The Subterraneans by Jack Kerouac
“Jesus,” as we’re walking along the benches of the church park sad park of the whole summer season, “now you’re calling me names, transparent.”
“Well that’s what it is, you think I can’t see through that, at first you didn’t want to go to Adam’s at all and now that you hear—well the hell with that if it ain’t transparent I don’t know what is.”—“Calling me names, Jesus” (shnuffling to laugh) and both of us actually hysterically smiling and as tho nothing had happened at all and in fact like happy unconcerned people you see in newsreels busy going down the street to their chores and where-go’s and we’re in the same rainy newsreel mystery sad but inside of us (as must then be so inside the puppet filmdolls of screen) the great tumescent turbulent turmoil alliterative as a hammer on the brain bone bag and balls, bang I’m sorry I was ever born. …
To cap everything, as if it wasn’t enough, the whole world opens up as Adam opens the door bowing solemnly but with a glint and secret in his eye and some kind of unwelcomeness I bristle at the sight of—“What’s the matter?” Then I sense the presence of more people in there than Frank and Adam and Yuri.—“We have visitors.”—“Oh,” I say, “distinguished visitors?”—“I think so.”—“Who?”—“Mac Jones and Phyllis.”—“What?” (the great moment has come when I’m to come face to face, or leave, with my arch literary enemy Balliol Mac-Jones erstwhile so close to me we used to slop beer on each other’s knees in leaning-over talk excitement, we’d talked and exchanged and borrowed and read books and literarized so much the poor innocent had actually come under some kind of influence from me, that is, in the sense, only, that he learned the talk and style, mainly the history of the hip or beat generation or subterranean generation and I’d told him “Mac, write a great book about everything that happened when Leroy came to New York in 1949 and don’t leave a word out and blow, go!” which he did, and I read it, critically Adam and I in visits to his place both critical of the manuscript but when it came out they guarantee him 20,000 dollars an unheard of sum and all of us beat types wandering the Beach and Market Street and Times Square when in New York, tho Adam and I had solemnly admitted, quote, “Jones is not of us—but from another world—the midtown sillies world” (an Adamism). And so his great success coming at the moment when I was poorest and most neglected by publishers and worse than that hung-up on paranoiac drug habits I became incensed but I didn’t get too mad, but stayed black about it, changing my mind after father time’s few local scythes and various misfortunes and trips around, writing him apologetic letters on ships which I tore up, he too writing them meanwhile, and then, Adam acting a year later as some kind of saint and mediator reported favorable inclinations on both our parts, to both parties—the great moment when I would have to face old Mac and shake with him and call it quits, let go all the rancor—making as little impression on Mardou, who is so independent and unavailable in that new heartbreaking way. Anyway Macjones was there, immediately I said out loud “Good, great, I been wantin’ to see him,” and I rushed into the living-room and over someone’s head who was getting up (Yuri it was) I shook hands firmly with Balliol, sat brooding awhile, didn’t even notice how poor Mardou had managed to position herself (here as at Bromberg’s as everywhere poor dark angel)—finally going to the bedroom unable to bear the polite conversation under which not only Yuri but Jones (and also Phyllis his woman who kept staring at me to see if it was still crazy) rumbled, I ran to the bedroom and lay in the dark and at the first opportunity tried to get Mardou to lie down with me but she said “Leo I don’t want to lay around in here in the dark.”—Yuri then coming over, putting on one of Adam’s ties, saying, “I’m going out and find me a girl,” and we have a kind of whispering rapport now away from them in the parlor—all’s forgiven.—But I feel that because Jones does not move from his couch he really doesn’t want to talk to me and probably wishes secretly I’d leave, when Mardou roams back again to my bed of shame and sorrow and hidingplace, I say, “What are you talking about in there, bop? Don’t tell him anything about music.”—(Let him find out for himself! I say to myself pettishly)—I’m the bop writer!