beat the light now!)” and reflecting: “So this is what these damn dames and big guys been doing, giving each other turble personal glances of angry snaky love that I didn’t know about in my previous boy days beatin around the sidewalk with my eyes on the gutter looking for nickels and dimes wearin goldang cockin old pants. Damn! Lessgo!”
In the poolhall the hour was roaring. It was so crowded that spectators were standing obscuring everything from the street and somebody had the backdoor open simultaneously with the alley door of the Welton Street parlor so that you could see a solid city block of poolhall from the north side of Glenarm to the south side of Welton interrupted only by a little tragic alley of shadows with a garbage can, like looking down a hall of mirrors over a sea of angrily personalized heads and islands of green velvet, all in smoke. To Cody it was a vision, the moment of his arrival that everybody was waiting for, yet even though he stood in the door at the side of great cool Tom Watson the Virgil of this big Inferno, wearing not only his clothes but the same gorgeously sophisticated robe of their afternoon’s adventure which was already undergoing a rich change to evening and the lazy explorations that were to come, a decadent refinement that all the dumb bastards in this dimness would have to struggle to understand to know anything hereafter even about pool, nobody made a move to notice or even gave much of a crap and Cody would have immediately felt drowned again except suddenly for the saving memory of a hunch he used to have in boyhood which was whenever he turned his back on the people who were involved with him and even others who happened to be standing nearby, perfect strangers sometimes, they immediately gathered with the speed of light at the nape of his neck to discuss him voicelessly, dancing, pointing, until, jerking his head around for a quick look or just slowly to check, it turned out they’d always twanged back in place with all-to-be-expected fiendish perfect hypocrisy and in exactly the same bland position as before. Remembering anyhow his father when in his cocky way of bums used to stagger happily into some place howling “Hallelujah I’m a bum, bum again” Cody as he came in, very carefully digging everything through shrewd half closed eyes so he could size up and savor the scene for everything it had, jazzing on the balls of his feet in that thing Americans do instead of pinching themselves, now repeated the song to himself, “Hallelujah I’m a bum, bum again,” in a secret, sly, interested whisper of his own he always used to refer back to sad factors of the past. While Watson was busy looking around, Cody directed his attention to a spot on the floor near table number one where, after he had got tired looking at people on those long watchful nights, he used to spend stranger further hours on the onlookers’ bench absentmindedly studying the reality and vying with the existence of cigarette butts and spit by estimating exactly how it got there on the floor, wondering why for instance a particular calm spit gleamed like it did even though it had been rejected like a person’s rejected and spat out exactly (by the clock) two and a half minutes earlier by a blue-jowled conductor who had to spit and wouldn’t have spat otherwise but came apparently to think of something completely different at the button wire counting the score and scratching his chin (all as voices of the fellows reverberated around the walls of the hall and moaned in his absent not-listening ear), so that as far as the spot of this conductor’s own spit was concerned it no longer existed for him, only for Cody; Cody then estimating exactly how he himself got there, not only the world but the bench, not only the bench but the part of the bench he filled out, not only that but how he got there to be aware of the saliva and the part of the bench his ass filled out, and soon in the way the mind has; at all of which now because it wasn’t his best idea of what to do in a poolhall, in Watson’s company he made his ceremonial sneer and official revenge, even in the roaring noise and even though among all these Saturday feet he couldn’t quite see the exact spot he had studied, though he knew there were new cigarette butts and spit on that spot now, like little brothers and sisters following in the stead of others long ago studied and swept away, in any case doing all this so that the first full-fledged moment of his poolhall charactership would not be spoiled in fevers and forgetful excitement like running up to people to talk, but instead he would take advantage of his big chance to keep his attention disciplined on his good luck, and so do so in the roots of previous well-considered sorrow of October in the Poolhall.
“What are you doing Cody?” asked Watson when he noticed how pensive he was.
Oh ragged sailing heart!—it was far from time for Cody to be able to even want to explain his craziest secrets. “Actually and no lie, Tom, I was thinking to myself what a wonderful guy this Tom Watson fellow is really truly indeed.”
Slim Buckle, Earl Johnson and Jim Evans were the nucleus of Tom Watson’s gang at the time. They were grouped around a rear table in the usual ritual get-together game of rotation that they had every Saturday evening as a kind of preliminary tactical conference on the night’s action and for starting and a Coke. The program tonight featured two girls who were baby-sitting for the weekend in a house up near the Wyoming line. But this night without knowing it they were grouped around with that hotheaded dumbness the purpose of which is always to be ignorant of what’s about to happen, the only sure thing you can remember when you look back to see what people were doing during an important historical moment, sore, sullen, sighing from the drag of time, inattentive as always, impatient not only with life but always exactly the life unfolding in the immediate vicinity, the miserable here, the lousy now, as though all the blame was on that, and yet the poor souls actually sitting in that mysterious godlike stuff that later makes them say, “Listen, I was there the night Tom Watson came in with Cody the day he found him, 1942, Autumn, they had the Army-Columbia game that day I bet on it and heard it on the radio too, we were all playing pool me and Slim Buckle who just got haircuts and Earl Johnson and Jackoff and I dunno who the hell else, Christ we all drove to Wyoming that night, sure, it was a great mad night!”
Cody was introduced around. “Here comes Tom Watson; who’s that kid with him? What’s that, your cousin? What happened to you and Jackoff Friday night? Cody is it? Hiya boy.” And Cody with that strange little feeling of pleasedness that shivers deep in your chest and makes you want to hug yourself and explain everything to the man next to you, found himself standing at one table among all the others roaring with what he could now almost call his own gang as exciting shadows outdoors fell and they played eightball—Cody and Watson versus Buckle and Johnson with goodnatured Evans kibitizing. And everything they said—“That old Missouri twang Esmeralda swishin her butt around the Sandwich Shop I know her, if she had as many rods stickin out of her as she had in she’d look like a porcupine, yah, don’t laugh I stole it from Tony”—and everything they did—one reaching up to slap over the score and another reaching down to carefully place his Coke and another looking horizontally along his cue to see if it was too curved—was all part of one great three-dimensional moil that was all around him now instead of just flat in front of his face like a canvas prop, he was up on the stage with the show now. So he stood there with his weatherbeaten face growing more excited and redder by the hour, his big raw hands gripped around a cue, looking bashfully at his new friends and planning deep in his mind from everything they said and did the positively best, in fact only way to begin completely, helplessly impressing everyone and winning over their favor so conclusively and including their souls that eventually of course they would all turn to him for love and advice; mad Cody who eventually did run the gang, who was now just being merely coy quiet knowing instinctively the best way to start despite the fact that he never knew a gang before and the only thing he’d done was grab some poor kid by the arm in the junkyard or a newsboy in the street or some of the bicyclists on the paper route and make long strange speeches to them like the great speech he made to Watson that afternoon but they were too young to understand and frightened. So he stood stiffly at attention at the table side, sweaty in his suit, or made stupid hilarious shots laying out his big hand flat and flaccid for a cue-rest as if a baby was trying to shoot pool, and the boys laughed but only because Cody was so seriously absent-minded in his hilarious dumbness (trying to learn, they thought) and not because he was inconsequential. Right away the biggest fellow in the gang took a liking to Cody, six-foot-four Slim Buckle all shiny handsome in his Saturday night suit, who was always looming over everybody with a long grave calm that was half comical because it seemed to come from the loneliness of his great height which prevented him from being on a level with other faces so that he dreamed up there his own special juvenile dreams all the less realistic because they were so far from his feet where the ground was, the others had to stare dumbly at his vest most of the time, a fate that he accepted with immense and tender satisfaction. This goodnatured long tall drink of water took a liking to Cody that soon became hero worship and later led to their rambling around the country, buddies—a thing that Earl Johnson noticed and resented from the start. He was almost instantly jealous and immediately proclaimed next day in Watson’s ear (when it was too late) Cody wasn’t everything he seemed to be. So when the gang gave up the precious table and let their empty Cokes plop in a floorbox with a “So long fellers” and left the hall to jump in the car, a ’37 Ford belonging to Evans, for the ride north to Wyoming about eighty miles, the sun just then going down in vast unobserved event above the madding souls of people, and Cody above the objections of everyone else insisted on driving to show his skill, but then really fantastically wheeled the car right clear out of town with beautiful spot-shot neatness and speed, the guys who were prepared to criticize his driving and give pointers or stage false hysterical scenes forgot they were in a car and fell to gabbing happily about everything—Suddenly out on East Colfax Boulevard bound for Fort Collins Cody saw a football game going on among kids in a field, stopped the car, said “Watch” ran out leaping madly among kids (with noble seriousness there wearing those tragic lumps like the muscles of improvised strongmen in comedies), got the ball, told one blondhaired boy with helmet tucked underarm to run like hell, clear to the goalpost, which the kid did but Cody said “Further, further,” and the kid halfway doubting to get the ball that far edged on back and now he was seventy yards and Cody unleashed a tremendous soaring wobbling pass that dropped beyond the kid’s most radical estimate, the pass being so high and powerful the boy completely lost it in eyrieal spaces of heaven and dusk and circled foolishly but screaming with glee—when this happened everyone was amazed except Johnson, who rushed out of the car in his sharp blue suit, leaped around frantically in a mixup of kids, got the ball (at one point fell flat because of his new shiny-bottom shoes that had only a half hour’s poolroom dust on ‘em) and commanded the same uncomplaining noble boy to run across the field and enragedly unfurled a long pass but Cody appeared out of nowhere in the mad lowering dusk and intercepted it with sudden frantic action of a wildfaced maniac jumping into a roomful of old ladies; spun, heaving a prodigious sky pass back over Johnson’s head that Johnson sneered at as he raced back, he’d never been outdone by anybody (“Hey wheel” they yelled in the car); such a tremendous pass it was bound to be carried by the wind, fall in the road out on East Colfax, yet Johnson ran out there dodging traffic as mad red clouds fired the horizon of the mountains, to the west, and somewhere across the field littler tiny children were burning meaningless fires and screaming and playing football with socks, some just meaninglessly tackling one another all over in a great riot of October joy. Circling in the road, almost being murdered by a car driven eighty miles per by Denver’s hotshot (Biff Buferd, who tooted), Johnson made a sensational fingertip sprawling-on-knees catch instantly and breathtakingly overshadowed by the fact that dramatic fantastic Cody had actually gone chasing his own pass and was now in the road yurking with outstretched hands from the agony that he was barely going to miss, himself sprawling as terrorstricken motorists swerved and screeched on all sides. This insane scene was being beheld not only by Biff Buferd laughing like hell as it receded eighty miles an hour out of his rearview window, but across the wild field with its spastic fires and purple skies (actually an empty lot sitting between the zoom-swish of Colfax traffic and some old homes, the goalposts just sticks the kids “put up with believing crudeness of primitive Christians”) was propped all by itself there an old haunted house, dry gardens of Autumn planted round it by nineteenth-century lady ghouls long dead, from the weather-beaten green latticed steps of which now descended Mr. behatted beheaded Justin G. Mannerly the mad schoolteacher with the little Hitler mustache, within months fated to be teaching Cody how to wash his ears, how to be impressive with highschool principals—Mannerly now stopped, utterly amazed, halfway down, the sight of Cody and Earl Johnson furying in the road (almost getting killed too), saying out loud “My goodness gracious what is this?”; same who in fact that afternoon, at the exact moment Cody was approaching Watson, sat in a grave of his own in his overcoat in an empty unheated Saturday classroom of West Denver High not a mile across town, his brow in his hand as blackboard dust swam across October fires in the corner where the window-opening pole was leaned, where it was still written in chalk from yesterday’s class (in American Lit.) When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, sat there in a pretense of thinking for the benefit of any teachers and even kids passing in the hall with some of whom just before he’d in fact been joking (threw a feeble lopsided pass across the afternoon lawn as he hustled from Studebaker to business), sat now moveless in a pretense of remembering, with severe precision, the exact date of something that was bottlenecking his entire day, left wrist raised for a quick look at how much time was left, frown of accompaniment already formed, drawer pulled with letter headed memo paper ready to fly the instant he smacked the desk deciding, but actually choking over loss, choking over loss, thinking of the love, the love, the love he missed when his face was thin and fresh, hopes were pure. O growing old! O haggard ugly ghoul is life’s decay! Started life a sweet child believing everything beneath his father’s roof; went from that, immersed and fooled, to that mask of disgusted flesh called a face but not the face that love had hoped for and to that soul of a gruesome grieving ghost that now goes shuddering through nightmare life cluttering up the earth as it dies. Ah but well, Earl Johnson wanted to throw a pass to Cody and Cody challenged him and said “Run with the ball and let’s see if I tackle you before you reach that Studebaker where the man’s standing”; and Johnson laughed because he had been (absolutely) the outstanding runner everywhere (schools, camps, picnics), at fifteen could do the hundred in 10:9, track star speed; so took off not quite realizing what he’d done here giving Cody these psychological opportunities and looking back at him with taunts “Well come on, come on, what’s the matter?” And so that Cody furiously, as if running for his life, not only caught up with him but even when Johnson increased his speed in wholehearted realizing race caught up with him easily, in his sheer excitement, with his tremendous unprecedented raw athletic power he could run the hundred in almost ten flat (actually and no lie), and a sad, remote tackle took place in the field, for a moment everybody saw Cody flyingtackling horizontally in the dark air with his neck bulled on to prove, his head down almost the way a dead man bows his head self-satisfied and life-accomplished but also as if he was chuckling up his coat sleeve at Johnson about-to-be-smeared, both arms outstretched, in a tackling clamp that as he hung suspended in that instantaneous fix of the eye were outstretched with a particular kind of unspeakable viciousness that’s always so surprising when you see it leaping out of the decent suits of men in sudden sidewalk fights, the cosmopolitan horror of it, like movie magnates fighting, this savagery explosively leaping now out of Cody’s new suit with the same rage of shoulderpads and puffy arms, yet arms that also were outstretched with an unspeakable mute prophesied and profound humility like that of a head-down Christ shot out of a cannon on a cross for nothing, agonized. Crash, Johnson was tackled; Justin G. Mannerly called out “Why didn’t you try that in the road I have a shovel in the car” nobody noticing, even as he drove off; and Cody, like Johnson with his knees all bruised and pants torn, had established his first great position of leadership in Tom Watson’s famous gang.
Long ago in the red sun—that wow-mad Cody, whose story this is, lookout.
* * *
A WHOLE BUNCH OF SAD and curious people and half morose kicked around the weeds in the ordinary city debris of a field off East Colfax Avenue, Denver, October 1942, with semi-disgruntled expressions that said “There’s something here anyway.” Crap in weeds was an old map, Cashmere Soap paper, bottom glass of a broken bottle, old used-out flashlight battery, leaf, torn small pieces of newspaper (someone had saved a clipping and then torn it), nameless cardboards, nameless mats of hay, light bulb cardboards, old Spearmint Gum wrapper, ice cream box cover, old paper bag, weeds with little bunched lavender shoots and Rousseau-like but October rusted leaves—old cellophane-old bus transfer ticket, the strange corrugated cardboard from egg crates, a rock, pieces of brown beerbottle glass, old Phillip Morris flattened pack—the roots of weeds were purplish borscht color and left the matted filthy earth like tormented dog cocks leave the sac—sticks—coffee container—and an empty pint bottle of Five Star brand California Sherry drunk by an old wino of the road when things were less grim.
What actually had happened a miscarriage was discovered by some children in the field and reported to a cruising cop who’d now sent his partner back to call up a morgue wagon. There was something tremendously embarrassing about it because you wanted to see it and yet if you did you had to be conspicuous, had in fact to pick out the spot where it was supposed to be and even if you found that had to crane over others and give away the fact which is tremendously painful that you with your personal embarrassed also disgruntled face want to see the red horrible meat of a dead baby—have come snooping around to see it—probably knowing all the time what it was—Cody was embarrassed therefore till the other fellows (Tom Watson, Slim Buckle, Earl Johnson) joined him from the car and then it was easy to talk—But now: what a forlorn thing it is and frightening that the nameless soul (the thing created by the terribleness of a womb which when it does halfway work or even complete work takes the melted marble of man’s sperm which is a kind of acceptable substance, say in a bottle, and transforms it by means of the work of some heinous secret egg into a large bulky piece of decayable meat—) that this nameless little would-have-been lay, spilling out of that grocer’s bag, grocer’s wrapping, under a tree that by dry Autumn had been turned almost the same shade of red, turned thus instead of by wet and secret wombs—Girls are frightening when you see them under these circumstances because there seems to be a kind of insistence on their part to look you in the eye to find out that personal thing about you which is probably the thing that you expect and burn and kill to find in them when you think of penetrating their thighs—that secret wetness of the woman is as unknown to you as your eyes are to her when they’re confronted by a miscarried whatnot in a field under dark and mortal skies—Thus Cody ponders. Whatever he says (in the tragic dusk of this field, bareheaded), he says nothing now—
The roads that Cody Pomeray knew in the West and that I rode with him later were all those tremendously frightening two-lane bumpy roads with those ditches on both sides, that poor fence, that rangefence next, maybe a sad cut of earth, a hair head of grass on a lump of sand, then endless range leading to mountains that belong to other states sometimes—but that road always seems destined to bounce you in the ditch because it humps over each way and the feeling is of the car rolling on a side angle, inclined to a ditch, a bump in the road will bounce it in—as a consequence of this Western roads are lonelier to ride than any. Long hauls straight ahead and on a Saturday night you can see maybe five cars in the next five miles coming your way each headlight smaller and creating that illusion of water on the road when they’re so far the lights are absorbed probably by the night mist entire or whatever it really is—the mirage of night driving across great flat spaces—Cody like everybody else to drive this has that elbow over the window and he particularly with his thick muscular noble efficient (like necks of great busdrivers) neck looks calm and relaxed and perfect at the wheel as you look over his shoulder at that road which at night only shows part of itself, the most conspicuous being the five-mile headlights coming your way—coming into Denver for Saturday night—and the swath, the side-wash swath of the car lights catching the side ditches and a part of the range that jacks over, inlaps the fence like a sea past a breakwater towards the road showing forlorn tufts of bunchgrass on nobs of dry dead earth flashing by in the night in swift blurrily fanning succession and just beyond you know there is, or are, ends of the earth swinging out across the plain, thunderset, the desert, over gopher holes, over brush, sticks, rocks, tiniest pebbles reflecting largest stars (which are in reality galaxies) till the inevitable mesas that terminate Western horizons give some kind of indication that the world has contours and the flatness’s got to stop—this is flashing by, the stars are distant, if you put out the lights of the car you would see what you sense—Cody drove this that night eighty miles and drove it many other times too, north, south, east, west, and was perfectly still at the wheel for an entire hour and averaging an almost pure 80 m.p.h. in the trafficless wilds except for a town while the fellows gabbled and drank beer and sent cans banging after in the black abyss.
Now girls. The house was located on the Union Pacific railroad track under a watertank at the corner of a bunch of desolate looking buildings including one spare (the Anglo North and its fool Norwegians have captured Moby Dick! captured him a hundred years after!) vertical board church and a huge heavengoing creamy white silo with the name of the junction on it, a desolate place not even fit for a brakeman’s piss when the train’s stopped and watering, re-coaling, tanks, coal chutes. The house was somewhat sooty from railroad and therefore deliberately painted bright red window frames—brown sandpaper shingles over walls and on roof, those on roof pale green—weatherbeaten antique gray brick chimney protruding from peaked roof—wooden porch made into an extension out front, gray wood, full of bicycles, chairs, storm doors with lift hooks not knobs—and behind with adjunct wings getting smaller and beater in a graduating series, places to put overshoes, rubbers, umbrellas, addition-sheds, also gray wood but last little outhouse one has cheap English lamp hanging—In yard an old decrepit dresser facing house, shoved up against it with bucket and upside down apple basket on it—boards leaning on house—junk in yard, including an old water-heater tank in high grass, pieces of sodden dog biscuit—and one old sunken ancient car collapsed on timbers as if on display, decapitated, emptied of all except flaps of leather, twang of seat springs, the inner hay of seats, old red rust dials, a steering wheel cracked so you can cut yourself on it, blind headlamps, a back trunk where birds have nested and snow and spring combined to raise a small green crop—old potatoes dumped from a sack rotting next to the right front wheel hub—the kids’ playplace—the dog’s pissery—the trough of moony cows in the summer-rain.
It was a Saturday night and if a train happened to crash by you would have to hold up everything you’re doing to freeze and wait. The two girls were not exactly the usual American girl team of the pretty one and the ugly old one because in this case the older one was extremely attractive herself only you had to look twice or be an expert to tell that if passionate fornication was what you wanted tonight, real gnashing passion in the black, this older one—who looked away resolutely from everybody as if she was a school teacher who had orders to do so but with exactly that kind of sternly imposed self-discipline that was so pathetic and so tight you knew it was bound to explode and when it did it would be good for a man to be there to catch the contents of the act—Now Cody although he was only fifteen at the time noticed this about her the first thing because it was his habit to make his judgments as immediately as possible so as not to waste preliminaries on ordinary hello how are you I’m Joe he’s Bill hee hee ignorance—the moment he stepped off the dark curb of the car, stood in the muddy yard (it had rained in that part of Wyoming) and saw the two girls standing in the face of the onslaught they knew would come from such a carload he made his decision—simply, who’s best. The younger girl called Marie was the epitome of the cute little sexy fleshpot of honey, gold and shiny hairs that you see in illustrations of Coca-Cola girls at fountains with equally pretty rosy boys and so much so, so startlingly what the guys wanted that immediately they were terrified to see it staring them in the face, the bird in the hand—with her pudgy arms that gave promise to the genuineness of two beautiful tits protruding from a deliciously soft cashmere sweater and her arched eyebrows and plump little foolish assy mouth. But I’ll start again.
* * *
THEY GOT TO THE HOUSE where the girls were at nine o’clock sharp. It was located practically under a watertank of the U.P. railroad that passed right by and left that dark dirt which is like the concoction of an artist’s palette after a short rain, the black color artists use to depict night, gloom, maybe evil—and it had just rained when the boys pulled up and Cody cut off the motor in a kind of a driveway covered with this dark railroad snotground. A fitful moon was all that was left of that entire day’s wild light (poolhall chinks of light, miscarriage field purples and iron file skies) and now nobody could see anything except the shape of the house, a few brown lights in it, and the hanging pendant globe of a streetlamp not across the street but across a whole plaza of dirt which might have represented a crossroad, a soccer field, a square, because at the other end of it just barely seeable was an old wood church with vertical boards and gingerbread eaves, behind it even more vaguely in the lunar underground a crazy huge uplilting wheat silo painted wild aluminum and glowing like a June worm in the darkness of the plains that seemed to begin behind it but actually surrounded everything I’ve been talking about—house, clearing, watertank, tracks, lamp, and a few further indications of a townlet beyond the road’s lamp—in one hollow misty carrousel of wild black space horses so close to one another that the only time you could see between them was when a faroff light indicated it, a railroad switch light or a roadlamp or an airport tower in the other county or the topmost glimmer of an antenna in a Cheyenne or whatever radio station.
Johnson who’d picked up one of the girls in Cheyenne a few weeks before and scored tried the storm door first while all the others stood around carrying the beers, the whiskey, the whatnot like altarbearers but with considerably more guilt and with a stirring in their gut that you feel in a whorehouse when you’re told to wait for the girl and suddenly you hear high-heel steps coming down the hall and envision the legs, the garters, the thighs, the panties, the breasts, the throat, the face, the hair of the woman coming—This was exactly the way they felt when Johnson unhooked the storm door with that delicacy of thumb and forefinger you need for such gadgets and as though he was unfastening a brassiere from the bulge-back of the house. Wild children opened the door; there was a lot of stumbling over things on the porch floor but Cody never dreamed that one of the crazy little giggling girls who had been sent by the gals to open up while they brush up the last wave was Joanna Dawson his future wife. In America it’s always two girls and one is always older and uglier than the other, except in this case it was more accurate to say that one was younger and prettier than the other because the older girl—Vivian, a sort of taut redhead with fairly short hair, in dungarees, the chaperone of the two and anybody looking at the younger girl could tell she needed one—Vivian was really pretty and to Cody who was only fifteen offered the most promise of passionate kicks as he came in and sized up everything in one second (back) “you had to look twice” or rather, here, again, he saw that she was supposed to watch out for everything and because of that and maybe had to that all her life was accustomed to acting stern like a teacher among irresponsible elements that element year by year now becoming life in general so that he instinctively realized she was a plum to pick before the Puritanism sank in for good and she became an old Lesbic maid. Besides the dungarees Vivian was wearing moccasins and a blue man’s workshirt washed and re-washed and now faded and made to look feminine only by the crucifix that dangled over a freckle in the little throat-hole at the base of her frightened neck: an outfit that showed she did a lot of chores around the house and yard all day and rode horseback somewhere but also on this night seemed to be a concession on her part to the wild necking party her younger cousin had arranged via Johnson. Marie, the younger, was a vivacious blond who habitually wore broad shiny leather belts, usually red, that emphasized the place where the finest part of her waist gave way to the swing of two white hips that must have looked like columns from there down to the toes if you could have looked under her skirt while the belt was on. Better than that, best of all, and for a reason that none of the guys knew or even tried to form in their minds, Marie wore glasses—dark rimmed glasses that gave her creamy white face and rosy natural lips with but just a tiny down of sideburn wisping down the cheekbone a price they could afford, without them she would have scared them off into the formal camps of complete ego-approach the kind American boys use for their Lana Turners in the rosy ballroom of the land, use for their idea of what it’s like to make Lana Turner and Ava Gardner and such. The same kind of approach they use on the boss when they go out to find their first whitecollar job. Marie was a wild little thing who read books and Dostoevsky and enough of D. H. Lawrence to make her ten times more aggressive than any shambling shy boy she could meet in this forlorn district of the world whether they came driving from Denver or lived a couple of telephone poles away. These two girls were cousins; Vivian was the daughter of the thin countrified woman in glasses whose picture was on top of the player piano; Marie was staying for the month, visiting from Killdeer, N. D. One of the three kids was also visiting—little Joanna, from Denver, whose father, a cop in Santa Fe, was waiting for her annual visit from the general matriarchal Colorado. Big Slim Buckle sat on the couch among the others, Watson on one side, Johnson on the other, with a great beautiful sincerity that made Marie change her interior plans for the night, because it had been the prettiness of Johnson that attracted her and decided her to arrange this party no matter what happened, a prettiness that Buckle had in greater and tenderer proportions—
These imaginings lead me backwards to my one and original poipose.
* * *
DIRTY OLD VOYEURS. On Times Square all these dirty old men we all hate some of whom try to make boys as well as girls and are the ugliest old lechers, make you think of the Arabian proverb “A young woman flees an old man”—they wear hats, why all the time wear hats!—hang around subway entrances, little bookstores, library parks, chess arcades—prowl up and down—some so innocuous you don’t notice what they are till they stop in front of you (say as you lean against building) trying to look casual but somehow with their dirty old hardpants pointed straight at you like a hex, a hoodoo pointed at the man goin down Dauphine Street to die—Nevertheless Cody and I have the same soul and we know what they do, we stood with them at dirty-picture windows from coast to coast—So here goes, all this was just defensive preamble, and I will add (at least my own) food kicks: (anchovies with capers in olive oil is so rich it stuffs the throat, so salty it chokes you, so strong it seems to permeate and flavor the tin of the can itself until the tin tastes saltier than any salt, a metallic salt, the salt of Armageddon)—(this is a food example)—
Cody and I are continually interested in the pictures of women’s legs—little black and white books nudged among many in a Times Square or Curtis Street bookstore window draw us to see the thing in lurid white, somehow interests us more than color, in black and white the thigh is all the whiter, the background all the darker and evil—
Cody used to say “Have this picture, I’ve used it.” I have here a pix of Ruth Maytime (the famous Hollywood actress) and Ella Wynn and I love it—what tremendous lovely tits Ruth has, one shoulder strap of her suit is down, the other is flimsy, they reach very low because her breasts are low, heavy and way out thus stretching strap even further (ah me strap!)—her left breast occupies me for five nameless unconscious minutes on the sidewalk of Times Square and not her breast, just a pix of it, it is so vast, heavy, three-fifths concealed which is better than any other percentage, the nipple is in no danger of showing, what’s in danger is the point at which the soft yearning bulge might plop up, almost out—Ella’s is conventionally concealed, you can see the rich delicious soft living valley and then the bulge of the cloth following the holy contours we all know—but Ruth’s is as if Ella was a stripteaser who started the act and Ruth went next step—pulled cloth down but only one end so that instead of one-fourth upper left of a breast showing (with valley) now we see three-fifths full upper breast with valley expanding—Ah those gorgeous breasts—I stand here among the religious dirty old men of the world, chewing gum, like them, with a horrible beating heart—I can hardly think or control myself—I even know this is infinitely more delicious than touching Ruth’s breast itself (though I’d do anything for the chance)—But more, more about the breast itself—all my life I’ve dreamed on breasts (and of course thighs, but now we’re talking of breasts, hold your Venus, we’re talking about Mars, and your water, we’re talking about milk)—the dirty magazines of boyhood become the religious publications of manhood—to stop joking—one pull on that cloth and a great breast plops out, that’s the thing that is holding me here and all these lechers, some of them ninety, holding us captive and especially because we know it’ll never happen, it’s only a picture, but IF IT DID!—If so, a magnificent bouncing jelly-like white-as-snow warm strange Ruth-personal breast with a nameless but revealing nipple which would tell us everything we need to know (the exact nipple will tell us more than Ruth’s entire life story, “Around the beauty parlors of Brooklyn during World War II a strange energetic young lady began to be noticeable to the characters who frequented the places afternoon and night and even to the casual visitors…”—the first glimpse of it and we’ve finally seen her soul, its perfection and its imperfection, its confession, its secret girlish shame, which is best of all what we want) and everything we’ve all our lives wondered about Ruth speaking of Ruth as a woman who’s come across our attention only through her fame, pixes, husbands, and if she complains it’s her fault, I didn’t ask her to have three-fifths of her living breast that I want to nudge between my lips photographed, she offered it herself and I’m sure God will reward her for doing it—Ah that breast! it is such a casual breast, it just went swimming with her, her hair’s wet, she’s cutting a cake on Orrin Wynn’s yacht, Edgar Bones the idiot is husbanding cutely at her side—her mouth is done up into what is supposed to be a smile but is really a great bit of desire and shuddering sensual bitterness (she’s really cutting the cake) and her teeth are like my teeth when I bring a little kitty’s nose next to mine—This pix is black and white, this breast is gray—there is more reality in gray for me (and for Cody too) because I was brought up in the balconies of B-movie theaters. Ah the holy contours all we men know—Now, not to leave that, but let’s turn to knees. Ella’s knees are showing—Ruth’s are under a towel. Now all we lechers turn our vast, rumbling attentions in a body but with no military music and no salute and no flag except the Cross and Bones to the knees of Ella Wynn—they’re crossed, which would be unfortunate except by so being a little lovely dimple was formed on the back of the uppermost knee—I mean under the leg (sweet smooth underleg like the belly of a warmblooded fish but much better). This dimple, which is just a crease between some back knee flesh and the inner bottom thigh smoothness is especially notable because it emphasizes as nothing else could the main feature which is the lowermost knee, the knee that’s crossed on—the great thing about that knee is the glossiness, indicative of the texture of that gal’s flesh and of the further textures inward from the glossiness (my heart beats again!) to the thigh areas, deeper, more dazzling, dizzier, like climbing a mountain, till the gardens of her soul are within earshot and you are eligible to look for her face along and among the mountains to see what expression it wears alongside the long beautiful hair in a big ribbon—we lechers by now really raping the poor girl whereas tough Ruthy didn’t give us half that chance and subdued us and we jumped on her friend in cowardly revenge. We glance at Orrin Wynn as though we’d known him forever and recognize him with a smile, that is, recognize that his eye is on the sparrow, i.e., Ruth’s tit, not on Edgar as you might think if you don’t look close and Ella unsuspecting of this is smiling at the cake knife although that in itself is strange and perhaps infinitely more sadistic than Ruth and her gritting teeth—but Ella generally is a sweet little thing and although we’ve all just raped her, at least threatened to do so, we don’t want to harm her. We also wonder if there have been orgies and switchovers in this foursome and earnestly hope so as we might hope, as an example, for World Peace.