—But as I’m commissioned to get the beer downstairs, when I come in again with beer in arms they’re all in the kitchen, Mac foremost, smiling, and saying, “Leo! let me see those drawings they told me you did, I want to see them.”—So we become friends again bending over drawings and Yuri has to be showing his too (he draws) and Mardou is in the other room, again forgotten—but it is a historic moment and as we also, with Carmody, study Carmody’s South American bleak pictures of high jungle villages and Andean towns where you can see the clouds pass, I notice Mac’s expensive good-looking clothes, wrist watch, I feel proud of him and now he has an attractive little mustache that makes his maturity—which I announce to everyone—the beer by now warming us all up, and then his wife Phyllis begins a supper and the conviviality flows back and forth—
In the red bulblight parlor in fact I see Jones alone with Mardou questioning, as if interviewing her, I see that he’s grinning and saying to himself ‘Old Percepied’s got himself another amazing doll’ and I inside yearn to myself, “Yeah, for how long”—and he’s listening to Mardou, who, impressed, forewarned, understanding everything, makes solemn statements about bop, like, “I don’t like bop, I really don’t, it’s like junk to me, too many junkies are bop men and I hear the junk in it.”—“Well,” Mac adjusting glasses, “that’s interesting.”—And I go up and say, “But you never like what you come from” (looking at Mardou).—“What do you mean?”—“You’re the child of Bop,” or the children of bop, some such statement, which Mac and I agree on—so that later when we all the whole gang troop out to further festivities of the night, and Mardou, wearing Adam’s long black velvet jacket (for her long) and a mad long scarf too, looking like a little Polish underground girl or boy in a sewer beneath the city and cute and hip, and in the street rushes up from one group to the one I’m in, and I reach out as she reaches me (I’m wearing Carmody’s felt hat straight on my head like hipster for joke and my red shirt still, now defunct from weekends) and sweep her littleness off her feet and up against me and go on walking carrying her, I hear Mac’s appreciative “Wow” and “Go” laugh in the background and I think proudly “He sees now that I have a real great chick—that I am not dead but going on—old continuous Percepied—never getting older, always in there, always with the young, the new generations—.” A motley group in any case going down the street what with Adam Moorad wearing a full tuxedo borrowed from Sam the night before so he could attend some opening with tickets free from his office—trooping down to Dante’s and Mask again—that Mask, that old po mask all the time—Dante’s where in the rise and roar of the social and gab excitement I looked up many times to catch Mardou’s eyes and play eyes with her but she seemed reluctant, abstract, brooding—no longer affectionate of me—sick of all our talk, with Bromberg re-arriving and great further discourses and that particular noxious group-enthusiasm that you’re supposed to feel when like Mardou you’re with a star of the group or even I mean just a member of that constellation, how noisome, tiresome it must have been to her to have to appreciate all we were saying, to be amazed by the latest quip from the lips of the one and only, the newest manifestation of the same old dreary mystery of personality in Kaja the great—disgusted she seemed indeed, and looking into space.
So later when in my drunkenness I managed to get Paddy Cordavan over to our table and he invited us all to his place for further drinking (the usually unattainable social Paddy Cordavan due to his woman who always wanted to go home alone with him, Paddy Cordavan of whom Buddy Pond had said, “He’s too beautiful I can’t look,” tall, blond, big-jawed somber Montana cowboy slowmoving, slow talking, slow shouldered) Mardou wasn’t impressed, as she wanted to get away from Paddy and all the other subterraneans of Dante’s anyway, whom I had just freshly annoyed by yelling again at Julien, “Come here, we’re all going to Paddy’s party and Julien’s coming,” at which Julien immediate
Well, I thought, this is the end—I finally made the step and by God I paid her back for what she done to me—it had to come and this is it—ploop.
Isn’t it good to know winter is coming— and that life will be a little more quiet—and you will be home writing and eating well and we will be spending pleasant nights wrapped round one another—and you are home now, rested and eating well because you should not become too sad—and I feel better when I know you are well.
and
Write to me Anything.