The lurid big pictures of immense-thighed burlesk gals on corner newsstands make us hold up sidewalk traffic day and night. My next stop must be France (postcards on the boulevard?)—but further and later.
* * *
SO IT WAS AS THOUGH CODY POMERAY’S early life was haunted by the sooty girders and worn old black planks of railroad bridges behind warehouses, by cinder yards where great concentrations of cardboard crates that were a nuisance to foremen of factories became the sly opportunity of bums—the backplaces of what we call downtown, the nameless tunnels, alleys, sidings, platforms, ramps, ash heaps, miniature dumps, unofficial parking lots fit for murders, the filthy covered-with-rags plazas that you see at the foot of great redbrick chimneys—the same chimney that had bemused Cody on many a dreaming afternoon when he looked at it toppling forward as clouds upswept the air in readiness for the big disaster—it was as though these things had been the—(and of course many more, why list any further, and besides we shall come back on other levels and more exhaustively)—these things had been the necessary parts of his first universe, its furniture, just as the little rich boy in a blue playsuit in some swank suburb outside St. Louis stands, in November, beneath the bleak black branches, staring at a universe which is necessarily and unalterably furnished with things like half-timbered English style housefronts, circular wooded drives for avenue blocks, forests of birch, the wire fencing in back of Tudor garages, boxer dogs, bicycles, sleek autos reposant at dusk before the warm lights that shine behind the drapes of a Spanish style house worth twenty-eight thousand dollars bought by an insurance broker who cuts along the narrow redbrick downtown streets of St. Louis near the markets by day, where you can see the river between box factories, earning his living among the trappings of the poor and of bums of all kinds but is incapable of stretching his home bones anywhere twenty miles away, inland from the river and the unclean city in private parks, quiet neighborhoods—Cody’s life, with the coming of the suit and consequently the beginning of some kind of different adult existence that for instance reached its own maturity when he also acquired a winter topcoat from Watson or one of the others in the gang and that nameless gesture that men have, became his, when they reach for something in their pants pockets and flapshroud the coat away, elbows bent, head to one side, like a theater manager coming out at midnight in a hurry checking to see if the keys are all there. With the coming of the suit and this adult gesture, Cody’s life in Denver entered a second phase and this one had for its background, its prime focal goal, the place to which he was forever rushing, the place his father had only known as a bum in meek stumbling uplooking approach or had more vigorously known in his youth but that was Des Moines and long ago, nothing less and nothing more than the redbrick wall behind the red neons: it was everywhere in Denver where he went and everywhere in America all his life where he was. It was in the secret dusty place around the corner of the frontwall of the poolhall, up near the second-story beauty parlor windows there, actually in the alley or area between buildings no more than a foot wide or floored by anything but the most darkened debris of the city but it was illuminated by a nearby red neon and some from the poolhall below, it showed every furrow of the brick, it clicked sadly on and off with the lights—in the beauty parlor itself you could see the interior with its fathead shapes haunted by red and empty now, see through it in through the around-the-corner window that, like the wall, hid, as so many things in America on Main Streets and now even on bleak suburban streets that have chiropodists’ and lawyers’ offices near rectories and old houses with hooks over a defunct second-story door without stairs which is the old hayloft door and maybe a man in a roundpeak nineteenth-century hat was hanged from that hook, these things also hid behind the red neons of our frontward noticeable desperately advertised life. The new loneliness that came to Cody with the coming of a suit and a topcoat was the difference between sitting on an upturned bucket in the smoky exciting dumps of Saturday morning on Sante Fe Drive, near the unbelievably exciting crossing of the D. & R.G. railroad tracks that nudged a long smooth corridor through the lean and ricket of dumpbacks, junkpiles and hangbrowed fences for a solid mile, a place at least of wild playful promise where all you had to do was wear overalls (like the can jungle place My Man Godfrey wanted to go back to after he got his fill of Park Avenue in a tremendously Hollywoodian naïve Depression movie that was nevertheless naïvely true, the unspeakable visions of the individual), the railroad track that swooped from the smear of dumpsmokes in the blue morning air cleanly and swiftly to the mountains of the mist, the green banks of another El Dorado, another Colorado, which was a loneliness that could be diverted by the actions of one hundred interesting grimy junkmen laboring with tragic heavy importance among the skewered wrecks and rustpiles—the difference between this and standing in the middle of the winter night on a sidewalk that is not your home beneath cold red neons glowing as softly as if it was still summer but now on a redbrick wall which eschews a humid and perforated iciness of its own, corrupted, dank with winter, not the place to lean a lonely back and in spite of all this grimness inherent in it suggesting more than it ever could suggest in the summer and with infinite greater adult excitement than the dump a joy, but a joy so much stronger than the joy of the dump that it was like the man’s need for whiskey supplanting the boy thirst for orange soda and took as much trouble and years to develop, the joy of the downtown city night. Great sign posters set on top of low graveled roofs of bowling alleys and shining fiercely against the bare bald backs of windowless warehouses, or maybe filling the windowed eyes of a hotel with their sheens, the glitter and yet the hidden beyondish gloom of this drove Cody in his secretest mind as it has myself and most others to further penetrations into the interior streets, the canyons, the ways, so much like the direction music takes in the mind or even the undiscoverable flow of dream images that make dreaming a tragic mystery; and so seeking rushing all dreams into the heart of it, always the redbrick wall behind red neons, waiting. Something was there that Cody and I saw together in an alley in Chicago years later, when we parked a Cadillac limousine in an unobtrusive black corner, pointed it to the street; that Cody saw a thousand times in the walls of towns of Iowa, Virginia, or the San Joaquin Valley; something, too, that was namelessly related in his poor tortured consciousness to the part of the redbrick wall he had always seen from the smooth old waitingroom bench of the County Jail when his father had been arrested for drunkenness on Larimer Street probably with five or six others taken en masse from a warehouse ramp, waiting for his appearance before the judge to appeal to the court for some mete of mercy for his father, swearing he hadn’t drunk for a month before and soon making great childly speeches that sometimes astonished people and later was brought to the attention of juvenile authorities who come looking to aid Cody like the Beast to aid the Beauty: the brickwall, always dully glowing from dark red to gray bleak red as a neon somewhere flashed, seen through a little barred window on the inside wall and where calendars depicting Indian maids in the moonlight with beads and exposed breasts drove Cody to wonder about the world that spoke of beautiful piney islands and Indian love calls and Jeannette MacDonald yet had nothing to show for it but jailhouses, arrested fathers, distant moanings, clocks tocking, and the one spike-driven sorrow of that red wall besmirched with lights that were intended for the streets for official passersby, but hid something behind for some sad and dishonest reason faintly related to what his father sometimes complained about; and yet had the ability like any old brickwall of a factory if you put a white unloading light on it instead of red of shining as forlorn as brown snow.
Reaching into his pocket with that gesture, the topcoat flying behind him, see Cody hurrying into the heart of Denver with the same gleam in his eye you see on the fenders of shiny new automobiles just dusted out of that old house-light reflecting garage but now wink to the wild neon of Main Street; see him, sometimes in such a big hurry that it seemed the traffic light clicked green just for him and whichever buddy arm-in-arm with heads knocking in talk he sweeps along with, twinkling ‘round-corner in a vanish of heels, so they don’t have to stop at all but cut right along to the poolhall, levels of conversation to match the exciting joy, wham, bam, those voluminous talking-fogs whipping back like dialog balloons dissolving in wintry air, a sight (again) little Cody oft dug from that lonely Skylark winter window of his poor bumfather’s creaking in old chairs behind his watchpost dusty glass; maybe as he rushes a bus-waiting girl, (again), legs akimbo, watching him suddenly with that snaky sexy lovelike look and the kid’s saying to himself “So that’s what they been doin all this time the big guys and girls (damn, damn, look at that Cadillac beat the light!),” the girl standing under candy-striped late Saturday afternoon October five-and-ten awnings, with dark glasses, a regular highheel downtown Denver broad; see Cody Pomeray trying to hurry into the heart of the great Denver evening that to him will find its obvious focus in the pool-hall where sometimes the hour is so roaring that with the Tremont parlor backdoor open you can see a solid block of poolhall through the two joints like looking down an endless mirror all cuesticks, smoke, green; hustling to stab the heart of the night or be stabbed but always missing because it is not in the poolhall, or downtown further where the redbrick walls lead further, glowing from blackracked neons into unspeakable secret glittering centers where everything must be happening or at least give modified indication of where to go for it, show down what long dark lane and boulevard with its nameless forlorn corner (the Fox and Hunt Bar!) where a neon light hidden behind further buildings is sending an aura of invitation and calling men to come and make their mothlike approach (like the heroes of Dreiser whom he has hurtling like beetles against summer screendoors, against sad refinements and excitements in the huge dark of America, umalum, umalum), and instead the whole night and everything it’ll ever give anybody besides death and absolute loss is to be found twelve, thirteen feet above Cody’s head as he rushes all eyes into the poolhall, either with Watson the big Virgil of the Poolhall Night with whom he shares the same robe of refined dissipated excitement everyone else’s dumb about, the shark and his boy, the stars of loungey interviews at midnight, like Miles and Lee Konitz cutting into a bar together, or, say, Ike and Harry Truman, or me and my boy into the union hall three thousand miles from home, or alone hankering; twelve, thirteen feet up the redbrick wall and barely around the corner into the between-buildings alley, so tragic and hidden from the city, right there, the vision, what you get, what there is.
To emphasize that it’s Saturday night some people bring boxes of chocolate that they buy in poor beat drugstores that have bedpans and jockstraps in the window, thinking the ribbon, and the moonlit Indian maid with beads but this time (because dealing with ladies’ tastes and palates, not rough crotches of cops) no breast, makes it Saturday night truly; Saturday night, which makes it entirely different that, as you walk by a drugstore with nothing to do and maybe a glum lack of interest, you see an ad for chocolate candy in the window—those selfsame boxes that used to have even more ornate Indians on them and women with longer beads framed in silverer moonlight—even the names are Saturday night sad, “Page and Shaw,” “Schrafft,” etcetera and all this is as connected to the meaning of Saturday night as those old syphilis movies of the Twenties showing a couple all dolled in evening clothes rushing uptown in a mad glitter of lights to a party (where they get the clap or the syph and later, after Saturday night is over, they have a suicide pact in ordinary weeknight clothes—) (this was an actual pix I saw and it wasn’t a Thirties film because I saw it in the Thirties and even then, aged twelve, wondered about the oldness of the film). Candy in fancy boxes, chocolate, it’s the only thing a drugstore that sells nothing else to eat will sell, the serious drugstores without sodafountains sell chocolate candy; ice cream sodafountains, the fancy kinds that make their own ice cream and candy and have tile floor and jars of hard candy all spick and span and intricate like you might imagine old Vienna looked, they also sell boxed candy, have big displays of it, all brands and the boxes with their golden arrangement and ribbons and fancy lettering catch at my heart as I say with this unspeakable realization that it’s Saturday night—not only because the beau might tip his cap at the dismal door and present such a box, or because in a drugstore window otherwise made up of pans and rubber a lavender candy box sits humanly, sweetly, God-knows-whatly, dearly, dismally and the only person who’s aware of drugstores on Saturday night is necessarily alone and lonely, but because in the Saturday night darkness and glitter (the special kind that makes iron fire escapes of the sides of theaters particularly bleak) boxes of chocolate candy signify staying at home in spite of festivities everywhere so-called, signify the speechless yearning to reach a hand across the abyss and in gentle self indulgence like that of the opium man across town behind drawn shades plop rich chocolates one by one into the mouth, listening, I’d say, not to the Hit Parade but the Saturday night dance parade remote band-broadcasts most networks have (while the woman of the house is ironing the fresh fragrant wash), in your bathrobe and slippers, preferably Chinese style, with the funnies. But Saturday night is to be best found in the redbrick wall behind the neons, it’s now infinitely bleaker than ever, like the iron fire escapes at the blind wallsides of those great fat movie auditoriums that squat like frogs in businesslike real estate are so much bleaker on Saturday nights, they cast more hopeless shadows. Saturday night is when those things that haunt us beyond our speech and the formations of our thoughts suddenly wear a sad aspect that is crying to be seen and noticed all around and we can’t do anything about it and neither could Cody; and to this day he, older and after all this time, goes now haunted in the streets of Saturday night in the American city with his eyes torn out like Oedipus who sees all and sees nothing from the agony of having lived and lived and lived and still not knowing how to conjure from the pitiful world and the folks around some word of praise for something that makes him grateful and makes him cry but remains invisible, aloof, delinquent, complacent, not unkind but just dumb, the streets themselves, the things themselves of life and of American life, and the faces and hopes and attempts of the people themselves who with him in gnashing map of earth pronounce vowels and consonants around a nothing, they bite the air, there’s nothing to say because you can’t say what you know, it’s a void, a Demosthenes pebble would have to drop way long down to hit that kind of bottom. Sometimes way out of town, say miles out on East Colfax, Cody, waiting for a bus, or a ride, would see the distant rust glow of downtown neons and be so impatient to get there at once that with his chin lifted to his goal he would walk fast in such intense get-there preoccupation (in his topcoat pockets his fists pressed against his thighs for speed) he’d be like a man riding a wheel, a flat wood doll you hold in your hand and give the legs a blurry spin because miles from downtown was like the sudden tragedy I felt one Thanksgiving in Lowell when the family decided to go to the movies and though it was the biggest event that I could’ve wished for I said I’d stick to my regular Thursday night YMCA exercise gymn class and yet when I got to the Y steps, even before my father’s old Plymouth was vanishing in a wink of red light as exciting as the red neons up against the Kearney Square buildings and Chin Lee Restaurant five blocks down and around the corner of which wildly I knew the theater was glittering, I realized it was Thanksgiving and there was no gymn class (and so ran through shortcut railroad canal bridges among cardboard crates and mountains of millrags blue with dye, straight for the red walls of movie street as though, clutching my throat, only there I could ease the horror which had suddenly lifted me in the air in a dreamy realization that I was going to die), Cody feeling that way on lesser impulses most likely and maybe wasting his, dissipating his last dime on a wild promiscuous trolley ride that plummeted him in, and he ran to the poolhall, and nobody was there, it was closed for repairs or Thanksgiving, and always as he stood there on the sidewalk beneath the redbrick neon wall, thinking, unthinking, a cop cruiser came around the corner in a flash of evil two-toned black and white with shiny antenna and the growl of the radio and he turned away, he moved along, he had hurried for this and always for nothing more than this.
His father had never done anything but stare dumbly in alleys beneath windows of hotels that had red neons, in fact with that same grave careful floppyhat adventurous sorrow beneath the redbrick glow wall looking straight ahead with his eyes moist in the moon, but Cody was ambitious to conquer the world of men that existed up there in the shadows behind the swarming gloom in back of the neons that spread like brickdust softly exploding red and then dark again…and somewhere on the main drag a man hurrying across the street to serious business. When on rainy nights Cody happened to have fifteen cents for a bowl of noodle soup with rye bread and one pat of butter in some diner downtown, and sat there by the window with a stolen newspaper, and saw, through mediums and worlds of dark steel, concrete, and wetsplashed tar, through populations of parked cars beaded silver in the light from the diner and passing buses and Railway Express trucks and iron fences, through arches of nameless overpasses that for all he knew through the diner’s silver reflecting window were the overpasses of darkness and the night itself, when through all this, as in a dream suddenly fished from loving infancy, he saw, barely saw, two blocks away, the deep bloodred neons of some bar and restaurant winking against the distant brown-brick of its building with subsidiary blue moons of neons that said Sea food, Steaks, Chops, saw the thing agitating in otherwise gloomy city darkness more like the darkness he knew in the backass bridges and meatpacking porches of Wazee and the railroad tracks and agitating with a comfortable little message of joy to anybody who had the money or knew the people there to come on in and enjoy the shelter, the sea food, music, the waitresses, the hot hissing radiators, he wanted to go and be with it and go gabbling among humanities and not just meander in a blind chagrin like his Pa. It was like he wanted to penetrate and know the poolhall. Leaning his head on his hand at two o’clock of Monday morning in that diner and staring that neon, he thought, “And now, unlike Satnite when I came here with sixty-eight cents and had the wheatcake with sausages at thirty-five, and the fried onions with order at five, then the cream cheese sandwich at fifteen, and that gal with the marcelled hair in the green coat was making googoo eyes at me and I thought by gawrsh it was going to be one big dinger of a night and so and so but now, now, now, now and time has flown and rolled ah me and this pair of rubbers developed a hole sinst, now it’s Sunday night or should I say Monday morning (yawn) and now for me to cut over there and eat the blue chops only the ops of which I can see in blue thar with the gaspump hiding the ch and my rubbers leaking I go over that pattering shiny rain that ain’t interessed in my mother or me and never has to do with anything but where it falls and maybe I slide in oilslick and go off that high curb, jump over the puddle as only I can, on tiptoe, zoom across the middle island, zoom to the dry sidewalk along the gray wall with the bulbs and down through that part that I can’t see to that bar that starts town with a bloody light separatin this edge from general restaurants and bars of Denver as I go along, but here really if I’m going to die why do I get to feel so good and how come I feel so good so often anyhow, I don’t even figure with any exactness what my next shoes will be bought out of, it’s all fine and good to sit in a diner and enjoy soup and papers and looking out the window but son of a bitch goddamn if that coat hadn’t been given me I’d be freezin this winter and where the hell have they put my father with all their lousy systems of lopping and laying away people, I’ve got a long long ways to go before I get to that hard bed in Johnson’s buddy’s attic, and a climb to boot, and in the rain, and my eyes are hot, and I ain’t got a belt, and finished my soup and would like to eat sea food, steaks and shops of chops right now. What is all that brownness of light in the railroad station damn damn damn. There’s Denver, I always told Pa I wanted—he didn’t believe me when we had that friend with the printing shop and let us sleep on the cots and I seen those beautiful views of the city with lights shining full of movies and plays and lobsters flown in from New York, and pretty women with silk stockings tied by garters to their cunt hooks where I gotta go with my hand tomorrow night, he didn’t believe me when I predicted I’d be a big dispatching agent someday with a wife waiting for me where they have lit-up foyers and potted palm trees by the desk and upstairs you look out the window and there she is, the red light that says RESTAURANT, and the brick wall in back of it, and in blue SEAFOOD, STEAKS, CHOPS, and it’s raining and I got a wife and car and Watson is with me in a tuxedo because he just won the World’s title at billiards beating Willy Hoppe and we’re gonna go push that car and make tire tracks in the rain to the middle of town and eat all we want, talking to the Mayor in the lobby, passing by the boxoffice with a pass, sitting in the box of the theater the three of us like in Vienna, us leaning forward and her hanging back with a wrap and everything dark and great and after the curtain goes down they yell ‘Author! Author!’ I guess I’m the author, did that whole thing while selling in Chicago, I bow then I go out for a smoke on the iron balcony overlooking Denver and I see the whole town and all the red lights blue lights below me and I even see that place where me and Pa slept on the cots and I teold him I sure did tyell him but all he thyought about was other things.”
* * *
THEN ON THOSE MAD MYSTERIOUS gray afternoons when all of a sudden it was as though the Atlantic Ocean had swept its clouds over town and they had been further torn and tattered on the mountains and were swooping in a raw chill universe from all directions, screeching birds diving to see, occasional splutters of soft rain blowing upon the faces of people who stood at bus stops hugging their coats and packages to their bellies and not seeing their reflections in ruffled puddles at the curb—that kind of day, that’ll only know a rosy cloud at sundown when the sun will find its tortured way through masses and battles of fevered darkening matter—raw, dank, the wind going like a gong through your coat and also through your body—the wild woolly clouds hurrying no faster in the heavens above than the steam from the rail-yards hurrying over the fence and up the street and into town—fantastic, noisy, the kind of insanely excited day when suddenly at 2 P.M. you notice some places (say, nothing more than Haggerty’s washing machine distributor) have turned on their neons in the gray dark and men in topcoats and hats go rushing towards the redbrick walls and the Rathskellers of late dark-days, on those days Cody too was rushing, looking around to see where to rush, everything was hankering, pointing, leaping, arrowing towards some place in the mute gray mist of the wild city where, though the premature red neons of the afternoon were already turned on by busy absorbed office girls—Haggerty was standing there in his store with one hand holding the front of his coat down, the other reaching around and inside shroud of coat to pockets and down deep there, for money or keys, saying to them “Say wait, Sue—did I leave that box of samples in the Club McCoy last night or in the back of the car?”—outside his windows, which are gleaming red in the mad Denver afternoon, young assistants of state senators and pretty mink secretaries of 17th Street are rushing by and suddenly one pitiful raw ranch hand, to some nameless point that all the whole city twenty square miles of it squeezes and contracts in one speechless huge star-shaped bat-ribbed air nerve to locate and centralize—there, and there alone, we’ll find our chops and smoky talk of the most important dinnertime in Denver—but not only the most important, the one most reminding of the joy of the crib, the answer to all the countrified American crying in the wilds. “Yes, yes, oh yes indeed, yes siree, yes, yes.” Maybe poor Cody, collar up, feet a little damp because of the hole in his rubbers at the toe-end, would be walking along a block-long wire fence of a factory, the traffic bowling in the street all in the same direction, and ahead in the flying mist through steams and soots he saw the huge wonderful neon of a major hotel rising—this for the son of a man who’d been born in a little impoverished junction town in Missouri represented the thrilling unspeakable answer to all the wants of life, no more the log fence in the gray fog and the mountain of used cars—and he would think “Oh damn how delightful it’ll all be in a minute as soon as—say wait—” and he too reaching in that pocket—So now, a minute before gray becoming dusk, Cody stands in the doorway of the poolhall waiting for Watson, Buckle, Johnson, Evans, Jackoff, anything to come and unfold themselves, and he does not know, does not know, cannot know, even I don’t really know, and that thing twelve, thirteen feet over his head, that spot haunted red wall, what it is that makes the approaching night so exciting, so shivering, so all-fired what-where, so deep. It was years later before he found the answer in the little nameless second when, after meeting Joanna in a sodafountain and taking her to the Ouray Hotel, Tremont corner fifth floor room, and turning from his pants on the chair to go on with what he was saying to her his future wife as she spread her thighs experimentally on the faded pink bedcover, a beauteous creature of the first order with long ringlets and curls and only incidentally fifteen at this time he saw in the act of swinging his eyes from chair to bed a nameless red tint fading and flashing on the redbrick wall just outside the window, saw this in a fraction through the little dirty thin muslin curtain that billowed in the drafts of steam from the silver radiator which was also slightly roseate from the neon, the dirty sooty sill also almost rusty lit from the glow, a scrap of paper one hundred feet off the snowy ground suddenly swirling past in the January nightwind, the whole big flat window rattling, the neon coming and going on the brick, the poor hidden brick of America, the actual place that you must go if you must bang your head to bang it at all, the center of the grief and what Cody now saw and realized from all that time the center of the ecstasy.
* * *
SLIM BUCKLE WAS A GREAT BIG figure going down those Denver alleys between the rickety backs of houses that were completely suburban and respectable out front with lawns and sprinklers because the heat of the plains sun turns the grass brown, striding with bowed head in some kind of tremendous concentration of his own among the smoking incinerators, the brick ovens of Denver backyards that once you’ve seen them you wonder why they didn’t have them in your neighborhood they’re so exactly like home, they remind you of Saturday mornings when you were six and knew the day was young and blue just by looking over the fence through pale smokes of whoever it is is always burning something on Saturday morning (and hammering on nails in the afternoon). In fact Buckle went through these alleys (en route to the poolhall) with his hands in his pockets like Sad Sack but whistling like Genêt’s Alberto at his gayest, a way of walking and whistling when he was a little kid and scrabbled after others in a calm universe of his own that he carried around to wherever they wanted to go, spitting silently through his teeth and probably like Lousy over the waving grasses of afternoon in some occasion when the gang had fainted under a tree and was too lazy to play jackknife or call others over beyond the fence. Trotting along like this, calm, lovely, bemused, he approached the grownup gang as though he wasn’t six-foot-four at all.
* * *
FRISCO DREAMS, the most huge beautiful hill in the world with a broad Main Street with trolleys and activity on both sidewalks, a mighty swoop—as though Frisco was suddenly as big as New York, as though it had hills like Amsterdam from 125th to 140th but steeper and so white—
It had elements of a strange Chicago I’ve known, God knows pour-quoi Chicago, mais now to facts—Pop lived on that greatest white hill—at top it overlooks sea and even junction of Alameda and Frisco road near the sea to which one arrives after the rollies of Iowa and world-views of Colorado—
A lot of Fillmore in that big hill—Like heaven going up the thing on foot—the Chicagoan thing is the ferry to Oakland—Though I never took it and no ferries in Chi, it is the water—The new, latest Frisco hill was more downtown (that’s great joy of bighill, out, like N’s Robinson Street, in the white jewelry sunshiney part of town) new part had more bigcity gray and redbrick in it, there was an enormous dormitory-mine with a gymn on main level, like Orson Welles hall of mirrors in Frisco Park (Lady From Shanghai) and I walked, there was something over my head, balloon or pigeon, a vastened downtown Frisco and the one I in real life dug back of Embarcadero, old western warehouse firms—Why doth the Lord make me wonder in those places?—
A woman in a beat car on that gray hill—an infant—cobbles—it’s other side of town than Cody’s and my Pop’s white hill—unjoyous—connected with those salt mines—as though it was her, the baby, and jail for me—but much more than that because to the side were some of those doorstoops of Montreal and Brooklyn and some of my old relatives, Aunt Marie, Lynn, potted plants and everything’s waiting for me to understand it.
* * *
L’S BAR—I WAS OF COURSE so stoned I thought I was in Mexico in all those marvelous marijuana hallucinated nights when I didn’t even know where I was without some tremendous effort and sometimes actually didn’t as in case of Battleground movie house to which we arrived in a trance from a taxi wherein apparently some interest had absorbed us a million miles from either Mexico City or the movie—and incidentally activity that directly contributes to my Mexico City dreams, there were imageries, exactly in that neighborhood, a side street running parallel to Juarez but to the south and to the side, a place I walked in a dream but never really walked except nearby (or that is symbolically nearby) with Ike and Dave the night of the weed adventure—I believe an image which later became the bulwark of one of them of my dreams of MexCity was actually formed while riding, high, to Battleground in that taxi—
All this whole consciousness of cities as bigger versions of Lowell kicks as my father must have experienced them in his own raggly day began with Mexico—and it was because it so wondrously reminded me (in its simplicity, straightness) of Lowell (and French-Canadians). At Danny’s I got hi true, but just so as to say “Time hasn’t moved though of course I know it has”—and actually it was ten o’clock before I knew it. Walking forth from D’s the real high began—now let’s talk about high till daylight—after all, I’d not smoked for so long, or got hi, I was pure and not a dissipate—The highness first manifested itself in an exaggerated sense of the importance (mind you not the significance) of what I recounted—utter contempt for ordinary connectives, so that Danny wanted to have explanations to be conversive—I plunged into the bottom of my subject which was the origin of young guys who drink in Bowery at twenty and lose teeth but not muscles at twenty-five—origin was Lowell dump, where in North Carolina tea-dreams I also saw Cody and tried to write a “story” about it—and as I told everything swam in front of me, all the Centralville Lakeview dreams of the dump and along the dump and the brown nights and my father ignoring me again as I now ignore my own boy—and have to, as he had to—but when I was alone I met that man in hall with garbage, rode in dumb silence after “Gettin cold out!” but everything seemed self explanatory when he didn’t get off in lobby but continued to basement and I said “Oh, you’re going to the basement” and in that high “cheapness” I’ve noticed assuming that his silence had only been a menial form of humbling himself as though he was the janitor, not on speaking terms with guests where at first I’d dug him as snooty citizen. Assured by the basement I went out into cold night and cut (deep in thought of something till I crossed Seventh Avenue) then, as usual, turned to look at Danny’s window and imagined everybody in apartment which is so eternal, we’ve all seen it so many million times in death, everybody watching me, curling their lips “There he goes now, I’ve seen that one before, he always leaves drunk and stupid.” Up Greenwich Avenue I then go to meet Irwin and Josephine at San Remo’s, digging people in streets, stores, women’s jail, the coolness of the world in general as though it wasn’t l’Enfer at all, losing stretches of this in myself, popping back at Sixth Avenue to decide a glance at Waldorf then up Eighth Street and for this circling far to the right of my course and because of that and that only running smack into Irwin and Jo who didn’t seemed pleased and nobody’s pleased with me any more, I’m going to Hongkong, fuck ’em all.
In fact I felt the utter horror of having to be with them in my high, because they are evil, both of ’em.
We somehow got to L’s bar and I didn’t know where it was—I asked twice, they said Thompson Street, it meant nothing to me except with tremendous effort trying to recall Josh Hay (who’d lived on Thompson) in another city a million miles away just as the “me” that slept behind the outdoor ad sign in Asbury Park in 1943 and many others before and after have no relation to the “me” of now; so L’s bar was located in heaven, or anyway in the world and madly—on a blue street in fact, powerfully reminiscent of the location of Las Brujas nightclub in MexCity on its sidestreet off Letran and with the same Eternity. This location is like seeing, for the first time, a great and beautiful inevitable face, a face that couldn’t have failed to exist. It was a Les bar and not only that the coolest and best in New York—Irwin said “They’re all kind in here, it’s not a wild dike fight hole”—and it was so, quiet, cocktailish, the jukebox blowing the finest softest tenderest records (Frank Sinatra’s “April in Paris,” Tony Bennett’s “Blue Velvet”) for these little gals some of them gorgeous had refined taste and because women love love, women who love with women if only for a fling are the most (though this still depends on spirituality) loving and understanding of love and hungup on love in all creation—bah.
* * *
IN PUEBLO, COLORADO in the middle of the winter Cody sat in a lunch-cart at three o’clock in the morning in the middle of the poor unhappy thing it is to be wanted by the police in America or at least in the night (slapping dime down on counter like killing a fly with hand)—America, the word, the sound is the sound of my unhappiness, the pronunciation of my beat and stupid grief—my happiness has no such name as America, it has a more personal smaller more tittering secret name—America is being wanted by the police, pursued across Kentucky and Ohio, sleeping with the stockyard rats and howling tin shingles of gloomy hideaway silos, is the picture of an axe in True Detective Magazine, is the impersonal nighttime at crossings and junctions where everybody looks both ways, four ways, nobody cares—America is where you’re not even allowed to cry for yourself—It’s where Greeks try hard to be accepted and sometimes they’re Maltese or from Cyprus—America is what laid on Cody Pomeray’s soul the onus and the stigma—that in the form of a big plainclothes man beat the shit out of him in a backroom till he talked about something which isn’t even important any more—America (TEENAGE DOPE SEX CAR RING!!) is also the red neon and the thighs in the cheap motel—It’s where at night the staggering drunks began to appear like cockroaches when the bars close—It is where people, people, people are weeping and chewing their lips in bars as well as lone beds and masturbating in a million ways in every hiding hole you can find in the dark—It has evil roads behind gas tanks where murderous dogs snarl from behind wire fences and cruisers suddenly leap out like getaway cars but from a crime more secret, more baneful than words can tell—It is where Cody Pomeray learned that people aren’t good, they want to be bad—where he learned they want to cringe and beat, and snarl is the name of their lovemaking—America made bones of a young boy’s face and took dark paints and made hollows around his eyes, and made his cheeks sink in pallid paste and grew furrows on a marble front and transformed the eager wishfulness into the thicklipped silent wisdom of saying nothing, not even to yourself in the middle of the goddamn night—the click of coffee saucers in the poor poor night—Someone’s gurgling work at a lunchcart dishpan (in bleakhowl Colorado voids for nothing)—Ah and nobody cares but the heart in the middle of US that will reappear when the salesmen all die. America’s a lonely crockashit.