Please stay well
Your Freind
And my love
And Oh
And Love for You
MARDOU
Please
BUT THE DEEPEST premonition and prophesy of all had always been, that when I walked into Heavenly Lane, cutting in sharply from sidewalk, I’d look up, and if Mardou’s light was on Mardou’s light was on—“But some day, dear Leo, that light will not shine for you”—this a prophesy irrespective of all your Yuris and attenuations in the snake of time.—“Someday she won’t be there when you want her to be there, the light’ll be out and you’ll be looking up and it will be dark in Heavenly Lane and Mardou’ll be gone, and it’ll be when you least expect it and want it.”—Always I knew this—it crossed my mind that night when I ran up, met Sam in the bar, he was with two newspapermen, we bought drinks, I spilled money on the floor, I hurried to get drunk (through with my baby!), rushed up to Adam and Frank’s, woke them up again, wrestled on the floor, made noise, Sam tore my T-shirt off, bashed the lamp in, drank a fifth of bourbon as of old in our tremendous days together, it was just another big downcrashing in the night and all for nothing … waking up, I, in the morning with the final hangover that said to me, “Too late”—and got up and staggered to the door through the debris, and opened it, and went home, Adam saying to me as he heard me fiddle with the groaning faucet, “Leo go home and recuperate well,” sensing how sick I was tho not knowing about Mardou and me—and at home I wandered around, couldn’t stay in the house, couldn’t stop, had to walk, as if someone was going to die soon, as if I could smell the flowers of death in the air, and I went in the South San Francisco railyard and cried.
Cried in the railyard sitting on an old piece of iron under the new moon and on the side of the old Southern Pacific tracks, cried because not only I had cast off Mardou whom now I was not so sure I wanted to cast off but the die’d been thrown, feeling too her empathetic tears across the night and the final horror both of us round-eyed realizing we part—but seeing suddenly not in the face of the moon but somewhere in the sky as I looked up and hoped to figure, the face of my mother—remembering it in fact from a haunted nap just after supper that same restless unable-to-stay-in-a-chair or on-earth day—just as I woke to some Arthur Godfrey program on the TV, I saw bending over me the visage of my mother, with impenetrable eyes and moveless lips and round cheekbones and glasses that glinted and hid the major part of her expression which at first I thought was a vision of horror that I might shudder at, but it didn’t make me shudder—wondering about it on the walk and suddenly now in the railyards weeping for my lost Mardou and so stupidly because I’d decided to throw her away myself, it had been a vision of my mother’s love for me—that expressionless and expressionless-because-so-profound face bending over me in the vision of my sleep, and with lips not so pressed together as enduring and as if to say, “Pauvre Ti Leo, pauvre Ti Leo, tu souffri, les hommes souffri tant, y’ainque toi dans le monde j’va’t prendre soin, j’aim’ra beaucoup t’prendre soin tous tes jours mon ange”—“Poor Little Leo, poor Little Leo, you suffer, men suffer so, you’re all alone in the world I’ll take care of you, I would very much like to take care of you all your days my angel.”—My mother an angel too—the tears welled up in my eyes, something broke, I cracked—I had been sitting for an hour, in front of me was Butler Road and the gigantic rose neon ten blocks long BETHLEHEM WEST COAST STEEL with stars above and the smashby Zipper and the fragrance of locomotive coalsmoke as I sit there and let them pass and far down the line in the night around that South San Francisco airport you can see that sonofa-bitch red light waving Mars signal light swimming in the dark big red markers blowing up and down and sending fires in the keenpure lostpurity lovelyskies of old California in the late sad night of autumn spring comefall winter’s summertime tall, like trees—the only man in South City who ever walked from the neat suburban homes and went and hid by boxcars to think—broke.—Something fell loose in me—O blood of my soul I thought and the Good Lord or whatever’s put me here to suffer and groan and on top of that be guilty and gives me the flesh and blood that is so painful the—women all mean well—this I knew—women love, bend over you—you’d as soon betray a woman’s love as spit on your own feet, clay—
That sudden short crying in the railyard and for a reason I really didn’t fathom, and couldn’t—saying to myself in the bottom, “You see a vision of the face of the woman who is your mother who loves you so much she has supported you and protected you for years, you a bum, a drunkard—never complained a jot—because she knows that in your present state you can’t go out in the world and make a living and take care of yourself and even find and hold the love of another protecting woman—and all because you are poor stupid Ti Leo—deep in the dark pit of night under the stars of the world you are lost, poor, no one cares, and now you threw away a little woman’s love because you wanted another drink with a rowdy fiend from the other side of your insanity.”
And as always.
Ending with the great sorrow of Price Street when Mardou and I, reunited on Sunday night according to my schedule (I’d made up the schedule that week thinking in a yard tea-reverie, “This is the cleverest arrangement I ever made, why with this thing I can live a full love-life,” conscious of Mardou’s Reichian worth, and at the same time write those three novels and be a big—etc.) (schedule all written out, and d