It’s where the miserable fat corner newsstand midget sleeps in the lunchcart with a face that looks as if it had been repeatedly beaten on the sidewalk whereon he works—Where ferret-faced hipsters who may be part-time ushers are also lushworkers and half queer and hang around undetermined—Where people wait, wait, poor married couples sleep on each other’s shoulders on worn brown benches while the nameless blowers and air conditioners and motors of America rumble in the dead night—Where Negroes, so drunk, so raw, so tired, lean black cheeks on the hard arms of benches and sleep with pendant brown hands and pouting lips the same as they were in some moonlit Alabama shack when they were little like Pic or some Jamaica, New York nigger cottage with pickaninny ricket fence and sheepdogs and Satnite busy-cars street of lights and around-the-corner glitter and suggestion of good times in tall well-dressed black men walking gravely thither—Where the young worker in brown corduroys, old Army shoes, gas station cap and two-toned “gang” jacket of a decade ago now the faded brown of a nightshift worker dozes head down at the trolley stop with his right hand palm-up as if to receive from the night—the other hand hanging, strong, firm, like Mike, pathetic, made tragic by unavoidable circumstance—the hand like a beggar’s upheld, with the fingers forming a suggestion of what he deserves and desires to receive, shaping the alms, thumb almost touching fingertips, as though on the tip of the tongue he’s about to say in sleep and with that gesture what he couldn’t say awake “Why have you taken this away from me, that I can’t draw my breath in the peace and sweetness of my own bed but here in these dull and nameless rags on this humbling shelf I have to sit waiting for the wheels to roll” and further—“I don’t want to show my hand but in sleep I’m helpless to straighten it up, yet take this opportunity to see my plea, I’m alone, I’m sick, I’m dying” (a groan from another sleeper and one that has so little to do with a waiting room, rather with a dying room, sickroom, operating room, battlefield, doom’s gate)—“see my hand uptipped, learn the secret of my heart, give me the thing, give me your hand, take me to the safe place, be kind, be nice, smile; I’m too tired now of everything else, I’ve had enough, I give up, I quit, I want to go home, take me home O brother in the night, take me home, lock me in safe—take me to where there is no home, all is peace and amity, to the place that never should have been or known about, to the family of life—My mother, my father, my sister, my wife and you my brother and you my friend—take me to the family which is not—but no hope, no hope, no hope, I wake up and I’d give a million dollars to be in my bed, O Lord save me.” There’s nothing in this speculation and delirious sleep—I hear the click of a newcomer’s heels, the litany of voices, the doors squeeking—
* * *
NOW THAT IT’S ACTUALLY TIME to leave home and go to the last coast—across the mist and cold—I’m packing—it’s only at this very moment as I sit to mourn this terrible night in my life whether I’m Duluoz or whoever I am that I realize why Cody didn’t write in answer to that foolish letter, it was because I mentioned Josephine for his couch on the same page that I scribbled a letter to his wife, why last summer he’d worked out an elaborate code for talking about Josephine, it was at the head of the letter Dear Cody (she was coming) or just Cody (she wasn’t). But do they suppose that I’m evil or mean to do harm? I’ve finally become so distracted that it’s going to be only with the greatest struggle that I’ll be able to find out who I am in the coming months in the hell and gone of the world at the risk of losing my mind forever. Who would ever have thought that Duluoz, poor Duluoz who was after all just a nineteen-year-old kid with a sense of exile when most other guys are simply brooding in early bars, that Duluoz would come to lose his mind. No, I’ve got to live—and Metkovich today said his father was joyful at seventy-five and his own father had lived to one-o-nine, 109, because of an earthy Yugoslavian will to live and if, he said, we didn’t hustle to understand what that meant we were liable to die—of emotional congestion, poor American folly, fear and self-horror. Many many times tonight I cry in my wandering soul “Oh why didn’t my father live?” I look at the galleys of H from the C I threw away in the poor football pennant basket my mother bought me for the gay October afternoons of 1950 upstairs (don’t you realize what upstairs means, I’m exiled and she’s exiled to this horrible downstairs because of my own stupidity that the ghost of my father never warned or curbed, we have half the room we used to have, same rent, more problems, have to listen to the sounds of the new tenants upstairs as if in hell listening to the upper sounds of heaven, they are a middleaged particularly materialistic complaining New York couple, one time the lady had me help park her car when she got stuck on the big tree out front that figures in the drama of my stupidity because it was my lovely summertree of 1950 T-reveries which led to fear, to her, to not refusing to move from upstairs with her leaving my mother alone and subsequently weeping to move to South, to Nin’s, O when will the troubles of this cursed family end, why were we all made to totter in the dark like slaves while other lesser families shit in the light and moon over their own dumb asshole ignorant emptiness, why were the wild dark Duluozes cursed and especially the ones like Emil and Michel?—that tree—that couple upstairs—and having finally reconciled myself to downstairs after the horrors and pains of late September after her first insult, working and earning a few bucks and getting a bed into this room and oiling my machine and yet suddenly inexplicably getting drunk too often and abandoning Rachel and Janie Thaw for that bully Josephine, it all began October 25 which was also the great moment of discovering my soul, yet reconciled to downstairs as a cute cozy place only now to find myself hounded to the end and have to pack and leave and head for the hell and gone even from the desk I only finished repairing three days ago and which was going to be the scene of studies and the whole vast ordered universe of my life which I loved, I have to, go, like a fugitive, staggering again in the dark just like that dream of me and Pa and Ma, never Nin, staggering with few belongings on a dark road from New Haven back to home and our cats following us about to be run over by cars with their blinding headlights coming at us on the highway, I have to pack, clear completely so as to comply with evil hidden wishes of this world, have nowhere to go except the water, the terrible terrible dark sea water, leaving behind the fields of life and my mother the great and final protector of my life and soul who sleeps or maybe doesn’t in the next room right now, O who can I pray to for mercy, I prayed to my Pop to make her happy and that’s a futile thing to ask—there she lies, when I go for coffee I hear her waking, it’s a bad night for her too, for this is the night I came home and said “I’d better leave once and for all, it’s the only way to save trouble all around,” and so in effect, “This is my last night in your house, mother, that you so lovingly prepared for me yet how could you foresee or even prevent my evil which precipitated its own evils, and the first evil was not putting her down when I first realized I didn’t love or like her at all eight days before our marriage”—O dull clown. And now to make up for the botch of my days I think I can create a great universe and of course I can—) as I say, I look at the H from the C galleys in the basket and I remember my Pop the printer and how he’d have treasured them and never allowed me to throw them away. Maybe I’m throwing away my life there but I swear I’m not—This night is so tortured it’s unthinkable—I’ll come back and catch it all on sober gray mornings of the sea, of Alaska, of South America, of Javanese cities. I’m in love with my life and I’m sticking to it—I mean the belief in it. I may be a distracted wretch but I am still a man and I know how to fight and survive, I have before. Gods, if not help me, if instead barb me, be careful of me, I can catch thunderbolts and pull you down and have done it before. Adieu!
* * *
AND NOW LOOK, IN 1943 I dug the meaning of the sea when I called it my brother, the sea is my brother—Now it’s up to tomorrow if I go at once—on the great ship, Den’s round-the-world cargo ship, my destiny—I want to watch along the Nile and the Ganges—In any case now I am alone. Sin is sinking in my bones and making me older and wiser. But I’m only wiser to the wise men—my children grieve for me. Weep for me, weep for anybody, weep for the poor dumbfucks of this world—weep for the waves—weep, weep—now my eyes begin a voyage from which I am going to return resurrected and huge and silent. So I packed all night, just desk papers, and that’s the horrible sad thing—my dark glasses of the hospital, okay (given to me by jovial veterans’ committees); my reading glasses twelve dollars when I sold my book; my machine shrouded now for good, I can’t take it with me, I remember the day it came home on Sarah Avenue when Pop lost his business and I started right in with stories about Bob Chase owner of the New York Chevies and typed up the summer league (Gulf, Tydol, those namelessly sunlit names on purpose, Texaco, refinements of sunlight in each one, dissipating in the refinement of sunlight in the entire operation of the league); that machine, that the poor spastic flayed, and now everybody knows it from H from the C, that machine my father himself wrote on, editorials, letters (the trouble with life is that it has its own laws and controls the souls of men without regard for their least wish, and this is slavery); my Harcourt ad that Deni Bleu proudly wants and will see tomorrow (and how will Deni receive me now?); my little erasers, the round one which I’ll bring, the soft straight one which I’ll leave, all this matters to me like State, it’s vaster than Assemblies; the poor pipe (Pop’s) and pipe rack I can never use again, which is reminder of change (no more smokes) more than anything else in my tragic coffin of a desk tonight: O the child of the Phebe livingroom with his first vision of the marbles, did he come to live just to be buried? (this desk actually an old Faulknerian desk from a Southern mansion, Nin and Luke birthday gift 1950, when birthdays were birthdays and not anniversaries of guilt and culpritude); the sales slip, Ma had just bought me new crepesole shoes for home here and now I have to lay them down on foreign ground when she had intended them for Radio City or her first pitiful sight of U.N. building; Lord please protect your tender lambs! if you can’t do that then bless them, bless them—my blue Eversharp pencil also from hospital, with which I started that great diary that temporarily saved me and started the international spectral and now lost Duluoz of the Dolours; a bundle of recent letters, tied, with pathetic messages from the good hearts of the world including June and it’s as though I was battling black evil birds tonight and not anything human, something that the Devil sends, not the world, and the great black bird broods outside my window in the high dark night waiting to enfold me when I leave the house tomorrow only I’m going to dodge it successfully by sheer animalism and ability and even exhilaration, so goodnight—
And to go on and I meant to tell everything about my departure, only way to do it one by one the haunting things of this breathing life—Roy Redman of Clyde Lines, who is a curly colored guy working as attendant at Kingsbridge V.A. Hospital and reminds me not powerfully etc. but exactly of my sister in his every bemused method of, say, watching television, forgetting what you just said, the same lips too (nothing feminine ’bout him at all and especially nothing Uncle Tom Negro) and who was one of the hardtime organizers of the N.M.U. back in the Depression when seamen were bums to be attacked by cops on old inky waterfronts of early Pathé Newsreels and you saw clubs flying, well you saw this Roy Redman, he signs his name “Red” with quotes, and in parenthesis, like this, (Clyde Line)—he wrote me a letter of introduction to the VP-president of N.M.U., beginning “This will serve to introduce to you a very good friend of mine, Jack L. Duluoz. I will consider it a personal favor to me if you can see your way clear to extend any courtesy or consideration within your power to him. Please accept my good wishes and in memory of old times together, thank you, Yrs. very truly ‘Red’ Redman (Clyde Line)”—this courtly letter which is one of my greatest possessions may breeze me through the N.M.U. at a crucial moment tomorrow or Thursday—and it rings exactly the way he talks, slow, grave, certain, bemused, gum chewing. Everybody believed and trusted in Red at the hospital, just to see him sometimes you’d shiver joyfully in your chest especially if it was night and the fights were coming on in Television and everybody sat around, with Red, only for a moment off work, saying, “Who’s oan tab to-night?” with that very nameless drawl that he developed and took with him probably round the world ten times in the great night of ships and men that I will love if it’s full of Reds—and one dewy morning I observed him in a new light from the window of my ward by watching not him but other colored men coming in to work where they lost their Negro street personalities and became attendants, trying to imagine Red on the street in Harlem or wherever or even in Ralph Cooper’s hip nightclub, how he would carry himself in that great challenging parade which is the American Negro Sidewalk of the World. So there’s that letter of intro—and I’m taking with me the little tiny hand-sized Bible I stole from that Fourth Avenue bookstore in the used religious book section at the back because I thought the guy was a cheat in his bargainings with me over the exchange of new textbooks for used books, the Bible that I read only once or twice the print is so small and the big occasion was in Mexico City when in the incredibly warm glow of my lovely checker-cloth beside the soft goof lovely bed, well fed with midnight cheeseburgers from the Insurgentes lunchroom or just newly high, sitting on the edge of the bed for a moment before the sleeps that in Mex-City on T were never equaled in sheer sweetness and LOVE except on sleeping pills recently at Kingsbridge (in fact I dug Red Redman on goofballs, that is, just watched his face, many anight before I fell asleep in fleece), I was on that bed-edge maybe with a smidgin of sweet vermouth, maybe Sherman was high in his room or gone, but I happened to pick up this midget New Testament Bible and in my huge-hearted state of high love I saw the great words (at eight thousand feet above sea level!) and was so amazed with almost every sentence or that is line I saw that I felt attacked by words, overtaken by great blows of consciousness I should have absorbed a long time ago, realizations of Jesus I’d never dared before, Jesus as a prophet and his political necessities and positions as a prophet, including charmed and awed interpenetrations of the mystery of the Bible and especially of ancient Jewish need in rote, till I fell asleep, in balms, as I can no longer do for I’m now a man of the wide wide water and of strife, but then I thought about the fleecy lulls of the Eternal Lamb and so perhaps one stormy night in the Indian Ocean that I read about in old Argosy magazines of 1933 when I thought the sea had shrouds and heroes only, I’ll look at my little hand Bible, holding it over my face on the bunk, and a newer further diving into the awfulness and beauty of the Great Bible will happen to me—(Behold, your house is left unto you desolate)—Oh so!—I’m taking that with me, and the little tattered red French dictionary sitting under it in my poor rolltop cubbyholes, I’ll need it in Marseilles and Le Havre and Algiers and to read Genêt—What kind of journey is the life of a human being that it has a beginning but not an end?—and that it gets worse and worse and darker all the time till time disappears?
And for Den I have a surprise, his white silk scarf that he forgot at Lionel’s that night last Spring when Lionel and I imitated Alistair Sims for the girls from the office, Janie, Alice, Lola, and the great young kid Sid, and Den showed up with that sour seaman whom I am going to see tomorrow and in fact called three times in the past two days always fearful of what he really thinks of me and actually what I’ve got to do is not care what he thinks and indicate that to him somehow or he will undoubtedly try to hip Deni wrong to me, though because my lot is now Deni’s if we sail together or even later the seaman his friend is a friend of mine, “any friend” etc. I’m going to present Den his scarf. O reader just follow me blindly into the hell and gone! And for blazing sea days I’m bringing my new dark glasses in their white plastic case, the glasses I won at the hospital in the carnival where you couldn’t lose and I haven’t used them much yet and still feel almost guilty (everything belongs to me because I am poor) when I consider that I flubbed off since the hospital when I didn’t have to as the calm immortal presence of those glasses indicate, glasses put together by careful workmen using parts gravely manufactured, and why does it reach my destructive hands?, I’m not taking my brown writing board that I found in a waste can here in Richmond last year on a walk—nor my briefcase, what do I need now with a briefcase!!!
* * *
EN ROUTE TO STATEN ISLAND in the rainy dawn I walk rapidly on balls of my feet like a Cody heading for work and remembering Washington 1942 and other dawns when workmen stand in doorways, nothing else could have reminded me of a special series of going to work hot-eyes dawn and general strange manly sensation—passed Crossbay Boulevard a rainy green alley towards the sea, only saw it last minute looking up from Daily News, Ah me—Oh Lord—Now the gray rooftops of Brooklyn as I head for the ship that has been flying towards me in the night all night—Dawn lights in the kitchens of raw rickety outer Brooklyn—We make the same big famous curve (on El) that I first made June 1943 at a time when, twenty-one, I should have kept on going to sea, at a time when I thought I was old and had syphilis (warts)—When Pop was alive and would have been proud of my manly seagoing which only now almost nine terrible years later I acknowledge to his grave which is also under this great rain that extends in mist to the tragic rainfields of Nashua where my brother’s lost wails sleep and new autos roll in the slick road that I saw the day of his funeral 1926, year of Cody’s birth—The big ship at eight is due to be warped in at Pier 12 Army Base, the Pres. Adams—Tall, French, sad, whooping Deni Bleu will be standing among tangles of wires in the engine room when they inform him that chagrined J. D. waits outside four years too late after our agreements of 1947 in the fog and dark of Marin County that I’ll never forget and haven’t even begun to penetrate—(that’s for memory)—Brooklyn—a few scuddy clouds from the sea, a whip of rain, a smoke and all the beauteous, bottom-of-the-tank feeling of real life to which I now return amen.
* * *
STATEN ISLAND, six million things inundating my brain—Sitting in the little diner outside Army Base, watching sharp Negro cats with suitcases, and Puerto Ricans with coats, taking quick shot drinks at bar, who’re cutting off the ship for kicks, maybe the Adams—a gray exciting Atlantic day again but now a wild one connecting me namelessly with Oakland and the time I went thereon Bay Bridge train for a reason I can’t remember—also when I was with Den, at Golden Gate track, back across the land to here, Staten Island, to which I just arrived in the wild ferry where I chatted with a tanker seaman and dug planks and flotsam in water remembering the danger I faced foolishly in summer 1943 when I dove off the stern of the George S. Weems to keep cool—the same waters where corpses floated—a ferry in the grayness making you realize what a mad mind Jack London had (strictly as a guy)—sitting in the window of diner across gate to make sure Den doesn’t slip into New York—the Puerto Rican left, headed for two days of kicks in East Harlem fucking gone girls on Oriental bedcovers and eating yellow rice and beans con polio, the colored guy he’ll whoop at the Palm Café, these guys the sharpest workers in the world, more, say, than Cody, because traveling, and I am here in same moodway as Cody, fast, talk to everybody, no “dignity,” speed, kicks (I only know, that is, I strictly know what I know and that’s why sketching is not for my secret thoughts—my own complete life, an endless contemplation, is so interesting, I love it so, it is vast, goes everywhere—) And this gray day as I wait and pray for that world ship is the same that gloomily unfolded in Ozone Park and Brooklyn as I came over—but now it has gulls, wild hungers, voices of workers, figures crossing rainy supply dumps with umbrellas, black wires, poles, masts of ships, black forms of all kinds, a call from across the world and from the great gray mist of America and American things and wild smoke of boy headed for prepschool but so much more.
* * *
BROWN HALLS OF MEN—now by God many hours and events later I am finally entrenched in the vision that I re-discovered my soul with, the “crowded events of men” only now it’s me, myself smack in it—at the moment, flush because I’m going to start earning within a matter of hours I’m having a huge fifteen cent beer in a bar off the waterfront but a brown businessman’s bar and at the hem of the financial district with Emil-like fathers and men drinking at long bar—I say “brown” bar not in jest, red neons or pink ones too shine in the smoke and reflect off dark browned panels, the beer is brown, tabletops, the lights are white but embrowned, the tile floor too (same mosaics as the barbershop in which I had visions of Cody staring). Now what I’m going to do is this—think things over one by one, blowing on the visions of them and also excitedly discussing them as if with friends as I did last night joyously drunk in the West End (see actually I’m not old and sick at all but the maddest liver in the world right now as well as the best watcher and that’s no sneezing thing)—signs for Guinness Stout are namelessly brown—I’m sitting in the backroom so as to think but I’m in the whole brown bar and one of the men—All day I’ve been amazed by the fact that I’m a man and have the right to work for a living and spend my money as I see fit—I guess I’m finally growing up—amazed with for instance the union meeting in the brown hall of Marine Cooks and Stewards especially the big mad colored cat cook who got up and blew a crazy speech that was like a tenor horn in its wild jump and pitches but of course compared to other speeches infinitely more real and joyous especially when he kept saying “Frisco, Frisco” and that is my mad dream, I want (I’ll do anything) to be on a ship that sails out of Frisco that supra-marvelous city of brown bars and smoke and men and S.I.U. white-capped seamen’s halls and Cody and Buckle, the principals of the Denver poolhall, and Frisco pool-halls themselves, the whole wild world of men in crazy smoky places including the M.C.S. Puerto Ricans who take us back past Adam and Eve to meetingplaces of the great Latin night that I dug in MexCity—Now, I’m going to be interested in these things all my life but in order to really involve myself as a man on the other level of man-to-man communication I’m also going to talk about these things with people if I can, like for instance Deni’s beautiful story last night about the assistant electrician who got off the Adams and is now replaced by wonderful goodnatured simple Joe-like guy (a few beers gives a man the power to think like I’m doing but too many robs you of the rest)—I’m going to talk about these things with guys but the main thing I suppose will be this lifelong monologue which is begun in my mind—lifelong complete contemplation—what else on earth do I really know unless I’m depriving myself of kinds of knowledge that would bring out those qualities in me which are most valuable to others; not me, although I keep thinking what’s good for me is equally good for any of my intelligent friends—Last night in the West End Bar was mad, (I can’t think fast enough) (do need a recorder, will buy one at once when the Adams hits New York next March then I could keep the most complete record in the world which in itself could be divided into twenty massive and pretty interesting volumes of tapes describing activities everywhere and excitements and thoughts of mad valuable me and it would really have a shape but a crazy big shape yet just as logical as a novel by Proust because I do keep harkening back though I might be nervous on the mike and even tell too much). These two days—well first, Deni did come out to meet me (after those last thoughts in the lunchcart across the wire fence, recall?) (now hear this Jack: the S.S. Pres. Adams has red lifesavers on a white rail, at night the water is dark behind them as you look from an eventful cabin of smoke, drink and talk through the porthole, and the lifesavers say San Francisco against these dark piers of the world, for Frisco and as I say about that Negro cook, is really the port of ports and for this therefore I’m almost ready to decide to sail at least one four-month run on deck, as ordinary seaman, though I have a job waiting for me in the morning as bedroom steward on another ship, West Coast company but bound for France)—Now events of this moment are so mad that of course I can’t keep up but worse they’re as though they were fond memories that from my peaceful hacienda or Proust-bed I was trying to recall in toto but couldn’t because like the real world so vast, so delugingly vast, I wish God had made me vaster myself—I wish I had ten personalities, one hundred golden brains, far more ports than are ports, more energy than the river, but I must struggle to live it all, and on foot, and in these little crepesole shoes, ALL of it, or give up completely. Now, outside this bar is a little park, I shall sit there, high (on myself) watching the last of the Wall Street blue lights in high windows, remembering the dream of me as a seaman walking right by these nameless lights where a man bends over a blueprint to visit a girl that I fuck, and actually I did that exact thing in 1944 when getting my Coast Guard pass for the run to Italy on the Holt Johnson and was embedding my beautiful prick in the beautiful soft, wet between-legs slam of Cecily Wayne and coming with a bulging head. Now life is great and tremendous and beautiful; here at twenty-nine I feel like an old sick man; but time has come for me to build myself up again; and I will; and I am happy for the first time in a long time. Picked up my last sixteen dollars at work today, phooey. I can make one run round the world on the Adams as O.S. deck (the same dark ship that to me came flying in the night like Blake’s worm) and then somehow, in Frisco port, switch to messman if I can, if not, switch to mess on another ship. The true story of merchant seamen is not only their drunks in ports, and adventures, and their work, but the huge universe of their complicated conversations in Union Halls about ships in, ships out, papers, ferries, validations, dues, wives, beefs, passes, tricks, being late, being early, you know. (more later on that)—
But HOW am I going to keep my mind filled like this and incidentally also talk about everything with everybody first of which is Deni—by sober energies in the gray morning off gray Seattle.
O BROOKLYN, Brooklyn
where I have lived
all these years
Did they build a bridge
straight into your heart
And past that spectral
stupid Squibb
Raise airs of rosy night
all for nothing?
but now to Brooklyn, this is like the night I watched Boston Harbor, same situation, and same distant lights but New York, vaster, seaward, with spectral rosy Brooklyn across the way but now I’m stuttering like Tony—
O sad night—O waterfront!
* * *
PIER 9, the Pres. Adams is my ship of destiny, it must be, I keep knowing everything about it ahead of time—I’m waiting herein New Jersey before it’s even arrived and I know that a mountain of Four Roses whiskey is going on the Pres. A. to Yokohama and glassware to Hong Kong and machinery to Frisco and other things to Singapore, Kobe, Manila where I suppose further is to be picked up for the Venices and Triestes of the return swing round the world—but more of this later, i.e., the cargo, the shed at Pier 9, the enormous Erie railyard of the world, the truck ramps. Just now, in the Erie railroad waiting room (same railroad that had such a rainy wilderness sound when that Old Ghost of the Susquehanna listed it among all the others in Harrisburg Peeay and the actual stops of which the announcer with a W. C. Fields lilt is now announcing but all the little New Jersey stops with names like Arlington and Montclair, not interesting wild names like Erie itself)—here in the station on a bench with arms I suppose to prevent bums from stretching out, I took a nap after calling Blackie, but of Blackie in a second. In my nap-waking I suddenly remembered that beautiful whore from Washington Mildred who stayed at Danny’s with sixty-year-old Madame Eileen that I screwed all night, and the morning Mildred came back from a night of hotel fucking with the rich strange millionaire guy from Vermont and took off her clothes, sat in the chair in her slip as I watched from Eileen’s couch (smoking and just having had a morning marijuana forced on me by Danny) lifted up the slip, which was black, grabbed her own cunt which Danny says is the greatest in the world because it squeezes your cock like a soft fist, and said “Old raunce need a ride.” If it hadn’t been for that T which only allowed me to goof and stare I would have done either of two things as I look back on it from my bench here in the Erie Railroad waiting for the Singapore-bound President Adams and my meet with Blackie the Bosun for my last chance to get on board the dark ship of destiny—I would have said to Eileen who’s her madame and old buddy, “Eileen fix me up with Mildred,” loud, with their peals of laffter rising, or I would have kneeled at Mildred’s feet and said “If you stroke that pussy too much it’ll start purring.” Now why in the fuck didn’t I do that!—how could I have passed up such a piece of ass!—what effeminacy, what narcolepsy has come over me from overstaying my “leave in Manhattan” from 1943 or even 1944 or worse 1939—a cunt like that and then we would have fucked sweetly in Danny’s red bedroom, I would have said “O my God what a perfect saddle” and she’d have said “Iffff, oooo, drive it in daddy” and don’t you think I would?—with old sinister Eileen, naked, sixty, white all over, tall, bellied but well breasted, watching closely every movement of interlocked limbs and with a look like that look of madames in dirty books (in fact we’d been lookin at dirty books all morning, photos of Paris 1910 the best one being a guy in spats and hat ramming his finger into a woman’s cunt as he bends her back, dress up, over an ironing board), that careful heavy-lidded halfsmiling half snaky look of lecherous voyeurs in rooms so sensual you can come just by looking at them. So I vow to hit Washington next go round the world (if I get on the Adams and if I don’t all this waiting will have ironic uselessness although I will be managing to get round the world in a less direct way, ship by ship willynilly) and look up Eileen and Mildred, dig gone whorehouses of congressmen, fuck, eat, drink and see my former landlord and maybe even introduce Mildred to him just for kicks and as if I was pimping so as to surprise him and make him think that’s how I get my dough because he would tell her whatever he knew about me. These were my thoughts as I woke from this refreshing little nap and I needed it. Last night at home I talked with Ma, promised to take her to a show and dinner (I pick Sweets for this) before I leave (if I can) and hit sack at eleven, woke up at four restlessly, hurried to Jersey City in a long foolish ride on the E train with those miserable whitecollar Queens commuters who swoon in stuffy trains not only going but coming from work, five days a week, all for comfort and habit while I endure it only once (it was my very first morning ride on the citybound E, and this after two and half years in Richmond Hill) for the sake of Singapore—then, at Chambers Street, I dashed out to hit the nine o’clock call in Marine Cooks & Stewards and there was no Adams job so I dashed back, hit the Tube, got off at Exchange Place, mistake, re-routed in a complication of tokens and refund’s with refund slips, elevators, ramps, got off at Erie Station, followed signs through the waiting room halls to the footbridge that’s just like the one in This Gun For Hire with Alan Ladd (a pix incidentally that I saw the afternoon before I signed on for Arctic Greenland in 1942, when I lay in the grass of Boston Common thinking of death because then it was torpedoes and war and certainly no Singapore except that Duluoz that same year earlier made mention of it in his smoky newspaper office), a footbridge over a solid halfmile of (almost) tracks with boxcars that Alan Ladd jumped into and are from all over the raw American land lined up facing North River with all its barges, tugs, piers, smoke and ships and the one huge green shed of the American President Lines that says “Far East” on it, boxcars that say “Route of the Phoebe Snow” and “Canadian Pacific” and remind me of Cody, his old man, Nebraska, gray day in Denver right now and raw men with big hands standing under foggy trees right now in the Far West or just soogeeing Railway Express cars in the railyards of Portland, Oregon or Kansas (as I think this, to my left is a big sign the kind that advertises plays and Radio City in railroad stations clear to Boston and Lowell, and this one tells of AFFAIRS OF STATE with June Havoc, written by none other than Louis Verneuil, the same I met at age eighteen when secretary for Professor Schiller at Columbia, N. Y.A. job, shortly before I worked for New York Central R.R. dragging mailbags across le grand plancher sale…the big dirty floor…and French is so simple, a job I remembered so vividly last spring when we left Ma alone and I began reviewing all the jobs I ever had in this earth of labor and sorrow, thinking to myself “The night is my woman,” the same Verneuil who was in his dressing gown, had dark rim glasses and apparently since then has been going along successfully for they call it a “comedy smash!” (according to Garland of Journal American, the same I read during hamburg-sizzling suppers of home in New York that are now no more) and so while I struggle in the dark with the enormity of my soul, trying desperately to be a great rememberer redeeming life from darkness, he calmly goes along filling in forms like plays and making name and money and with same Gallic coolness he displayed when I delivered that envelope to his apartment with the glittering Gershwin Manhattan view that was the sudden realization of my dream of New York which flared briefly then and also at Marshall’s party in a penthouse on Central Park West near Winchell’s but never to flare up again) (and Marshell being that New York hero who takes two girls to the nightclub with “Daoulas” in the abortive attempt to resume the writing of the Vanity of Daoulas back in the city of desires) and since then banking down a flame of dreams into this bottomdark night from which at the last possible minute I now make my EXCAPE back to the sun of decks and the dewy mornings under Guam trees like the trees of the Marine base in Portsmouth, New Hampshire with Joe and the French-Canadians building a fence, back to the sense of life I had as a child uncomplainingly getting up at seven in the morn to go to school and on Saturdays joyously to go play, back to the open air of the world, out from dark enfer New York where, if a pine tree stood it would only stand in Rockefeller Plaza with bulbs, where there’s now freshwind blowing through window of kitchen or galley from rosy morn or from piney dews. The footbridge overlooks miles of railyard and some of it is overgrown with brown weeds, unused tracks, nameless smoke-puffings far off at the other side, sooty mudground, views of New York across the Hudson, then the Pier and the place where the stevedores are waiting by the adjustable gangway one hundred feet spectrally over the water of the slip for the President Adams to come in at one, as soon as barges are gone, a platform I leaned out of to check the river to see if P. A. was coming but found out, calling ship at Staten, it wasn’t even shifted yet, a platform like something I dreamed and I kept thinking of diving off, continually, till at one point (all the time positive I could handle the dive and live, easily) I thought the frantic secret thought over a barge and as I pictured myself falling through the air I tried to fight the air, squirm, so as to fly off and move over to hit the water not the barge, and the futility of that!, this platform reminding me I dunno why of the dream of the enormous apartments in the Paramount Building, I guess the hugeness of it, who ever heard of a warehouse platform one hundred foot off water and of a shed a quartermile long. It took me ten minutes to penetrate the shed; lines of trucks were winding up the ramp and going in, some of them the huge trailer trucks of Georgia, one said “Ruby S.C. and Atlanta” and I said “South Calina aa-haa!!” Big crates everywhere, for instance veritable mountains of Chianti crates (just got in)—and most of the crates, barrels, boxes, bags, rolls, etc. said Pres. Adams on them with the destinations, and they were as I say, “S.F., Yoko, Kobe, Manila, one Malayan port I can’t even pronounce or recall, Hong Kong, Singapore” and that’s all, no sign of further ports like Karachi or Suez, which we also hit! So I’ve just got to get on and if as deckhand, well, I’ll keep thinking of William Faulkner, make myself a man, like him the boiler factory, work the lard off my belly and lines off my pasty cheek. If I don’t make it, goodby Singapore and Den and the red lifesavers, the same lifesavers that struck me so deeply like a dream that only they alone now seem to be assurance from my pyschic future-sense that I will get on! Blackie sounded like a real friendly intelligent guy on the phone, he’s bosun or carpenter, the delegate on the ship, S.I.U., I will make friends, work hard, I meet him, or that is yell for him from the gangway at one o’clock in the huge green pier over the footbridge from here…the pier of the world, at the foot of the railyard of the world, across the great Wolfean river from the World City, and huge spectral awe in the early morning air and workmen who don’t give a shit talking and smoking on all sides in their lovely conspiracy to enjoy life as much as they can. En route I’ll watch from the footbridge: (but further events).
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MISSED IN NEW YORK, I missed the boat, the O.S. and the B.R. jobs were both snapped up by bookmen and I stood there in the pier watching the Adams warp in with a feeling that I’d miss. So now Deni says I must stick it out and follow the President Adams overland to San Pedro, Calif. where it arrives Christmas Eve and the Chief Cook Antonio writes me a letter to the union agent so I can snap up the fireman’s mess or anything else in steward’s department—and so the plot thickens for now I’m going to follow the dark destiny ship and do so ON THE ROAD—
Thinking this on cardboard boxes that are stenciled for Hong Kong. A longshore truck roars by sending blue fumes over me—There’s the drowsy racket all over of hundreds of men working—immortal lazy clouds gave way to gray afternoon—a red Clark truck sends hot exhaust in my face. Out of a huge house of a truck they’re unloading wooden crates—There’s ammo in the hold and a special locker is full of some priceless cargo bound for Penang, probably champagne—There are rowboats or skiffs, crated, for Singapore—Valentine’s Meat Juice from Richmond, Va. is also bound for Singapore in crates—barrels for L.A.—the complicated and tangled rigging is working, they’re loading on and I, a poor ghost, have to run on land like I used to do in imagination along the car—If I don’t make it on the Coast I shall have committed a frantic foolish blunder but Deni says “You are a frantic fellow, it will not be unusual for you.” The drowsy shed, the racket of winches, the smell of cinnamon and oil, the whine of trucks, the smell of coffee beans (a mad longshore truck going backward among cities of produce thirty miles an hour)—Almost four, everybody’s knockin off and I’ve missed the last four o’clock call at Marine Cooks & Stewards and am sunk, doomed again for the goddamn road, Den will lend, I go to Cody’s—
On footbridge, and now the sun’s going down on another mad day of mine at the hem of the Adams, going down in a big red ball that blinds over the boxcars (Boston & Albany, M.D.T., a faded khaki wood car, Chesapeake and Ohio, El Capitan), over hundreds of boxcars on tracks extending from the impossible smokes of intown Jersey City where I can see a big white neon frame Davis Baking Powder to where the sun is setting over black grimes and further entanglements and gatherings of steel that are lost in a rosy distance behind the sun, including one faint crazy smoke-begrimed-from-sight steeple—white smoke, black smoke, hundreds of cars of workers everywhere parked, the huge scene of Erie, the old buswagon hotdog trucks, two of ’em, below, men with grimy caps coming up the footbridge steps, the footbridge extends along the waterfront, the actual oily wet waters which connect us to Penang, towards the station where I dozed and beyond which I am now going in this mad immense dusk to get two cases of Budweiser in cans to be drunk tonight in Den’s cabin with cook, first engineer, etc. The light deepens and so the smoke seems to increase—and at last far off at the termination of a pinpointy track I see red signal lights that without knowing it are preceding the neon night of Jersey City—so next I watch the whole land.
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SAILING DAY OF ADAMS FROM NEW YORK—Quarahambo and Quarhica, savage tribes at the headwaters of the Orinoco River in the Venezuelan wilds, along the Ventuari River that has great rapids roaring in the South American jungle—I could hear the roar of wild hard waters over ancestral rock in the completely unoccupied middle of great huge South America continent, just by reading above words in Hudson Tube and pretty soon I could hear drums of the Quarhica who undoubtedly blast the Quarahambo in traditional war, the thought that savages still exist (after all our complexities and Washington mink coats) making me stare into the darkness—Today, December 10, I feel sad, in a quandary, “as before,” no-good. Spent the night mourning and slowly packing—But it all goes back to the setting sun over the Erie Yards Friday evening. I went for the beer along the most dismal the most tragic the most begrimed dark Slavic street I’ve ever seen anywhere (this mad Jersey City!) and the name of it, perfect, is PAVONIA AVENUE with fat sad short men in cloth caps and black gloves, everything black, drinking at wild hollow bare-plank dim bars or trudging across the railroad tracks with hands muffled in coat—as always overhead the great sootclouds roll in darkness and suddenly you pass the open backdoor of a locomotive roundhouse, a great loco is standing there like a supercharged super-sized but terrible—
All my boyhood in America, though, in the little blond refugee with his mother in this Erie Station lunchroom—his little sister won’t eat anything but cake—the boy is amazed by everything, the old Erie conductor having coffee and cruller (glazed), all—The mother ordered five roast beef sandwiches, she’ll be surprised at price—it will be a big story—Little girl gulps the cruller, both hands—her poor little East German palate learning things (Public Address man calls stops, including Irwin’s RIVER STREET, Paterson)—Meanwhile the Adams is pulling out without me, behind me and all those tracks on this cold whipping sea-day with the cruel towers of Manhattan flashing in the winter sun like they do where rich men live in East Fifties apartments and a Negro is slamming a garbage barrel on the sidewalk (as once, incidentally, my first view of Frisco, a colored guy banged a barrel in a foggy dawn). The mother is so hungry she ate the little girl’s beef too—the old one that is, there’s a young mother and she just smiles and doesn’t want to sit down she’s so excited. On Pavonia Avenue, meanwhile, I walked along, hit a bar, they didn’t have Den’s specific Budweiser so I had a beer and moved along in the murk—went halfmile, in a bar a Budweiser man, driver, who was real dumb and gawking in the street wanted to talk about something after giving me directions to a delicatessen but had no words so I got to delicatessen, bought two cold cases, chatted with young prop. and staggered out in the smoky slum streets that here bisected Pavonia at the railyard hell’s limit—I found a beautiful young girl in an Aiken-Street-like door looking blushy at things—found cab, rode back along hem of Holland Tunnel bound traffic, pass’t yards, saw yardlights disembodied in smoky night sending smoke halo stabs down on clutters and rails—staggered along great length of pier to gangway. Now it was evening, party was in order, but actually everybody went ashore into all these mad areas and irons of Jersey City.
— Later: And now I’m in Danny’s music store, in a booth, just took dexy, am blowing some Allen Eager and Gerry Mulligan bop—Have fifty-five dollars with which to hitch to Frisco starting matin—no bus—okay—and fifteen dexies, five bennies—till Cody—then all straight—till I then run down to Pedro, it’s Pedro, meet you in Pedro, yes it’s Pedro (home of Ray the wiper, whose job I may get)—Trying to borrow $ for bus ride to Frisco but nobody has—Here are the mad complexities: and to return: everybody went ashore, only the first assistant engineer drank with us, a big Thomas Mitchell who the night after, night of Lacoucci’s party, dug my Ma—also Mr. Smith the fat alcoholic sicksad beastly wiper had a drink—and crazy Ray—but I got stoned, yakked in poor Deni’s ear about nothing, went to sleep in cadets’ stateroom—in morn had coffee, felt guilty (for deciding to follow Adams to Frisco instead of shipping out from here pronto with mucho loot), had chat with our wonderful chief cook Frederico who’s my friend and is going to teach me cooking if I get on Adams (I’ve become the great mad Cook of THE ROAD)—of ROAD, where goest thou now?—I came home Saturday morning—but later—AND AT THIS VERY MOMENT AS I SIT HERE THE S.S. PRESIDENT ADAMS IS FLYING SOUTHWARD OFF THE JERSEY COAST.
Just as in 1942 when I shipped out for Arctic Greenland I’m now going through all kinds of mad complications, like, in Pedro I’m getting a letter from the cook written in Spanish to the Agent of M.C.S. at Frisco; already I’ve got a letter to Wilmington, Calif. agent—also I have to look up his Friend Joe in Frisco to tell him that the gabardine from Italy is ready and if Adams, because late in schedule, doesn’t dock in Frisco Antonio will mail from L.A.—I also have to look up the GUIDE to see where the S.S. Lurline is at, to locate Jimmy Low to check on Deni’s deadly enemies Matthew Peters and especially Paul Lyman (Matthew is a hipster, Jimmy a little guy, Lyman a gunman)—also, I look up a woman in Hollywood, my same 1947 Hollywood and soon. And I’ve decided to hitch-hike with my seventy dollars and hit all the bars in the snow of the great land between here and Frisco—if I freeze to death it won’t be from lack of beer and food (!)—straight for the Coast so’s to save 1000 miles of South and should be watching the roof of Cody’s house on Monday December 17 I hope, then leave around 23rd for Pedro preferably with Cody in car and kicks, so I have loot for kicks. I just saw Jody Mifflin (after long Duluoz walk along park in gray nippy day, Central Park South) and borrowed thirty dollars from her, but bus, I find, is sixty-five dollars so fuckit. Last night got hi with Danny, bought plenty dexies, bennies, all set to go. The last thing is actually putting clothes in bag and saying goodbye to Ma, dammit—but I gotta go to those brown union halls of the gray West Coast and make my way, and find my work on the run. Jody and I had long talk—perhaps she’d disapprove of these ideas of mine—I must write down books too, story-novels, and communicate to people instead of just appeasing my lone soul with a record of it—but this record is my joy. Now, Saturday morning I wrote, typed a letter to the agent in Wilmington, Calif. where I’m to meet ship and renew old strange haunting acquaintance with that L.A. that’s made me dream since, the actual ORIGIN of the B-movie and the center of the California Night, find how to reach Pedro etc. by myself on those humming sidewalks in the mild wild night (hit colored bars from here to there! blow jukes, talk up with cats!) (buy a whore or two!), the same L.A. I travailed and was hallowed by with Mexican girl 1947 when we cut along together in the unbeatable sweetness of man and woman. Let me tell a story: I’d met her on a bus and all that, and we’d decided to hitch to New York over Route 66, were out there—but wait till tape recorder! (for this particular past story). I want to start hitching tonight from in front of Lincoln Tunnel, why wait? So I will. And buy further sleeves for my heart.
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ON THE ROAD, HARRISBURG, PA.—4 A.M., just took jog in cold narrow street—bus to Frisco—all closed in New York—thinking—fast bus—Pittsburgh—Jogged across my bridge—sternwheelers of old used as tugs pushing barges in freezing Ohio River—same that will transfer its waters to the warmths of New Orleans—Long lines of freights snaking along cliffbottoms—ancient blackstone monument of some kind—I ran to P. & L.E.R.R. waiting room so ornate and dignified (the terrible name of Lehigh, the terrible name of Lackawanna, they make me think of that seven-mile hike in the misty night among the bushy crags of the horrible Susquehanna flowing in her October with flare-fires of grim locomotives across the waterbed, me and the Ghost of the Susquehanna walking, walking for the bridge that was never there Ah me) I no go in with dungarees blackjacket—new visions of Pittsburgh, old orange trolleys—skyscraper Ward Morehouse office buildings rising in the joyous winter morning—boys in a parkinglot plotting jazz—
Dug DEERTRAIL, OHIO—Long walk—hot cocoa in truck diner—
OUTSIDE CLEVELAND—A graveyard of Thirties wrecks covered with snow, like Old Cody Pomeray dead—
CLEVELAND—Blizzard—white—ricketiness—Kitchen Maid Meats, a butcher store, with Xmas garlands—SOHIO gas station with old cars and trucks in the snow—Leader Department Store with hat, sport shirts and blankets (and Xmas Tinsel) in the window—Dark shiny plastic drugstore—Olympic Confectionery candy store—Old picketer in white and green hunting cap picketing sign says “These clothes are not union made” in snow—Andy’s Coney Island Hotdogs on trolley sidestreet with four women waiting for bus in doorway—Main leading-in street snowy, dark, mad, white-lined, American, meaningless—iron fences, porticoed mansions that are now funeral homes—puke-yellow furniture stores with bargains in big print—a huddled pedestrian in a yellow and black check hunting coat and brown felt hat walking and trying to read order slips on blizzardy sidewalk—great empty lot with snowy stones and hints of crumbled ashy timbers in the whiteness—Sunoco station, attendant bending dismally to tank, gloved—Beat-up sooty old brown-shingled Main Street house—huge smokestacks in swirling shroudy snow across the city plains—bridge over railyard with snow-covered oil cars, tanks, Xmas billboards, Pennsy coal cars, Nickel Plate coal cars, distant nameless bridges in black iron, red wood warehouses, mysterious refineries, rooftops of Cleveland Man finally—old redracked wood trailer trucks—a horse drawing a flaring stanchioned junk wagon on glistening wet paving—brownbrick truckage buildings in the storm—Allied Florist Exchange, purple brick, snow-piles, dusty front windowpanes—downtown people huddled in rainy snow under the everlasting red neon.
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IOWA, Chicago Great Western (boxcar)—Inscription on shithouse wall Grand Island, Nebr. “I was in a suck party one nite with 4 fellows we sucked cocks and fucked each other in the ass hole at the Olds Hotel one salesman come 8 times.” I want to suck 2 cocks while my cock is being sucked too” etc.—all like that, land of Bill Cody.
WYOMING—Shrouded windswept snowridge in the blue—marsh-mallow humps—a whiteness riddled with brown sage—lonely cluster of shacks—my window is clouding and icing again. Dug backalleys of Rock Springs, Wyo.—a bench along a shackwall, sign painted on wall “Don’t sit on Whitey’s bench”—cowboy with ruddy lean features walking beanpole from the bank along the railroad street of cafés and stores—Pretty Wyo. cunt in car, a rich rancher’s daughter…. Sunny valleys of snow in the great rock waste—reddish buttes—far off ravines of the world—Last night I dug the snow swept road in front, to North Platte where had three beers.
SACRAMENTO—The myth of the gray day in Sacramento—intersection, with Shell station (tan and red) on one corner, a distant palm visible in the fog over the creamy California roof—Nameless young Jap cats of California cutting by—Much traffic, a few old trees of Sacramento—Colonial Arms a brokendown wood structure—then Sacramento Public Parking Inc., a big lot with namelessly bleak two-story redbrick apartment beyond—then the people—I’m exhausted.
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THIS TRIP IN DEPTH, THEN, beginning, New York, colored queer cat with radio no battery—pull out fast—at New Brunswick wild Air Force gang in Levis get on with satchels of whiskey, wine and jewelry for wives in Colorado Springs…the leader is big handsome Ben from San Antone, his buddy is crazy snap-knife Doug with blond hair—others—Ben says he was knifed in Amarillo, an X in his back, got a buddy to hold the gang at bay with shotgun and stomped all four one by one, stomped one’s tongue out accidentally—They call their cocks “hammers,” cunt’s a “gash” and do the up-your-ass fingersign slapping finger down into palm, wham—Bus went through pretty Princeton, made me homesick for oldfashioned Eastern Xmas dammit and especially now as I sit here in Ross Hotel in sunny dull L.A.—then into Pennsylvania and hit the mountains and first snow swirls at ridge top immense truckstop—in Harrisburg I jogged in eighteenth-century streets remembering the Ghost and also it’s like Lowell—Turnpike in snow to Pittsburgh—I on dexies feel relaxed, moveless but time is long—in Pittsburgh as I say I run across Ohio River Bridge—eat my first two ham sandwiches on bus locker outdoors while Negro cleans out bus and others eat ham and eggs inside—At Deerfield I walk up and down highway in intense sunny cold of old Ohio—Then Cleveland, and bought a pint of whiskey cheap—Cream of Kentucky—Airforce boys plying me plenty good whiskey—we talk—I dog everybody straight, no more brooding or paranoia or nothing, preparing for world—(but I’ve known the world, it’s all happened before, why do I kid myself with these artificial newnesses)—from Cleveland, to Toledo (ate sandwiches) in cold downtown red neon night, I walked, ran, froze, had just hot cocoa, dug a Cody Pomeray Toledo—Then across to Indiana and the lights of Xmas trees of supper evening coming on in little towns like LaGrange and Angola (remember Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck going home to Indiana at Xmas?)—at South Bend I run, get a drink in mad little bar with young beefy sad organist up in portico and characters, old man who changes a ten for every beer—Then into Chicago and the fantastic big red neon of ITS night—around midnight—the great glitter in the cold lakeshore night (Dreiser should have seen, but he did!)—I ran for beans, coffee, bread—very, very cold on the Loop—I saw no bop, hurried—saw North Clark trucks with girlieshow flaps—Across Illinois to Davenport, where I woke up just before dawn, dug the Mississippi again, the ninth time, now flowing in winter, walked in cold dawn near oldman bar’s street where I slaked my hot thirst in summer ‘forty-seven—thought “This night has names” outside Rock Island—for a letter to Wilson—nonsense half forgotten, thing to do is GO ON—Cut along the river we did as russet East flared over frost fields to Muscatine, Keota (the Golden Buckle of the Corn Belt), Sigourney where I walked in freezing morn while others ate joyous breakfasts—in Knoxville, Ia. Negro mine operator told me his life, looked like Pa—Drank with boys—at Council Bluffs everything was gray and Western and inevitable, even rollercoasters—bam, in Omaha it’s snowing—a blizzard—dirty old scabrous shithouse character watches me shit, another sells me comb for dime, I eat sandwiches (now down to bread and boiled eggs) in Omaha doorway facing Missouri River Street down by warehouses in huge blizzard, I look real handsome passing plate glasses, like new cowboy, old scabrous finds me, wants sandwich or dime, I say “Get money from the rich!” and I’m mad but guilty, recalling Dostoevsky’s sayings—Bus slowed down plows along to Columbus and Grand Island where, while others sup, I cut around, in toilet read, take dexy—storm is thick, I dig from front window, and old men, old Nebraskans, two, one an usher now in Frisco Mission Street B-movie and knew Buffalo Bill, the other a farmer goin to Frisco or such, North Platte was where Ben threw a snowball through a small hole in wall and everybody so exuberant sailor puts arm around me as we go in bar for three beers—which start me and send me buzzing, also dexy, so from North Platte to Cheyenne the route of my great 1947 flat-truck rotgut whiskey ride with Mississippi Gene and the boys I am DRUNK and finish all the whiskey, talking to everybody, seat jumping, running out with old man to piss at Chappell, busdriver says “I know there’s a bottle on this bus—if anybody needs a rest stop speak up”—and I say “This gentleman needs to go to the restroom”—bravado at height, like I’ll use in Paree some day—next year—the Handsome Stranger that I dug first in Omaha lunchroom watching waitresses dig him, unconscious slouch hat, mustache thin, great angular Indian face, dark maroon skin texture (from cold winter’s, he no look like farmer but is), dug him in the bus chewing slowly under his personal reading light with twenty-five-cent book and little girl digging him and calling her mother’s attention to it across the aisle—so drunk that I told him all this before he got off at Chappell or Sidney, Nebr. or wherever to go to his farm where he lives alone (!) and screws all surrounding countryside women—Till at Cheyenne I was stone cold out when they woke us up to change buses because heating system no good in New York coach—So now here I am waking up somewhere in Wyoming as great sage-snow-eternities spread everywhichway (Denver one hundred miles underneath, my poor Cody Denver)—at Rock Springs I walked and decided to splurge on big eggs and potato breakfast (at the last minute as driver called), great—next stop (went through Fort Bridger in his great land discovery country) wonderful drowsy winter afternoon Mormon town with steaming cows in corrals and silence of mountains at I believe Wasatch (dunno)—walked, dug old small covered wagons families keep in backyard, as relics of past like Lowell people keep daguerrotypes—then Ogden, which I dug, Jap hipsters, crazy bum street with Kokomo Bar at foot of which white-capped mountains rise—a town I’d heard about some, I can see it’s something—then I from window dug Farmington a little hem-of-the-mountain settlement—then at Salt Lake a major four-hour wait because of strike of drivers, which I make partly by myself walking and digging Jap pool parlor and hanging round station with the Frisco-bound sailors—and good old Airforce boys whose whiskey I’d all drunk up ere Cheyenne got off Ogden—also two old seamen bound for N.M.U. Seattle, one of ’em knew Nebraska and Wyoming years ago as circus man!—but old asshole bores like North Atlantic A.B.’s 1943—Left Salt Lake after I took three walks, long ones, at nine or so, crossed flats, began stopping every literally ten miles in Nevada for passengers to throw money on slotmachines, chief sucker my sailor pal—Wendover, Wells, Elko, Winnemucca, Lovelock, stopping all the time and I walk and dig all over, and it’s deathly cold in Nevady—Finally I get to dig that crazy Reno high on dexy at 6:30 A.M. booming with roulette and house girls and me three beers and almost miss bus, and tic-kid with money so handsome and tragic at faro table, three fags watching, and soldier asking for girl at bar and Jewish New York handsome gambler with girls, and foggy streets, and those cunts it’s a sin that town—then the new fag driver with ONE glove (and the young Skippy soldier in front of me with his queer chin tweaker and lover)—up the mountain and home in Truckee, just like Lowell, gingerbread houses and five-foot snow, I took walk, my nosedried up—over Donner Pass, and down to fogs of California, Colfax, Auburn, Roseville, old loud talking W. C. Fields Sacramento lawyer with cane, and kid, my bleakness in Sacry, and over to Frisco which couldn’t be seen from the Bay Bridge though en route I tried to dig Frisco kicks in little character with cloth hat in front of me and scenes outside—Called Buckle, waited for him in saloon at Mission and Sixth—all Buckle’s till Cody showed up with ONE precious stick that rode us high-crazy-yelling-wild clear into the Little Harlem Satnite where they told us Buddy’d slashed his woman and for want of money I gave away my MexCity wallet to gal who, Five Guys Named Moe in the crazy drizzling Negress morning I screwed forty-eight hours later—Oh mad!
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NOW DOWN IN L.A. TO MEET DENI’S SHIP—L.A. XMAS, the Great American Saturday afternoon but in L.A. and at Xmas shopping peak-just like Lowell is South Broadway but in a warm strange sun—Little Mexican girls in pink blouses cutting along with their mothers, shopping bag over the shoulder flung—sharp characters by the thousands in every kind of jacket, shirt, shoe, sometimes half sharp on top with wino pants below—And cunts! Purple bandana, red velvet skirt, long legs—Beauteous Mexican girls with those full tits, lips and cougar eyes—Colored cats in black shirts with light hats and checked coats—Girls in floppy sharp jacket-coats over loose slacks, looking doll-like just like Evelyn in her shirt and dungarees—it’s a California dolliness—whole families eating in Clifton’s celebrating the shopping—Just like Queen Street must be right now in Kinston, North Carolina and Ma and Nin are cutting along—A carful of Negro sharpies—sailors—crazy trolleys—the people different and crazier than New York and refined to the sun in clothes and feel—Pouring pouring, this poor mind can’t compete or even these eyes—Girls in short tight skirts, barelegged, in sandals, long hair, I die.
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L.A. PLAYLAND, but there’s something inexpressibly sad right now—in this beat old Playland, at the coffee counter, Bing’s “White Christmas” on juke, some sadness that draws my mind apart and makes me want to moan—I remember how Irwin years ago used to dig these joints from New York to Denver to Houston and back and how it took me so long to follow suit—but without selection for he chose his monkey image in this maze and applied it to the interests of that day and all I do is roll along anyhow—from across South Main Street it’s like looking at a realistic American painting—PLAYLAND, the great square stage, and racing tip sheets tacked up on right—a family, mother with long tumbly hair in overalls and black jacket fiddles pennies into weighing machine with the kids, the old man in yachting cap with anchor and wino pants and who brings his family to South Main Street on the big pre-Christmas Saturday afternoon only because it’s the street of his own hangup just as old Cody must have brought him and Ma Pomeray in her mad tubercular Okie overalls to Larimer on this day or in Lowell the poor sepulchral farmer comes not to Central Street but to the brokendown stores of Bridge Street (though not really comparable)—the little kid therefore remembering his Pa in his own appropriate sad setting—Sailors and Marines, one Airforcer studying those nude magazines, I see him poring over two crazy cunts reclining in the sun together bellyup, legs closed, “health-y,” and “Europe-Nude Impressions of Europe (!)”—the incredibly beat fortune machines, a gypsy woman plaster head with plaster wart—the antique pistol machines—a great amateur canvas depicting destroyer on blue sea, now torn at one end to show dusty electric fixtures in back—a hole in the floor, cubbyholes of tools down in it to repair crazy kickmachines—hootchy movies with actual flapping white electric dolls that Jap and Mex kids dig (those kids who comb their hair sleek and horizontal at back and vertical up front like movie stars, they have no loins, just a Levi belt and presumably a cock although there seems to be no room even for an ass, they float disembodied or that is dis-hipped, dis-loined over the sidewalk like spindly sexless ghosts, either that or they slouch loose in huge sharp suits with those L.A. sportshirts that are the maddest for this is home of sportshirts)—Saturday afternoon in Playland, some of the families I dug 1947 who drive from the Zorro night to Hollywood and Vine to see stars filtered in here now (I saw the Pacific feathering the night shore south of Obispo, wow). All the machines, muscle machines, photos, ordinary bowling, etc. and the juke blowing Ella, Mr. B., Bing, and blues and across the street down a ways my shoeshine friend who goes falsetto squeal while shining shoes, keeps digging street first over one shoulder then other, jumps, yells Blow!, spends all his money on juke in shack, wears plaid bop cap, says “I love money I dunno what’s the matter with me” and in course of talking and jumping (played “Illinois” on trombone and Lester and Hawk together records) tried to hook me with $1.25 “dye” shine but I got off, in genuine disappointment in him, with thirty cents, but I blame it on his morose boss Negro that when he showed up the saint stopped jumping and digging street, a big hype—South Main mad and L.A. too, more than ever—The “Optic” B-movie right across Playland here with fiddly little marquee and “open-all-night” boxoffice, colored cats digging pixes in front (“Little Egypt”)—Now a Negro family comes to Playland from hotsun street—Now I’m being swept away by a broom!
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SOUTH MAIN STREET, bums with bloody foreheads—Indians-buddies of Marines in bloodred sport shirts—Indians in hip blue serge suits—Prado’s Mambo coming from Over the Top Bar—Gayety another B-movie—Negro kid in dungarees, black suede shoes and old red sport shirt—Every cocktail bar has inviting B-girl on first stool and blue interiors waiting—Old Indian worker (or Mexican) in brown leather jacket but regular felt hat though somewhat Western—A family: a Mex lil hunchback Pop, wife, cute, and cute little dotter five with present—he wears farmer coveralls—white shirted Mex goes by with dark tragic mouth—
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WILMINGTON, ATE TERRIFIC MEAL in Jack’s Star Cafe—short ribs of beef, sweet candied yam, buttered beets, was full for first time since Evelyn Pomeray’s mother’s wonderful hickory smoked ham at Cody’s filled me (ham feast). I was weak with hunger from walk—Catholic Marine Club to Berth 154, a one-and-a-half-mile walk in cold raw California winter night which earlier at work in Frisco gave me this terrible cold that literally prevented me from seeing out the Zipper caboose window and which I personally checked with twenty-four hours in bed, a pint of bourbon, lemon juice and Anacin—a ten-dollar treatment (including a turkey dinner in L.A. bum cafeteria). Meal earlier today at Clifton’s, lamb rib, was too small and not half as good as this Wilmington Jack right by Pacific Redcar tracks. The ride down phenomenal—after Compton the bourgeois town and rickety wild L.A. suburbs of garages, cottages next to tire mountains, green stucco box houses, nigra coal and coke shacks, there arose on the plain whole metropolises of oil drills and then refineries, all sides, pumping, smoking, mad—And the S.S. President Adams is now turning in at Berth 154 and I’ve come overland to meet her—Suspicious characters around dock, Matthew Peters? Paul Lyman? I have to be alert for Den’s safety, really. Same shiny waters that connect Penang and Jersey City are here too.
Four days of hard work at railroad baggage department Frisco heaving mailsacks, $10.40 clear a day; spent ten-dollars on kicks and Marie-came to L.A. in Zipper freight caboose Cody put me on, with thirty-dollars—half dead with virus pneumonia, three different conductors forced me to retire into sleep or I get questioned—walk two miles in bleary sorrow with burden bag from L.A. railyards clear to South Main and Fifth and lifesaving hotel and lemon and bourbon. This is records. Lonesome for Ma, Nin, Luke and Kinston today—I’m going to go over the entire Tragedy No. One of my early life on my ship whichever it may well be. Hope it’s Adams, old dark Adams now in the vast Pedro night reaching to touch me.
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YES, TO RECALL, MARIE, DUG HER, SHE DUG ME, in Little Harlem at Third in Frisco—gave her hincty Mex wallet, got rid of that though worried—on a cold rainy morning at 7:30 they told us to come in work at 6 P.M. so Cody and I’d rattled in his old green heap to housing shacks across tracks and beyond junkyards at five-mile house—woke up Marie with pint of bourbon and split bottle (poorboy) tokay—her sister asleep with her dotter(seven) in bed, white sailor in bedroom, but records right off (Five Games Named Moe, Little Moe, No Moe, Half a Moe, Big Moe, Never Moe etc.) and then breakfast and brother-in-law and we bang in bedroom, talk of her $4600 inheritance, Cadillac or goose farm—Slim Buckle came with fifth burgundy—drove around Third Street for T, none, characters in and out—Old Jabbo—then home to sleep two hours in afternoon, Evelyn had fits, wow!—And in L.A. I never got that ship!
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THAT WAS IN FRISCO when I was still sure I could get the Adams but now it’s the San Pedro blues, walking back from Joe Wilkinson’s M.C.S., Xmas Eve, missed the ship, along the tracks stumbling in a universe of burning rubber and oil refineries in the hot dumb sun, loss, loss, my charade, tirade—worst of all meeting sexy box juicycunt Rickey in Long Beach at Stardust—after that mad day in Hollywood and Santa Monica walking with Deni drinking champagne and spending one hundred dollars on all kinds of nonsense (Larue’s, five-dollar taxi rides with no destination, case of beer for girls that put us out the door, etc. Lola, Anne, Monroe Starr by swimmingpool).
NUTHOUSE bar, after Xmas Eve of Cruiser at 4 A.M. silent with star and stem-to-stern lightbulbs—trudging in dark tracks with Mr. Leonard and his bop cap—Xmas dinner of turkey and Danish beer on Adams with uproarious cussing laughing crew—hot sunny Xmas afternoon in NUTHOUSE bar Wilmington, Rickey no go, crazy fistfight between Okielovers, I’m hot and unfucked, drowse, beer, shit on it. Where’s wife?
At LaCienega joint the pretty couple (Encore Bar)—the fireplace, the L.A. night—again later at Sunset Strip bar with Lezes—My vision of men enslaved to cunts, to women who at or near thirty become lost in a dream of maternity as men die in the night with slavering thirst for the eternal food, the inexpressible security of a conscious caress (or dreamy unconscious)—poor Mac, Cody, broken by their cunts—but not me—the son of the Nuthouse proprietor riding a foolish singlewheel in the afternoon horizoned by pumps, tanks and towers—issempassem—Den’s many expressions—What do I love? Den says my own skin. I have $14.50.
Sitting on a stool facing blinding open door—parking lot beyond little porch of concrete—post—then brown fields, wire fences, oil cranes, blue haze, telegraph wires, shapeless black steels, hills, trees, houses, Pacific Sky over Pedro and then ocean.